Oakland's African-American male students have a disappointing high school graduation rate, their efforts often dragged down by poverty, crime and too many absences. More than half of African-American boys now in middle school are at risk of dropping out of high school.
Oakland Unified is fighting back with something school districts usually leave to community groups and nonprofits: its own mentoring program pairing black boys with black men. It's called the "Office of African-American Male Achievement."
Recently I spent some time with the men who are helping boys with great needs and great potential.
Why should a well-off white person living, say, in Menlo Park care about what is happening to a poor black kid in Oakland? A cold question, I know, but it was one of my first when we started discussing how to report this story for television and radio.
I took on this reporting assignment knowing that the plight of black youths like those I met in the course of this project would be close to my heart -- I see so much of myself in these young men that it makes me grateful to have had a strong support network while I was growing up. My family in West Palm Beach, Fla., was working-class but not poor, and I was fortunate to have had some excellent community influences to rely on.