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Who: Hill Harper, actor on CSI:NY and author of “Letters to a Young Brother”
What: National Education Association conference on minority dropout rates
THE AUDIO
Hill Harper on the perfect storm in education
Elements of this storm start with the underfunding of our school system. I was just in a school the other day of 3,000 students and did a little research on teacher pay. I found that the security guards were making more than the teachers. And so we start to talk about priorities and what the actual priorities of that institution are and are they just holding areas or are they actually institutions of learning, institutions. Clearly, in many ways, we have our priorities wrong.
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Hill Harper on Pre K education
The strain that created this perfect storm is the fact that we have undereducated children attempting to raise our children. Two thirds of our young people are being raised by single moms many of whom are undereducated themselves. We’re entering this time when we have these generations of individuals and I was talking to a principal of a public school in Chicago who said first grade students often show up at his school unable to recognize a number or a letter. We see this domino effect happen and the desperate need for pre-K education.
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Hill Harper on corporate influence
My industry and the related corporations see our young people as prey and they convince them that if they don’t have Air Force One’s or Jordan’s that they are not worthy. They have made young men believe that the measure of their manhood is somehow linked to the size of the rims on their car, or they have a platinum Rolex. They have made young women believe that unless they wear certain things they are actually unattractive...unless they can drop it like it’s hot. The priority is not learning how to read, but learning how to drop it.
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Hill Harper on being worthy of a future
If we really start looking at our young people and we talk about self esteem, self worth issues, it’s difficult to speak about any issue that’s a future based activity (like education, like financial literacy, like HIV an AIDS, teen pregnancy) if you’re talking to young people that don’t believe they’re worthy of a future.
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Hill Harper on walking aisles of footlocker
That’s what Nike is doing, it’s hooking them early. You need Air Force One’s. You need Jordan’s. So young people, instead of walking around isles of book stores or libraries, are actually walking the isles of Footlocker, waiting for that next shoes to drop.
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