August 23rd, 2011

"Partner for Parity"

In June, ACES staff members Sunni Monson and Anna Seifert attended the Cultural Wellness Center’s training, “How Institutions, Community Organizations, and Community Partner for Parity.” The keynote speaker, Professor Nekima Levy-Pounds, illuminated the current state of African American communities in Minnesota, including education and the academic achievement gap.

Levy-Pounds is founder and director of the University of Saint Thomas’s Community Justice Project, an award-winning civil rights clinic that trains students to use the law as a tool to advance social justice in poor communities of color. Raised in inner-city Los Angeles, she integrates personal experience and academic prowess into her innovative legal research and writing.

ACES' mission is to help close the academic achievement gap, and among the insights Levy-Pounds shared was a sobering look at the gap (the observed disparities in academic success between students of color and white students and between low-income and middle-upper class students). She reminded everyone that, “Before congratulating the white students on the more-than-double success rate, we should also be asking, why is this number not 100 percent?" Perhaps her moist poignant question regarding the academic achievement gap was, “What are we going to do?”

Strikingly powerful is Levy-Pounds’ ability to link these gaps to distressing and costly future disparities for the children left behind—in home ownership, college attendance, prison rates, unemployment, and poverty rates.