The teaching career of Grammy Award-winner Roberta Flack

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Singer, songwriter, and former schoolteacher Roberta Flack

Singer, songwriter, and former schoolteacher Roberta Flack

Many people have heard of Grammy Award-winning songwriter and singer Roberta Flack. Her best-known songs are “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Where Is the Love?” But did you know that this celebrated jazz, folk, and R&B icon was once a public school teacher?

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, Buncombe County, North Carolina. She was raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her mother was a church organist, so Roberta grew up in a musical household. At the age of nine, Roberta began to study classical piano, and by the time she was fifteen, she had won a music scholarship to Howard University. Howard is a traditionally Black college located in Washington, DC.

Roberta completed her undergraduate work, and then her student teaching at an all-white school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She was the first African American student teacher to work at that school. After her college graduation, Roberta accepted a position teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina, a gig which paid her only $2,800 per year. She also taught in Washington, DC, at Browne Junior High and Rabaut Junior High School. While she was teaching, she took a number of side jobs as a night club singer. It was there that she was discovered and signed to a contract for Atlanta Records. The rest, as they say, is music business history.

In recent years, Roberta’s contribution to education came when she founded an after-school music program entitled “The Roberta Flack School of Music” to provide music education free of charge to underprivileged students in the Bronx, New York City. The program is offered through Hyde Leadership Charter School. You can learn more about this program at this link: Roberta Flack School of Music.

Mary Catherine Swanson: The innovative teacher who created the AVID program

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Mary Catherine Swanson

Mary Catherine Swanson, original developer of the AVID program.

Back in 1980, Clairemont High School in San Diego, California, suddenly faced a court-ordered integration order. Teachers at the predominantly white, suburban, middle-class school knew that their incoming minority students would need extensive remediation. As Clairemont’s staff scrambled for ways to meet the needs of these students, one innovative staff member came up over with a groundbreaking idea. That staff member was English teacher Mary Catherine Swanson.

Mary Catherine believed strongly that with appropriate academic tools and support, minority and other under-represented students could succeed in a rigorous academic atmosphere just as well as their Clairemont classmates. To meet their needs, she developed an innovative instructional program called Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID). The program trained students in strategies for note-taking and test-taking, offered peer mentoring and tutoring, and sponsored cultural field trips.

Mary Catherine’s efforts produced astonishing results. Since the program’s inception, over 400,000 students have participated in the training. The program is so successful that today over 5,000 high schools in 45 states and 16 countries around the world have implemented it. Statistics show that of those students enrolled in AVID, 95% go on to enroll in a four-year college, and 85% of them graduate. To learn more about the AVID program, go to www.avid.org.

The overwhelming success of Mary Catherine’s work has earned her many honors. Among them are an A+ Award for Reaching the Goals of America 2000 from the US Department of Education; the EXCEL Award for Excellence in Teaching; and the Salute to Excellence from the American Association for Higher Education. She has also been recognized with the UC San Diego Remarkable Leader in Education Award and the Distinguished Achievement Award by the UC Davis Cal Aggie Alumni Association. She has also been recognized with honorary doctorates from UC San Diego and the University of LaVerne.

Mary Catherine Swanson: truly a chalkboard champion.

Alan Haskvitz: Showing the best teachers among us how to be even better

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Every teacher is a chalkboard champion in my book, but sometimes I discover an educator that shows even the best teacher among us how to be even better. One such educator is Alan Haskvitz, a middle school teacher from Walnut, California.

Alan, who was born in 1942, has earned four degrees and possesses credentials to teach English, social studies, special education, gifted education, journalism, and business. His career as an educator has spanned more than four decades. Currently, Alan teaches history at Suzanne Middle School in the Walnut Unified School District in Walnut, California. He also serves as the chair of his school’s Social Studies Department.

When Alan first came to Walnut, his students’ standardized test scores were only in the 22nd percentile. However, by using his unique teaching methods, he helped his students improve their scores into the 94th percentile. This was the largest gain in California history.

What are Alan’s unique teaching methods? Well, he introduced “quality circles” in the classroom. A quality circle is a group of students who work cooperatively to identify, analyze, and solve a problem. Also, Alan was one of the first educators to actively promote “service learning” as part of the social studies curriculum. Service learning combines learning objectives with community service in order to provide a practical, progressive learning experience that also meets the needs of the larger community.

For his achievements in the classroom, Alan was inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame in 1997. He has also been named a “Hero in Education” by Reader’s Digest. He has recognized as a National Middle Level Teacher of the Year, and a USA Today All-Star Teacher. In addition, this chalkboard champion has been honored with the Robert Cherry International Award for Great Teachers, an award usually given only to university-level instructors.

To learn more about this amazing educator, see his biography at Alan Haskvitz. You can also check out the website that Alan works on in collaboration with the Horace Mann Companies, ReachEveryChild.com.

 

Hawaii mourns passing of educator and politician Daniel Akaka

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Daniel Kahikina Akaka

Daniel Kahikina Akaka

Citizens in Hawaii are mourning the passing this week of their beloved educator and senator Daniel Kahikina Akaka.

Daniel Akaka was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on September 11, 1924. He was the youngest of eight children born to a father of Chinese descent and a Native Hawaiian mother. As a youngster, Daniel attended Hawaii’s prestigious Kamehameha Schools, founded specifically to provide a quality education to Native Hawaiian children. He graduated from high school in 1942.

Daniel was an American hero. He served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, from 1945 to 1947. When the war ended, the US veteran used his GI bill to enroll at the University of Hawaii. There he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Education in 1952 and his Master’s degree in 1966. After earning his teaching credential, Daniel was employed as a high school teacher in Honolulu from 1953 to 1960. He taught music, social studies, and math. In 1960 he was promoted to vice principal, and in 1969 he became a high school principal. In 1969, Daniel left public schools to work in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as a chief program planner.

A multi-talented individual, the former teacher won election to the US House of Representatives in 1976, where he served a total of seven terms. In 1990, Daniel was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the US Senate which had occurred upon the death of Senator Spark Matsunaga. Later Daniel was elected to that position in his own right, and he served there until his retirement in 2013. Daniel’s career in politics spanned a total of 36 years.

While in office, Daniel served on a number of committees, including Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Energy and Natural Resources. But he is best known for his work on behalf of America’s veterans. He supported legislation to re-evaluate the wartime service records of members of the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion. These units, comprised almost entirely of Japanese American soldiers, were engaged in some of the fiercest fighting in Europe. They exhibited some of the most exemplary combat records of the entire war. Despite this, only one Asian American soldier earned the nation’s highest decoration for military valor, the Medal of Honor. Because of Daniel’s efforts, more than 20 additional Asian American veterans of World War II were awarded the Medal of Honor in 2000.

Daniel Akaka passed away after a lengthy illness on April 6, 2018, at the age of 93. To learn more about this amazing educator and politician, click on  or the article at Washington Post Obituary.