When you hear the phrase, “I Promise,” you likely assume the next bit of the sentence will be something positive.
“I promise to love you forever.”
“I promise I’ll pick up the groceries on my way home.”
“I promise I’ll clean my room, Mom.”
Less common, I'd expect, are phrases like, “I promise to drop the ball, bungle this plan, and utterly fail a bunch of kids.” And yet, it looks like that’s exactly what NBA star LeBron James has spent the last five years doing.
And by “LeBron James,” I mean his “I Promise” school, a project the Los Angeles Lakers superstar launched in 2018 to help at-risk kids in Akron, Ohio. The public school, funded by the LeBron James Family Foundation, serves kids in grades 1-8. We’d tell you more about it, but a documentary on the school was shuttered in 2020 when the outlet producing it closed up shop.
Perhaps that was an omen.
It turns out the STEM-based school, which purportedly costs about $8 million a year to operate, has for years failed to produce passing scores in math for its 8th grade class. In fact, according to this, the last time students at the I Promise school took the state’s math proficiency test was in the third grade - and it didn’t go so well, with one former school official calling the results “discouraging.”
School board President Derrick Hall didn’t have a whole lot of positive feedback, either.
"For me as a board member, I just think about all the resources that we're providing," Hall said. "And I just, I'm just disappointed that I don't think, it doesn't appear like we're seeing the kind of change that we would expect to see.”
The LeBron James Family Foundation has suggested the school’s poor results are just a short-term problem, and that achieving high student performance will take “long-term commitment, hard work, and a lot of love and care.”
“We’re here for the ups and downs, and will continue to wraparound our students and their entire families so they can be successful in school and in life, no matter the challenges and obstacles that come their way,” they said.
Challenges and obstacles like adding short columns of small numbers, for example.
It's almost as though dumping buckets of money doesn't fix government-fueled dependency, poverty, and broken families.
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— MRCTV (@mrctv) July 31, 2023