This summer is really not peaceful for the LeBlanc James family.

On Brownie, the heart stopped suddenly during training, and the development of the future basketball road was marked with a question mark; Lao Zhan and his wife were in shock, then the negative news of “I promise” school of LeBlanc was revealed in the media one after another-the board of directors of Akron Public School and Ohio Ministry of Education were naming and criticizing the school, the most direct reason is that in recent years, students’ exam results are really a little too poor.

Taking the most problematic math scores as an example, the passing rate of this year’s eighth grade students in the first year of school (in the third grade) is 17%. Since then, teaching has been affected by the epidemic, and the exam has been suspended for a while. When the exam was re-opened, the number of students who passed the math exam in the three years was zero.

“Three years, no one passed?” Some members of the school manager questioned like this.

This class of students is actually the first batch of freshmen enrolled after the “I promise” school was put into operation in 2018 (the school drew lots from the last 30% of all the second grade students in the city’s reading scores), five years have passed in a flash, and the “promise” of LeBlanc’s pledge to change their fate seems increasingly difficult to fulfill.

I don’t know whether you still remember that the LeBlanc family foundation established this school together with many public institutions including Akron public school board, Akron University and Akron school district.

His vision was very great, because he was poor when he was a child. LeBlanc was forced to miss classes for 83 consecutive days in primary school, which made him pledge to help the children from the poorest and disadvantaged families in his hometown, provide them with a shelter that can shelter from the wind and rain and receive reliable education. LeBlanc not only had to pay for their education, but if any of these children were admitted to Akron University, they would get a full four-year scholarship.

At that time, all major streaming media in the United States carried out extensive publicity on this (there were many inaccurate information, which we said later), which made LeBlanc famous in the world and the glorious image reached its peak.

A report in The New York Times in 2019 described a beautiful utopian scene: children queued up for free breakfast, and their learning energy “exceeded everyone’s expectations” (Leblanc), because LeBlanc is the strongest backing for children.

Just a few months ago, there were also Basketball media praising the school’s various lofty commitments with long reports in depth, which was just a short note of the problem of student performance regression.

Because they only recruit the worst students, the outside world has never expected these children to become university tyrants in just a few years, but few people have improved their grades, most of them still do not advance but retreat with the promotion of grades, and it is impossible to achieve the goal of “preparing eighth-grade students for high school courses when they graduate.

This will inevitably lead those cooperative organizations to issue such questions:

Where has the taxpayer’s money been spent in the past five years? If these children do not learn worse in ordinary public schools, what is the significance of “I promise” schools?

In fact, from the beginning of its establishment, there have been many confusing or contradictory statements about the operation of this school.

For example, the tuition-free study at Akron University was initially passed on to LeBlanc for self-paid sponsorship, but it was actually a four-year full scholarship offered by Akron University.

There is also the problem of operating funds. At the beginning of the school’s enrollment, the “Cleveland network” media emphasized: “The national media reports never mentioned that the operating expenses of this school were not borne by LeBlanc alone”, because of its public nature, most of the bills generated by the school are still paid by taxpayers.

However, the LeBlanc Foundation revealed that the first year of school operation was about 2 million US dollars (all the public should bear it, and the foundation provided 600000 US dollars of additional support). With the expansion of enrollment, the cost will definitely be more in the future. The estimate given by the local school district is 8 million dollars a year, which is enough to eat all the regular budget of the school district. Now the annual donation of the Foundation has reached 1.4 million dollars, which is used to add counselors to junior classes.

The enrollment model formulated by LeBlanc for this school and the extremely complicated commercial projects derived from the brand “I promise” later are even more shocking.

In the “I promise” school, black students account for about 60%, and disabled students account for 28%. A survey by the board of directors of Akron Public Schools found that the disability rate was even half of the sixth grade students.

Choosing children with difficult background and poor grades directly leads to the difficulty of teaching. During the epidemic, teaching was changed to online, which also hit these children very hard (except for parents who are not responsible, they may not have the conditions for online learning). In the past two years, a large number of faculty and staff in the school have left, and the principal has changed again and again. It is no surprise that the State Ministry of Education has put the school on the list of key concerns.

Even though there were many problems in the operation of internal affairs, LeBlanc soon extended his ambition to outside school. Almost at the same time as organizing the school, his foundation began to acquire various properties and real estate in Akron, and built projects such as residential, hospital and commercial complex in the name of “I promise. For a time, “I Promise School (I Promise School)”, “I PROMISE Village (I Promise Village)”, “I Promise Housing (I PROMISE Housing)”, the concepts of “I PROMISE organization (I Promise Institute)” and “I PROMISE health headquarters (I Promise HealthQuarters)” are dazzling.

I promise whole barrels

In addition to entering real estate, LeBlanc also used his huge commercial influence and social network traffic to attract investment for these projects. The joint departments include Ohio Housing Finance Authority, JPMorgan Chase, the world’s top Cleveland Clinic Partners and a charity foundation headquartered in New York, not to mention Wal-Mart, Taco, Starbucks, Nike and other enterprises, the interests involved in this are indeed far beyond the investigation ability of ordinary basketball media.

The publicity of the Leblanc Family Foundation and himself on social media is basically that which child or employee has received tens of thousands of cash support, or which brand they jointly donate millions to build a stadium.

And shortly after the end of the All-Star, the “I promise” school had a campus bullying tragedy, and a student was beaten to death because of a quarrel with others on the stadium. This matter was made a big fuss by the political opposition of LeBlanc, but neither LeBlanc nor his foundation responded too much, and the reports of mainstream media were also very restrained.

Today, the media that exposes these teaching performance problems is the local Akron lighthouse. Interestingly, this happened to be the newspaper office that venhorst once worked for. As a fellow LeBlanc, venhorst followed and reported on him since his high school, from Knight to heat, reporting ESPN from local places can be said to be inseparable. However, as LeBlanc began to run his own media company, he kicked off the speaking tube of winkost.

The treatment of fame is still the same. Naturally, local tabloids can’t get into LeBlanc’s eye. It is no wonder that the media in his hometown have turned against him more than once or twice in recent years.

In that year, Leblanc established the “Uninterrupted” media, which meant that he hoped to give athletes an “undisturbed” platform and make his own voice. The original intention was good, but in the face of unimaginable influence (Durant’s “toxic” comment was the most appropriate), even Brown could not keep the water flat forever, however, when his voice gradually becomes a word on one side, the buried crisis will always break out to a certain extent.

It is also about to realize what kind of cultural civil war may be triggered by his energy. LeBlanc has stopped a lot on social platforms in the past two years. Previously, his successive “rollover” involved the election and racial politics. The last time he caused a sensation, it should be the case that a 16-year-old black girl was shot and killed by Ohio police in 2021. in contrast, leBlanc’s reaction to the 17-year-old black boy being killed in his own school was too low-key.

Next year is another election year. We will wait and see if LeBlanc will come up with a new recruit for canvassing.

In fact, the original intention of LeBlanc to create the “I promise” school must be good, even great. Now it is just a setback caused by the conflict between subjective ideal and objective reality. The future is not without a turning point.

However, as for the merits and demerits behind these setbacks, they are probably the same as the health crisis of brownie, which cannot be easily understood by outsiders.

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(Text/kewell)