Black male graduation rates improving

By Courtenay Edelhart. It looked like a commencement exercise, the rows of black male teens in neckties or sweater vests and neatly creased slacks. One by one they rose as Project BEST scholarship committee chairwoman Fuschsia Ward called out their names, grouped by school, and announced where they had been accepted to college. Then she handed them checks as beaming parents cheered. It's been more than two decades since the founding of Project BEST, which stands for Black Excellence in Scholarship and Teaching. The program was founded in response to a series of articles in this newspaper that listed alarming statistics about young black males. The dropout rate for black students in general was 40 percent higher than for the Kern High School District as a whole, and the rate of black males quitting school was 70 percent higher than for black females. Read more...