Dr. Robert Patterson’s passion for education began early. As a young child, he carried a clipboard and wore glasses, as if he were already teaching a classroom.
“From Pre-K through 5, I went to Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Hartford, Connecticut, which was predominantly Black,” he says. “I lived in a predominately Black neighborhood, and all of my social interactions and institutions were majority Black.” 
Dr. Robert Patterson
When Patterson entered sixth grade, he participated in the Project Concern program, which is now called the Capital Region Educational Council.
“There was this passive acknowledgement that perhaps the schools in Hartford did not have the resources to provide said educational opportunities that I would get at another school,” says Patterson. “But instead of trying to transform that school system, you take a handful of students, disperse them to other school systems, so that the central problem — which is the educational disparities — stay intact. But for a set of circumstances and luck, I might not have had that narrative.”
This realization led him to write a term paper on school choice during his junior year in high school.
“I do think it has its advantages, but clearly school choice obfuscates the need to address structural inequalities that [are] rooted along racial and economic lines,” he says.
Patterson is now entering his second year as the inaugural chair of the Department of African American Studies at his alma mater, Georgetown University.
