A Crisis of Zeroes: Engaging NYC Public Schools

by Jeremy Del Rio

Where are the Christians?

The New York City Department of Education will spend $12,200,000,000 ($12.2 billion) to educate 1,100,000 students (1.1 million) in its public schools beginning this month – an average of $11,220 per student. For those of us who scrimp by on modest means, our minds struggle to grasp the effect of all those zeroes. Let’s put them in perspective.

12.2 billion: Larger than the economies of dozens of nations. More revenue than the net worth of all but the nine wealthiest Americans.

1.1 million: Larger than eight U.S. states and all but nine U.S. cities, including Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Las Vegas.

That’s a lot of kids, and a lot of money, especially considering that they reflect only New York’s public schools while the City also boasts private schools, charter schools, parochial schools, home schools, and too many dropped-out-of-schools to count with certainty. They are taught by a system where, as of June 2002, 18% of teachers had failed licensing exams.

Even more telling:

60.7% of the City’s elementary students do not meet state and city reading standards.

64.7% do not grasp math standards.

26.5% of students in Grades 4-12 exhibit symptoms of at least one diagnosable psychiatric disorder requiring intervention.

5.1% of high school students abuse alcohol so severely as to impair daily functioning.

Fiscal mismanagement. Failing educators. Underachievement. Mental illness. And enough children to make one school system the tenth largest city in the nation. All this crisis, plastered on the front pages of metro area newspapers at least weekly during every school year, has made reforming our public schools one of the great public mandates of our day.

Politicians, educators, teachers unions, bureaucrats, academics, corporate big shots like New York City’s current mayor and schools chancellor all seem to have opinions on how to improve our schools, but where are the evangelicals in the public discourse? As a collective voice, how many summits have we held or debates have we entered? How many coordinated city-wide efforts have we undertaken to address the problems?

Zero. The real crisis.

Individually, some are engaged. They function as principals and administrators, teachers and paraprofessionals, student missionaries and advocates, coaches and volunteers. But for every Christian employed in a public school, for every local church that has adopted a neighborhood school, for every outspoken parent or pastor, scores do nothing. For instance, how many leaders have reached out to local principals or superintendents as a resource to serve? How many retirees or youth workers or Sunday school teachers volunteer as hall monitors or teachers’ aids or tutors? How many parents are active in PTAs or coach PSAL teams or regularly attend parent-teacher conferences? How many student organizations, whether Bible clubs or not, have Christian business people supported? How many prayer groups intentionally intercede for community schools?

Sadly, not enough. In some communities, zero.

Last year, New York City’s officials finally set aside partisanship long enough to initiate the most widespread, systemic education reform in decades. As a collective group, administrators, politicians, and the teachers union all agreed to tackle entrenched problems with innovative strategies. Only time will tell how effective the reforms are.

In the interim, evangelicals, as a group, should follow their lead and bypass whatever excuses have kept so many of us disengaged for so long. It’s time for our community to seriously consider its role in one of our great public issues. It’s time for us to propose comprehensive strategies that go beyond the pat answers we are more commonly known for. Cliché solutions are no more helpful to our schools then they would be in the board room of a $12.2 billion Fortune 500 company or in Detroit’s City Council chambers.

Finally, it’s time we recognize that mandating a return to institutionalized prayer in schools is bankrupt. Legalistic prayer, devoid of faith, is no prayer at all. Besides, purposeful prayer by men, women, and students of conviction is already in public schools. It’s time for us to turn zeroes into heroes by becoming answers to those prayers.

In New York, both city-wide Christian monthlies published “Why Public Schools Matter to God (and Should Matter to You Too),” a column that makes the case to pastors and faith leaders why literacy and education reform are issues requiring their leadership and congregational investment.

Outreach magazine, one of the nation’s most widely circulated Christian magazines, profiled 20/20 in their “Going Public” article about reimagining how churches can engage public schools.

Here are excerpts and links to both articles.

// “Going Public,” by Dave Urbanski, with Sidebar by Jeremy Del Rio, Outreach (Sept/Oct 2009)

A growing number of congregations are learning that outreach to public schools doesn’t mean tearing down an iron curtain or diving into a sea of protests and lawsuits. There’s very little to figure out, invent or dream up. In fact, apart from discovering and meeting the schools’ needs, everything else—spiritual conversations, church attendance, rsion experiences—happens naturally.

[They] have discovered the painfully obvious truth that the church has a credibility problem in America, and if churches have any hope of influencing lives within schools, they have to meet the schools on their terms.  This starts with serving with no strings attached — along with an open ear to helping schools overcome their biggest stated obstacles.

