A nation forgets its priorities: But in Harlem

One of our ongoing dilemmas is how important issues are pushed to the side by trumped-up inaccuracy and the counterfeit outrage peddled by irresponsible Republicans.

For example, when daunting reports are being released about how badly black students are doing in our public schools, one would think that New York could respond with documented successes countering that problem.

Because despite the bad news about lost jobs and long wars, Americans remain capable of successfully addressing troubling problems with ingenuity.

Take, for example, Danielle Moss Lee. She heads the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, and is one of the most important success stories in the nation because of the way the numbers push through the purple mud of sentimentality until they touch hard-won fact.

Those numbers will snap your head around. Ninety-nine percent of the fund’s kids – poor black and Hispanic cases from Harlem – graduate from high school, 98% go on to college and 78% graduate from four-year institutions in five years or less.

That is much more significant than the invented irritations of a GOP willing to stoke every molecule of discomfort felt at the idea of building a mosque near Ground Zero. This simmering rage travels the gamut from insane theories to pure race-baiting. The current scapegoats are Muslims on whom is focused all of the anger and helplessness Americans feel.

Some of the anger comes from what Wall Street slicksters did to our economy. That anger is intensified by the anemic job market and the affirmation BP brought to everything suspected about rapacious corporations. Then there’s the fast lane-growth of the Chinese economy, which should make many tremble in their boots when thinking of the future.

But while that anger addresses genuine problems, it distracts us from recognizing remarkable work done here on the ground.

Just look at the Harlem fund. If American educators determined how to export its success to other schools, we could produce optimism in the country’s future. It is time to get to work and reverse those horrific academic trends if we expect to remain competitive in the global economy.

Unless we do, we will be burdened by those millions of people made useless to our economy because our country failed by not providing them with what they need to contribute to our society.

The Harlem Educational Activities Fund is so successful because even if students come from an environment hostile to learning and the development of sophisticated skills, HEAF knows what to do.

It gets students to understand that they’re not betraying their backgrounds by learning; rather, they’re improving their neighborhoods by succeeding. That sort of vision leads to big results.

Perhaps most importantly, they learn to depend on their own sense of life, which includes the inner life that blooms with learning. HEAF students see themselves as individuals on personalized crusades instead of embodiments of anti-intellectual street “culture.”

They begin performing well and encouraging each other in what are new families of the mind, whose duties include committed study and superior grades. With this new peer group, they’re ready for the inner thrills of discovery.

Stupendous accomplishments such as those of HEAF defeat stereotypes and restore more confidence in our greatest natural resource: individual human beings. I wait for the day that the nation focuses on Danielle Moss Lee, her faculty and her students as it steps away from all of the distracting and phony controversies sold to us. They only bring out the worst from both the right and the left. There are better things out there: Just look at what HEAF has done in Harlem.

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