Ravare makes history
Joins state commission on charter schools
Los Angeles, CA -- Corri Tate Ravare, senior vice president and officer of Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF), has been appointed to a two-year term on the California Advisory Commission on Charter Schools as the parent/guardian representative, and she is the first African American to hold this post on the influential nine-member commission.
The commission, which was created in 2001, advises the State Board of Education on all matters pertaining to charter schools.
Ravare, 36, a U.C. Berkeley graduate, served as field deputy for former Los Angeles Unified School District board member Genethia Hudley-Hayes and prior to that she worked in the district’s office of school reform—the division that granted charter petitions.
Currently, as a senior staff member at ICEF Public Schools, Ravare has been instrumental in the foundation’s efforts to create 22 new public charter schools in a 45-square mile area bounded by the four major freeways in South Los Angeles.
ICEF currently operates 13 public charter schools including View Park Preparatory Charter High School.
Eric Garcetti
In January, the unemployment rate for African Americans overall dropped to 13.6 percent, a sharp plunge from the December 2011 figure of 15.8 percent.
Those officials who did remark on the change, (and not many did, according to UC Berkeley labor specialist Steven Pitts, Ph.D.) urged caution to see if the decline would continue.
The February figures came out last week and the answer is it didn’t. The Black unemployment rate climbed to 14.1 percent in the second month of the year.
Pitts attributes the increase to three factors:
Los Angeles has long been a dream for immigrants haling from various parts of Africa. The United States Census estimates the current population of African immigrants at about 881,300. With so few numbers in the disparate communities, Africans are a silent minority, carrying a very low profile. They are less likely than other immigrants, say Latinos, to question political decisions. And many come from countries where the political consequences for questioning government can be harsh.
Editor’s Note: We thought it interesting and appropriate to run the following email from Sunny Dae Earle, a local resident who is now a second-year student at UC Berkeley. It seem sides are hardening on the campus over Senate Bill 185, which would allow state colleges and universities to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions. We don’t know if the attitudes chronicled here are typical of what the school has now become. If so, it’s back to the ’60s.
My friend, Tavis Smiley, has a new documentary out on the plight of the Black male in America.
It’s a subject that has been part of the intellectual and academic discourse for the past decade. For the last five years, it has been the No. 1 issue in public education. For the past four years, it has been a subject of intense debate in Los Angeles, which has the worst large school district in the nation, right here in Tavis’ own backyard.
