Nathan’s Story: A Child of Poverty Gains a Wealth of Education

Nathan first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 1 student during the 2009-2010 academic year. He enrolled late in that academic year, in March, by which time his teachers were expressing concerns that he was having problems reading material appropriate to his grade level, thinking that a speech impediment was exacerbating his reading difficulties. Nathan’s teachers also indicated that his math skills had not reached full grade level development by that point in the school year.

Nathan’s mother (Lillian) and male friend (Preston) had just moved to Minneapolis close to the beginning of that academic year, in August 2010. They lived in one of the cheapest rental units in the city, on Newton Avenue North, just south of Glenwood. Lillian and Preston were seeking to make a fresh start in Minneapolis, and they both fervently wanted Nathan to get the kind of education that would allow him to break the cycle of poverty that the two of them had witnessed in their own families.

A variety of factors influence poor school performance, most essentially those rooted in environment and familial circumstances, and those rooted in the natural aptitude of the child. I have always braced for those frequently occurring challenges whereby moving a student to grade level performance requires particularly stringent effort over a period of months and, in a few cases, a year or two.

But possessed of a keen natural intelligence, Nathan did not as it turned out present problems so grave that they could not be quickly addressed with an aggressive program of skill remediation. With strong support from Lillian and Preston, garnered from the firm relationship that I built with the family, Nathan responded with alacrity to the academic program with which I presented him during our two-hour weekly sessions. I was delighted at the speed with which Nathan latched onto me as a mentor, as well as teacher. By the end of academic year 2010-2011 (in just three months time), he rose quickly to grade level in both reading and math. During academic year 2010-2011, Nathan attained Grade 3 performance levels (one grade level above that of school enrollment) in both math and reading.

Nathan got a chance to demonstrate some of his precocity at the late May 2011 New Salem Educational Initiative Annual Banquet. Students in the Initiative gave performances of different kinds throughout the banquet. Some gave their interpretations of various speeches by important figures from African American history. Others showed their ability to read above grade level. Others demonstrated their mastery of college preparatory vocabulary. As for Nathan, who could have shown his ability to do many of these same things, his personal demonstration focused on his mastery, in just his Grade 2 year of school enrollment, of multiplication tables for the numbers 0 through 9; such mastery is generally regarded as a noteworthy accomplishment for students in Grade 3. The crowd was in particular impressed with Nathan’s quickness in giving answers involving the nines (5 X 9 = 45; 7 X 9 = 63; etc.). Having several weeks prior to the banquet mastered the nine trick (e. g., the number before 7 is 6, and 9 minus 6 is 3, so the product of 7 and 9 is 63), Nathan zoomed through his nines with great speed.

Nathan beamed. Lillian and Preston looked as if they would burst with pride amidst the rousing applause. In this way, hope builds on the strong foundation of a promising start in the early grades of the K-12 sequence. Moving to Minneapolis begins to look like a very good move, indeed. A vision of life beyond shabby tenements and dead-end jobs gains clarity. A young life moves in promising directions. This impoverished child, connected to families that have been stuck in cyclical destitution for decades, gains academic momentum along a path that would typically be more descriptive of the route taken by a child of the upper middle class attending a well-regarded suburban or private school.

Whenever we bear witness to such a phenomenon, we should all feel ourselves moving a little closer to true democracy.