OPINION:
Entertainer and businessman Jay-Z has come under fire from the mainstream media and the education establishment for supporting Pennsylvania families who want the freedom to decide where their children go to school.
The famous rapper’s critics should ask why he might feel strongly about empowering families to control their own educational destiny.
Jay-Z grew up in Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects. He dropped out of high school, and his adolescence and early adulthood were mired in drugs and violence until he found a path to prosperity through music.
He was part of a generation of hip-hop artists in the late 1980s and early ’90s who gained millions of fans but were greeted with skepticism by established record executives.
Jay-Z refused to take no for an answer. After getting rejected by major labels, he co-founded Roc-a-Fella Records to release his first album.
The independent label became the foundation of a diversified business empire. By 2019, the combined value of his ventures in entertainment, apparel and technology made him hip-hop’s first billionaire.
He got the last laugh on his 2005 track “Encore”: “Record companies told me I couldn’t cut it/Now look at me, all star-studded.”
If Jay-Z had been forced to accept the opportunities the powers that be were willing to hand him, his success story never would have happened. It more likely would have ended in tragedy.
Like the establishment record companies of his day, the education establishment is sending the same message to Pennsylvania families: Accept the opportunities we give you.
As Jay-Z’s Roc Nation explained in a recent statement, “parents are simply at the mercy of the system, where their kids’ academic futures are predetermined based on economic status and the location of their homes.”
Perhaps he is frustrated, as are many Philadelphia parents, that only 1 in 5 students in the city’s public schools are proficient in math.
For other celebrities hoping to give back, forcing families to accept fates predetermined by the system has been a path to positive press — and dismal results.
LeBron James received fawning coverage for his decision to work with Akron, Ohio, Public Schools to launch I Promise Academy.
But five years into this venture in working within the system, not a single eighth grader passed the state’s math tests, and district administrators admitted that I Promise kids were doing no better than similar students trapped in other public schools.
In 2017, Chance the Rapper made national headlines by giving $1 million to Chicago Public Schools and drumming up corporate donors to match his generosity.
After years of teachers union strikes, COVID shutdowns, sagging test scores and soaring pension debt, no enterprising journalist has followed up to see what the school district has accomplished with its famous alumnus’s largesse.
It’s admirable that a celebrity like Jay-Z is using his clout to fight for other families’ right to rise — and to refuse to take no for an answer, just like he did early in his career.
More successful entertainers and entrepreneurs should do the same. And the ones who do deserve our thanks.
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Erika Donalds is CEO of OptimaEd and a visiting fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
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