Rick Bonifas is the administrator of Manhattan Christian Academy. He holds a doctorate from Nova Southeastern University.
I believe that Christian educators as well as ACSI, as a leader in Christian school education, can play a critical role in making the issues known and in finding solutions.
I am convinced that education in the inner city is in a crisis that goes unnoticed by most white people. This may be because they simply have not been exposed to the inner city. They just do not know firsthand the problems that exist in innercity schools. Or they may ignore the inner-city crisis because the problems seem too big, too scary, and too foreign. I believe that Christian educators as well as ACSI, as a leader in Christian school education, can play a critical role in making the issues known and in finding solutions.
I recently saw an excellently produced video about Christian education. However, as I watched, it became clear to me—a white man in my 15th year of working with minorities—that I could not show it to my school parents because all the children represented in the video were either white or international. They were just not representative of our children from the inner city. At Manhattan Christian our student body is 77 percent Latino, 21 percent African American, and 2 percent white (my own children).
It used to bug me when persons of color would comment or complain that they could not identify with a brochure or video because it did not include people of color. I thought, Who cares? What is the big deal? But I now see and understand that including a minority is a sign of understanding, respect, recognition, and value. Being included provides minorities the opportunity to say, “Hey, those are people like me, that’s a school like mine—we are in this together, we are part of the family.”
There are over 1,100,000 students in New York City (NYC) public schools (Bruter 2000). According to Dr. Laura Rodriguez (2003), a superintendent of one of NYC’s 10 regional school districts, only 4 out of 10 students in public high schools will graduate. I do not understand why all minority parents are not in an uproar over this crisis. Some may simply be naïve or reluctant to trust the system. Others may be resigned to the system because they feel an inability to fight it. At this time, with no real improvement in public education in sight, affordable private schools represent their only real hope.
In NYC, 33 percent of all students will drop out of high school; the dropout rate is about 45 percent African American and about 55 percent Latino (Rodriguez 2003). The stories I hear from parents, students, teachers, and administrators are unbelievable. A friend told my wife and me that we should never send our children to the local public high school she attended—a school that is the second largest in the country, with about 7,000 students. While there, she experienced two attempted rapes. She also said that sexual activity and drug trafficking occurred frequently in the hallways.
I saw another example of the crisis in inner-city schools during my recent visit with a group of educators to a public middle school in the area. As we approached the heavily guarded elevator that would take us to the sixth floor, police officers passed us, escorting a girl in handcuffs.
From a Catholic background in Aurora, Illinois, I came to know the Lord when I was almost 27 years old. As I have grown as a Christian, my heart for missions has grown, giving me a deep appreciation and sensitivity for what God is doing in missions around the world. And yet, because of my exposure to missions as a young believer before God introduced me to the city, my heart is still slightly more sensitive to foreign missions than it is to the inner city, even though I minister in the inner city. At a Christian conference a few years ago, I learned that fewer than a tenth of 1 percent of evangelical churches in the United States are located in the inner city. Many Christians have a greater understanding of the foreign mission field than they do of the inner city.
At the October 2003 ACSI Metro NYC teacher convention, I was pleased to discover that workshops on Latino education had been included in the program. At one of the workshops, Dr. Caleb Rosado of Eastern University told the story of being invited to Minnesota to speak to 415 principals from Minneapolis and St. Paul. With the exception of a black principal from St. Paul, the entire audience was white. When he asked why he was invited to speak to such a predominately white audience, his host responded by saying, “You, Dr. Rosado, a Latino, a person of color, represent our future. Most of our graduates are going out into a world that looks like you, and we want to prepare them for the future.” He was right. Our world is changing quickly. It has been said that whites will be a minority in the United States before the year 2020.
In 1900, 6 percent of the world’s population resided in major metropolitan areas (Bakke 1987). By 2000, that figure had grown to 47 percent (United Nations 2002). We must give attention to the cities because of not only their population increases but also their population changes. I have heard it said that the problem of the cities is not a problem of darkness but of light because light has left them. As soon as people can afford to, they tend to move out of the city, and those who remain are left in crisis.
Because the world is becoming increasingly urban, we as Christians have an opportunity for great impact, such as in evangelism. Paul approached missions by targeting the cities because influence flowed from them. Should we not do the same with our cities?
I would challenge believers to pray fervently for the inner city and to make it a focus, as they do with foreign missions. They can take mission trips into the inner city and give of their expertise, resources, and finances. They can also encourage their children to pursue a career in the city and to raise their family there.
I would love to see Christian schools create policies of tithing from their gift income and giving to less fortunate school —those with critical needs in the inner city as well as in poor rural areas, on Indian reservations, and abroad. What a statement and what a difference this action would make in the Christian school movement and in God’s kingdom! Would not God be honored and blessed by such concern and effort for His needy and deserving children?
References
Bakke, Ray. 1987. The urban Christian: Effective ministry in today’s urban world. With Jim Hart. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Bruter, Inna. 2000. NYC Board of Education chancellor visits C.U. Cornell Daily Sun, October 27.
Rodriguez, Laura. 2003. Lecture at Nyack College, Manhattan, New York. May.
United Nations. 2002. Future world population growth to be concentrated in urban areas of world: According to new report issued by United Nations Population Division. New York: United Nations Population Division. March 21.
The Meantime Volume 3 Number 2