In 2001 a group of San Gabriel Valley parents joined together to purchase a prestigious private school for 220 students in Pasadena. The school is Waverly School. During the same year another group of parents opened a school called St. Monica Academy in Pasadena with just 46 students. And in 2006, Art Center celebrated 30 years of educating scholars in Pasadena. Oprah Winfrey used her money and built and opened a prestigious private school in South Africa for approximately 150 students in 2007. Have these parents and Oprah hit onto something that needs to be copied —more private schools?

Normally I don’t subscribe to these types of elites schools, but since public schools in many areas have gotten so "bad," something has to give. Private schools may be the answer for parents who are tired of having their children compete with the non-stop violence, tolerance for low performance, and the epidemic of low expectations for our students.

In a private school, students who want to disrupt the class, and guarantee that they and other students don’t get the most out of the educational experience, will be sent home, immediately. I like that. These students guarantee the process of failing their class. They won’t learn, and those students who want to learn can’t, learn because the teacher has to spend so much time disciplining the one’s who don’t want to learn, and can’t teach the larger group.

Yes I know there are lots of reasons why some kids are disruptive in class, but at the close of the day, it is not fair for one or more students to act so badly that the rest of a class of can’t be taught? I say, send them home. Then they can try to return when they’re ready to learn.

I was impressed with Oprah’s school in South Africa because she said she asked children what they wanted most. They said they only wanted uniforms so they could go to school. Those children had suffered rape, physical abuse, loss of their parents to AIDS, war, deprivation of food, deprivation of electricity, and the general amenities of life that is afforded to even some of the poorest of children in America. In the United States, when Oprha asked the children what they wanted, they said "expensive tennis shoes, or stylish clothing, or in a word, ‘Bling Bling.’" Schools should be made up of students who want to go to school to learn. That’s what many private schools offer.

I believe that we need to get back to the old style culture that says: (1) you go to school to learn; (2) you can’t move to the next grade until you pass the last grade; and, (3) if you are in school to disrupt, you go home until you are ready to learn. Until we do that there are going to be more and more private schools created. I just hope that my grand children are not in the schools that are not tough enough to make rules for learning and stick to them.

I also believe that we need to promote academic excellence with programs and campaigns that accentuate the positive, publicly, and demonize the negative, out loud. As a real celebration of Black History Month, we need to be bold enough to do something different in educating our children. Join a group and pay for Billboards with messages we want to get out. Put public service announcements in this newspaper and others, and on television and radio that say, for example: