(NAME-MCE) Closing the Racial Achievement Gap through Cultural Competency

[Anselmo Villanueva]

*Closing the Racial Achievement Gap through Cultural Competency*

[image: if these hall could talk]

In school districts all over this country, 50%-78% students do not graduate
from high school. That translates into over 171,000 students who “disappear”
between 9th and12th grade or fail to meet graduation requirements by the
time they are seniors. Leading those statistics, as many as 45% of African
American and Latino male students do not graduate.

In the book, Courageous Conversations, author Glenn Singleton states that
“...the racial achievement gap exists and persists because, fundamentally,
schools are not designed to educate students of color, and educators
continue to lack the will, skill, knowledge, and capacity to affirm racial
diversity. Consequently, educators need to begin a deep and thorough
examination of their beliefs and practices in order to ‘re-create’ schools
so that they become places where all students do succeed.”

In this newest documentary, Lee Mun Wah will explore some of the reasons for
the lack of success of students of color, as well as the ways we, as a
society, and our educational institutions, administration, faculty and staff
can contribute to finding solutions to closing the achievement gap. We will
film classrooms and programs all over the country that are highly successful
with students of color, interviewing administrators, teachers and students
to discover what are some of the characteristics of the teachers and the
classroom techniques that make these students want to succeed.

We will also interview students who are in gangs, incarcerated, and who have
dropped out, in an effort to find out what happened in their educational
experience that caused them to leave. In addition, we will question students
who have made a “turnaround” and explore what happened and what were some of
the deciding factors in their emotional, academic and social transformation.


The goal of this film is to illuminate some of the problems that cause a
lack of student success. We particularly want to highlight institutions with
teaching programs that include cultural competency as a core value, and to
demonstrate how they have succeeded in improving the lives and classroom
performance of their students.

If you would like to be a part of this film or know of an agency, school
program, or individual(s) working on this issue, please contact us at:
stirfryseminars.com or call us at 510.204.8840 extension 101.

* This new film will be co-directed by Richard Bock, Robert Goss & John
Lenssen.