An On-the-Ground Demonstration of the Power of a Knowledge-Rich Education >>>>> The Cases of My Students Damon Preston and Javon Jakes

Note  >>>>> The names used in this article are data privacy pseudonyms.


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Damon Preston is an amazing young man.


Damon is now in Grade 7 at Washington Technological Magnet School in St. Paul.


I’ve worked with many, many poor kids in my forty-five years spent in inner city neighborhoods--- but Damon, half-brother Javon Jakes, mother Evelyn Patterson, and Evelyn’s significant other Marcel Gifford constitute the poorest family with which I’ve ever worked. There is one sofa for furniture in the whole house. Mattresses and bedrolls thrown on the floor are used for beds. There is not a single table. There is a television, but in a social universe in which some very poor people manage to secure oversized televisions with a full array of cable channels--- Damon and his family make do with a small screen of traditional network and local channels only.


Sometimes food supplies run so low that cereal, a loaf of cheap white bread, and a half-empty jar of peanut butter are all that is in the house. Marcel is actually a great cook, and when he gets paid from his occasional gigs at Xcel Energy Center, the family gets treated to tasty southern soul meals--- but the spare offerings in the apartment-provided refrigerator describe the more abiding situation as to available food supplies.


Twice now I have paid bus fare for the family so that these people whom I love could get to our annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet --- to have a good meal; celebrate the academic achievements of Damon, Javon, and my other students; and witness the speeches and demonstrations of skill and knowledge displayed by Damon and Javon (and the many other students).


I’ll never forget how when Javon was in Grade K, he smiled in pride from ear to ear for being able to count backward from the number 20; how Damon proudly delivered his Frederick Douglass speech; and how broad were the smiles of Evelyn and Marcel at the accomplishments of their two boys--- all after thinking that they were not going to make the banquet for the lack of a measly bus fare.


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As I have previously recounted, I followed Damon through three residences in Minneapolis and over to St. Paul in order to maintain the permanent relationship to which I always commit with my students. Because of time and distance considerations, I do not always have a chance to take Damon all the way back to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in North Minneapolis, my preferred location for holding academic sessions. Thus, most typically Damon and I conduct our highly sophisticated academic sessions while sitting cross-legged in the hallway outside Damon’s apartment--- because the dim lighting and paucity of furniture inside make teaching and learning difficult.


But on Saturday, 6 November, I finagled the extra time, so that Damon and I went to New Salem all the way from eastern St. Paul. At that academic session, Damon first of all manifested very adroitly the art of finding Lowest Common Multiples (LCM, applied then to find Lowest Common Denominators [LCD] for adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers). Damon went on to nail all operations with fractions and mixed numbers, as well as to demonstrate mastery of a series of review exercises that I put him through involving decimals, percentages, and ratios.


So pleased was I at Damon’s masterful display of Grade 7 skill and knowledge in math that I smiled expansively enough to swallow the Mississippi and said---


“Damon, man, you’re on it today--- You must be at the top of your math class, huh?”


In his laconic way, Damon said, “No.”


So I returned, “Well, how many students are better than you are?"


“Two or three,” he replied.


I chuckled a question:


 “Well, that’s out of about 30 people, right?”


“Yep,” Damon answered.


“So that’s pretty good, huh?”


Damon finally allowed himself a smile of pride: “Yeah.”


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So our work in math was splendid enough, but then came our work in the first chapter of the book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education that I have mostly finished, written with the goal of delivering a knowledge-intensive, college-preparatory curriculum to all of my students. The chapter features my concise course in Economics (micro- and macro-).


We began with a review of the concepts and terms that we had covered in our previous meeting, items which included goods, services, wages, salaries, supply, demand, Consumer Confidence Index, stock, bond, stock exchange, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, Standard & Poor’s, principal, interest, inflation, deflation, federal fiscal policy as distinct from federal monetary policy, national deficit versus national debt, fiscal quarters, Gross Domestic Product versus Gross National Product, standard of living, and median income.


Damon remembered all of these items and gave perfect answers to my questions.


