ISL awarded for exemplary work for young men of color

By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer

The International School of Louisiana (ISL) in New Orleans was one of two national recipients to be honored this month with the 2014 School Award for Exemplary Education of Young Men of Color.

The award was presented to principal Melanie Tennyson by the Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color (COSEBOC), an organization with the stated mission to “connect, inspire, support and strengthen school leaders dedicated to the social, emotional and academic development of boys and young men of color.”

COSEBOC’s origins go back to 2002, when Rosa Smith, director of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, “cast a spotlight on Black boys as the canary in the coalmine of public school education,” according the COSEBOC website.

Smith called for a “movement committed to the goal of generating a positive future for Black boys,” with three specific objectives: “focus on public policy, engage new and broaden existing community efforts, and build public will for change.”

The award given to ISL, which has a student population consisting of about two-thirds students of color, recognizes innovative education practices that achieve academic success and increase graduation rates among boys of color. Male students of color at ISL consistently score higher than state averages on standardized tests, according to Tennyson.

ISL is a full language-immersion public charter high school. And while the award specifically applauds ISL for their work with young men of color, it is the critical language immersion component that is the great equalizer, Tennyson said.

“One often hears about the great disparity in vocabulary and early literacy skills between the students who enter kindergarten from households of means and those families who live in poverty,” Tennyson said. “Language immersion eliminates that disparity as 97 percent of all students who attend ISL come from English speaking households. In an immersion classroom all students start out at zero and work toward the 1,000 word vocabulary needed to be successful. They all have to work together to help one another navigate through the routines of the day and get the work done.”

In a school that celebrates diversity – with teachers from 39 countries, and a student population representing seven parishes, multiple ethnicities, and a broad spectrum of the socio-economic scale – Tennyson wasn’t accustomed to isolating out the successes of one subgroup of the ISL students.

Tennyson said that they focus on looking at the successes of the students as a whole, or whole classes or grade levels, but don’t break it down by gender or ethnicity.

And when she met COSEBOC president Ron Walker during his visit to the ISL campus, she said she saw that the organization was “dedicated to creating a new narrative for young men and boys of color,” and one that was dedicated to specifically celebrating “the hard work and success that schools across America are having with the population of Black and Hispanic boys in particular, which have the worst odds for academic success and the best odds for dropping out and ending up incarcerated.”

Part of what makes ISL’s unique approach both very challenging and very rewarding is the diversity of the both the student and faculty population, Tennyson said, and the broader world view that comes with learning about and accepting their differences.

“Different is not bad or better at ISL it is simply another way of saying something, looking at the world, of being,” Tennyson said. “By the time a student has been at ISL for nine years they are much more open and accepting of the world and others, and believe that different is something worth taking a look at and understanding before rejecting it – ideas, people, food, language… they have been expanded.”

This article originally published in the June 2, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.