Friday of last week was Jackie Robinson Day in the big leagues. Every Major League ballplayer took the field wearing a big 42 on the back of his jersey. It was a fitting tribute to the ballplayer who had broken the Major Leagues’ color barrier. And to Branch Rickey, who never tired of pointing out that “luck” was but the residue of design. When a chance for greatness appeared, Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey simply took it—together. They didn’t just sit around waiting for either lightning or luck to strike. For both believed in what Martin Luther King Jr. called the Fierce Urgency of Now.
And so does Eva Moskowitz, who runs Success Academy in New York City, and makes sure it lives up to its name. Each student is also given a crack at winning a college scholarship, and an impressive number of them do.
This year there were more than 20,000 applications for the 3,200 seats available for the Success Academy schools and many of these kids went home with college scholarships, too—despite every obstacle New York’s politicians, teachers’ unions and an ossified public-school administration could throw in their way.
The vested interests were all arrayed against them, but the kids and their families weren’t about to give up. For they had their minds set on freedom, and knew they would overcome someday. And did.
How did they manage it? By relying on these Success Academy schools, for at last report 95 percent of them had passed their Proficiency tests in math and 65 percent did the same when it came to their scores on the English tests. Not bad for kids the politicians, teachers’ unions, and The System in general had written off as hopeless. All these kids really needed was for all these naysayers to just get out of their way and show what they could do. Just as Jackie Robinson did.