When I explained the notion of a balanced portfolio, he critically considered his own future investment options and opined that he would do his homework on investments, perhaps employ a broker, and load his portfolio up more with stocks than bonds.


Damon knows the conditions under which inflation and deflation occur, has a sense of how the Federal Reserve Board controls monetary policy, knows the technical definition of recession, and understands that depression is more prolonged and is found saliently in the 1930s after the stock market crash in the United States.


Then Damon and I analyzed the budget that President Obama proposed to Congress in winter 2015, which I base on a clear presentation in the Star Tribune and discuss in my Economics chapter. By the end of our two-hour academic session, Damon understood that the proposed federal spending in the Obama budget was an annual $3.9 trillion while federal revenue would have totaled $3.5 trillion (Damon grasped that income, payroll, and corporate income taxes bring in most of federal revenue), which would have resulted in a rather typical $400 billion deficit and bring the federal debt to over $18 trillion.


Damon also understood the difference between mandatory/ entitlement spending versus discretionary spending; and that while defense would have taken 16% of the budget, that paled by comparison to Social Security (24%), was just above Medicare (14%) and Medicaid (9%) individually, and was relatively small by comparison to the 47% total taken by those three entitlement programs as a whole.


I confided that as a democratic socialist who in the context of politics within the United States votes mostly for Democrats, I am in favor of spending for the entitlement items but would look for efficiencies and more economical ways of operating the entitlement programs; and we discussed how, from those sizable outlays, one can see why those on the conservative side of the political spectrum take issue with the level of spending for social programs.


The latter comment led to my usual explanation of the political continuum, which I present in detail in my chapter two, Political Science)--- but that I present in concise form in the Economics chapter to make Democratic/ liberal and Republican/ conservative party contention over federal budgetary matters understandable.

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So Damon put on quite the tour d’ force academic display in just two hours. Damon’s thorough grasp of some of the very most important economic concepts was almost enough for us to forget how splendid had been his display of skill and knowledge in math.


Damon is in Grade 7 but is on his way to a mastery of microeconomics and macroeconomics that most high school graduates do not have; he will complete his mastery in his next academic session with me, studying the three ways (setting reserve ratios, establishing interest rates, and buying or selling of bonds) that Chair Janet Yellen and the other members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors have of controlling the money supply and thereby making monetary policy.


And he will study the differences among the three great economists Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes in putting in play all of the major issues of political contention with regard to federal economic policy.


Damon is well on his way to mastery of knowledge-intensive material that will give him the vocabulary and information base to score at a high level on the ACT and feel more at home in a university setting than many students who come into life with far more advantages.


Little brother Javon is just in Grade 1 but is functioning more like a Grade 2 student via his study with me in the New Salem Educational Initiative. He has mastered all additive and subtractive operations and has a fundamental understanding of how counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s relates to multiplication; and how dividing 10 things into five groups of two relates to division.


I have read an assortment of classic childhood tales to Javon, regaled him with stories from the African American tradition, and delighted him with myths and legends from across the globe. Javon is accumulating the level of vocabulary that exceeds the abundance of word recognition found most typically in children of upper middle class parents.


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These references to just one day in my interaction with Damon Preston and Javon Jakes have implications for K-12 education broadly construed.


Every day my feet hit the ground, I am endeavoring to create powerful life potential for the 125 students and family members in my network.


In the production of my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, I am now able to deliver with ever greater proficiency a very powerful education to the economically poorest children in the Twin Cities. And in the functionally expanding program of the New Salem Educational Initiative, I am projecting my methods and materials for extrapolation by personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools--- the latter of which I want to help improve in order to provide truly excellent K-12 education for all of our precious children.


I take as my sacred duty in life the overhaul of K-12 education so that children of all demographic descriptors will have the chance to live lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction. The cases of Damon Preston and Javon Jakes, and 125 others in the New Salem Educational Initiative, demonstrate clearly the realized potential of children of the very poor to master and thrive on the strength of a knowledge-intensive K-12 education.


The need to inject the transformative power of K-12 education into the body politic of these United States is the paramount responsibility of our nation in becoming the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.


So we shall meet that need and accomplish the transformation.