The programs are a small part of a growing national imperative: to increase the number of black men working in the nation’s public schools, where “minority” students now constitute a majority.

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Honoré Center founders consider the program unique because it starts with an unlikely group of students, sometimes referred to by education analysts as “the bottom quartile” of scholars because they lack the requisite grades, test scores, and financial means to attend college.

“We take these young men who were expected to go to jail or graduate at only a 20 percent clip. And they’re succeeding,” said former Southern University President Ronald Mason, who designed the Honoré Center as a national pilot program with hopes of boosting the numbers of African American males in two key areas: college graduates and teachers in urban schools.

Johnny Taylor, who heads up the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, said that success at the center will be “a key moment” within an array of often-disappointing programs. “There have been a lot of dollars expended on the black male over the past few decades, with little to show,” he said.

Mason sees Honoré Men as “hidden stars” who can, with several years of concerted investment, reach their full potential in a way that breaks through barriers. (The Honoré Center is part of Southern’s Five-Fifths Initiative, a name derived from the nation’s 1787 Three-Fifths Compromise, under which each male slave was counted as only three-fifths of a man.)

In exchange for a full scholarship—free room and board and a small monthly stipend—each Honoré Man receives a loan that is forgiven if he teaches in public school for at least two years. That commitment to putting more black male teachers in schools was a big selling point for the Louisiana legislators who helped finance the center, starting with its launch in 2012.

Incoming students must have a high school GPA of at least 2.0 and an ACT score between 14 and 19. Their income must also be low enough to qualify for a Pell Grant.

Basically, the program recruits intelligent kids who lack resources, said Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, the retired U.S. Army man and hero of post-Katrina New Orleans who, at Mason’s request, gave his name and oversight to the center. “All things being equal, the only difference between these young men and some kid going through prep school off his endowment and driving a new Mustang is money and opportunity,” Honoré said. But most of the center’s participants lack those resources. Instead, many come from dire poverty, Honoré said, recalling a young man who cried when he first saw his dorm room; he had never before had even a bed to himself.

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Five years ago, in a commencement speech at New Orleans’ Xavier University, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan kicked off an effort to increase teacher diversity. Duncan decried the lack of black teachers, noting that when he headed up Chicago Public Schools, most of the students were black, but many schools lacked a single black male teacher.