// “Why Public Schools Matter to God (and Should Matter to You Too),” by Jeremy Del Rio, Tri-State Voice and Love Express (Sept 2009)

How many eighth grade Bible studies lead with Lamentations? Or Leviticus?

Yet last I checked, Lamentations and Leviticus are part of the Biblical canon, along with Romans and Revelation and lots of other heady reading material.

Should it matter to pastors then that average graduates of America’s city schools read at eighth grade levels?

If pastors believe Scripture, then absolutely it should.  Romans teaches that spiritual transformation occurs by renewing the mind according to the Word of God – not at altar calls or church services.  Besides being ill-equipped to compete in an information economy, where the currency is fluency with words, how likely are poor readers to engage the written Word?

Regardless of whether literacy matters to pastors, it matters to prison wardens.  States allocate prison construction dollars based on fourth grade reading test scores.

Download the article pdf here.

In September 2008, Jeremy Del Rio launched 20/20 Vision for Schools in New York City with one idea in mind: What would happen if church leaders activated the people in their churches for “good deeds” within public schools?

Here, Del Rio shares how 20/20 Vision has succeeded and why he believes churches are called to this backyard mission field.

If the moral test of a society is how it treats children, America has failed the same test year after year for decades. Specifically, we have failed to educate the urban poor despite promising equal access to quality education for all. This educational inequity–where the place of one’s childhood determines the quality of one’s education–has been called our nation’s greatest injustice and the Civil Rights issue of our day.

And churches have watched it happen.

As we looked at what it would take to accomplish comprehensive reform, we knew it would require multi-sector, collaborative strategies led by men and women willing to commit. And churches are uniquely positioned to lead this effort.

First, the God we preach requires us to care about justice (Micah 6:8, Isaiah 61:1-8). The prologue to Proverbs 31’s Wife of Noble Character describes the Bride of Christ at her most noble: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Second, Jesus activates us as salt and light, that the world “may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:13-16). Salt that loses its preservative and flavoring effects–or remains inside the saltshaker of our churches–is useless.

20/20 Vision is bent on activating churches. Our vision is that first graders of September 2008—the graduating high school class of 2020—would reverse decades of chronic underperformance and graduate in record numbers, equitably across demographics and neighborhoods, with the skills and character necessary to achieve in life.

Mobilizing congregations for scalable engagement requires a plan, and 20/20’s school adoption paradigm moves congregations from no relationship to holistic, transformative relationships. It begins by committing to pray for a specific neighborhood school as often as the church prays. If America’s 300,000 evangelical churches actually prayed for its 100,000 public schools, dare we expect God to answer?

It continues as congregations overcome generational mistrust by cultivating personal relationships at the school. Next, churches become answers to prayer by responding to felt needs with meaningful acts of service such as beautification efforts or event sponsorships. Then they develop an ongoing presence by volunteering as coaches, mentors or tutors, or coordinating leadership clubs. Finally comes the credibility to affect policy both at the school and district level.

To date, nearly 200 New York churches have adopted schools through 20/20. Together, these churches have open-sourced a multi-sector effort to transform education in America. Because the problems are too vast for one person, group or community to overcome on its own, sharing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country.

If it’s “about the kids,” 20/20 reminds us to share.

And to lead.

–Jeremy Del Rio

ONLINE: JeremyDelRio.com; 2020Schools.net

Rev. Jeremy Del Rio, Esq. is the lead architect of 20/20 Vision for Schools.

As a first-hand witness to the power of adoption, Jeremy Del Rio knows that failing public schools and students can be changed with some intervention. That’s why he helped found the 20/20 Vision for Schools last year with The Coalition of Urban Youth Workers, a regional network of youth specialists. The seeds for the initiative were planted when Del Rio’s Generation Xcel youth group teamed with the Southern Baptists to paint some local schools in a summer community service project, which opened a door with school administrators.

The New York City Leadership Center has embraced 20/20 as its first initiative, and brought together representatives from the Church, business, education, and political arenas for its “Leadership Conversation.” The consortium sought to find strategies and solutions regarding urban education, specifically in New York City, as it heard from various national experts and made recommendations that will enhance the “20/20 Vision Adopt-A-School” program.

“This is a time of urgency,” said Newark Mayor Corey Booker. “Why do we tolerate a world where children, born with God’s genius, are going to school in environments that are not nurturing that genius and manifesting the divine within them?”

Download the PDF.