Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.
An extended school day gives administrators the ability to ensure children get a well-rounded education.
In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find high-quality after-school options.
My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.
Good dental care doesn't make you a good student, but if your tooth hurts, it's hard to be a good student.
When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.
I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.
You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with.
People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.
When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks.
The rates of soda consumption in our poorest communities cannot be explained by individual consumer preferences alone, but rather are linked to broader issues of access and affordability of healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, and to the marketing efforts of soda companies themselves.
I believe that for lots of churches and religious institutions, their main focus on the development of faith among parishioners needs to spread to the community.
One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'
Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize - and sometimes you have to cauterize - the ones who really are against change. They're the kind of person who, if you tell them it's raining outside, they'll fight you tooth and nail.
Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science.
People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.
Young people will tell you, if you're not prepared to write the most violent, the most misogynistic, the most horrible kinds of rhymes and scenarios, you are not going to get air play.
Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.
You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.
There's not a day that goes by that I don't draw on my undergraduate background in psychology.
