Ending Cyclical Poverty Through the Power of Education: The Cases of Darnelle, Tyrone, and Faye on 6th Street North

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


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Every Saturday at 9:00 AM I roll up in my 2008 Toyota Matrix (recent upgrade from my 1996 Honda Civic) to pick up Darnell Jacobsen-Myers (Grade 9, Henry High School) at the home owned by grandmother Addie May Myers on 6th Street North in Minneapolis. Darnell piles into the car, a little sleepy but otherwise in good cheer, as he has done since he was in kindergarten.


Seven young people from Darnell’s household or extended family have participated in the New Salem Educational Initiative; one is now enrolled as a student at St. Cloud State University with a generous financial aid package including several grants and scholarships. I have known Darnell since he was four years old, when Addie May and mother Jenna Myers began clamoring for me to take him to my academic sessions, as had been the case for so many others in the family.


Darnell struggled at first to adjust to the school environment at Jenny Lind K-5 School. He was the recipient of bullying, was not getting along very well with his teacher, and clearly was carrying a heavy emotional load. A switch to Bethune K-5 proved timely: Darnell liked his new teacher and had no problems with classmates.


Still, there emerged concerns, these of the academic sort. Darnell was purportedly lagging in reading according to measures emphasizing speed. Jenna expressed worry. I assured her that with me Darnell demonstrated extended vocabulary development and excellent phonics sense. I counseled her to relax and vowed that Darnell’s reading speed would pick up in time.


And so it did.


When we got the results back from Darnell’s first experience at Grade 3 with the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) for both reading and math, he was meeting grade level expectations for reading and exceeding expectations for mathematics. From that point on, Darnell began a steady ascent toward academic excellence.


At this point he has performed in three of our annual Shakespearean productions (featuring my compressed [30-minute] versions with all original Shakespearean [Elizabethan] language), acting as Kent in King Lear, Laertes in Hamlet, and Banquo in Macbeth. For three summers, he has traveled to Winona with one of two groups that I take annually to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Throughout Darnell’s Grade 4 and Grade 5 years his grades were mostly at the first tier, and at Olson Middle School (grades 6-8) only two “B’s” appeared on a transcript that otherwise was replete with “A’s.” Now, at Grade 9, Darnell is functioning as a Grade 11 student in terms of academic accomplishment.


We are already at work on practice ACT material for reading, mathematics, English usage, and science; securing Algebra I skills while moving on to concepts in Algebra II, Geometry, and Trigonometry; and doing advanced reading, vocabulary development, and knowledge acquisition via my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.


Darnell has a deep hunger for the knowledge provided in the book. We have already moved through the content material in the chapter on Economics, so that Darnell has a thorough grasp of the most important concepts from microeconomics and macroeconomics, including a detailed examination of a federal budget and an examination of revenue and both mandatory/ entitlement spending and discretionary spending; a careful consideration of the Federal Reserve System; and a comparison of the ideas of the three great economists Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.


On this Saturday morning in November, Darnell and I moved on to my chapter on Psychology, getting far enough into the material to compare the ideas of Sigmund Freud with those of B. F. Skinner. Also on the morning of this particular academic session, we examined two methods for solving simultaneous equations and considered examples for solving for area and surface area for three-dimensional figures. Darnell is well on his way down the college preparatory track that I envisioned for him as early as those years when he was walking around Addie May’s living room at age four.


Given the circumstances of his life, the realistic envisioning of a highly successful university experience for Darnell will have a transformative impact on his family.


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Darnell’s mother, Jenna, is now thirty-eight years old. She has never lived independently. Her significant other, Marvel Watson is the father of Darnell’s younger brother Tyrone Watson (Grade 4, Jenny Lind) and Felicity Watson (Grade 2, Jenny Lind). Jenna works about 30 hours a week in the office of a social service agency. Tyrone has worked only sporadically and has no job at present. Jenna helps Addie May some with household expenses, but her nuclear family essentially depends on Addie May for the roof overhead.


Seeing Darnell happily piling into my car on Saturday mornings for so many years, Tyrone and Felicity were eager to do so: I dropped off academic materials even during their preschool years, and at Grade K they both became official every week attendees in the New Salem Educational Initiative.


Tyrone has demonstrated his mental math acuity at two successive banquets that we hold each year in early June, and he is rapidly acquiring a vocabulary far beyond his Grade 4 year of enrollment; this coming June, he will take on his first role in our annual Shakespearean production.


Felicity also is an exceptional math student, easily performing additive, subtractive, and rudimentary multiplicative operations in her head; we are now shifting more of our attention to reading so as to strengthen Felicity’s grasp of phonics and thereby facilitate acquisition of the sophisticated vocabulary items in which she takes so much pride.


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When I pulled up on two of those Saturday mornings, the police had cordoned off Addie May’s yard on 6th street North. Addie May is a solid citizen who has passed on exquisite manners to the young people in her family. But she houses anyone in the extended family who needs a place to roost, and these are multiple. The ethical standards vary widely and their legal records all over the place: some behave according to Addie May’s standards, but life has pulled some onto the streets, into penal institutions, and back onto the asphalt and concrete of life at the urban core.


For this reason, Jenna (who has a set of moral standards of the better sort within the family) is deeply grateful to me for the loving attention and academic instruction that I give her children. She lets me know of all that goes on at school. We therefore mostly revel together in the accomplishments of Darnell, Tyrone, and Felicity; and we deal with any problems as they arise.


And without saying so explicitly, we know that these three young people, with Darnell leading the way and with Tyrone and Felicity following his lead, will succeed in university experiences and travel down the pathway that we have long charted to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.


Darnell, Tyrone, and Felicity will break the cycle of poverty that has spun in the family since Addie May arrived broke and desperate in Minneapolis, escaping from small-town Mississippi to a life that was still full of challenges but better than what she left behind. Darnell, Tyrone, and Felicity will ascend to a standard of living that Addie May has only seen in visual imagery.


As the cycle of poverty ends and these young people show the way out for other family members, cordoned lives and visitation by officers of the law will give way to expansive horizons and visitation by friends and family who will learn by observation how they, too, can end the vicious spin of generational poverty and thrive as people for whom life has purpose, meaning, and economic security.


This is the power of K-12 education.


This is the future for all of our precious young people if we are to make of this nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.