It is without question that hip-hop is society's biggest influencer. While it's always been a staple in black culture, the Justin Biebers, Ellens, and Jimmy Fallons of the world caught on, saturating it to a measure that's never been seen.

So it comes to no surprise that Flocabulary, an education technology company who marries hip-hop with learning, is starting to see more schools and boards of education buy in.

At least that's what Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen and other schools in her district are doing. Considering that today's average student, regardless of ethnicity, connects with rap and the hip-hop style, when it came down to it, there is no better curriculum than Flocabulary.

What started as selling rap/vocabulary CDs from the trunk of a car in 2003, has transformed into a full corporation, offering more than 800 educational rap videos covering all academic subjects, along with quizzes and other curricular materials. CEO and co-founder Alex Rappaport told News One that the Brooklyn-based ed tech company will never replace textbooks, but see's their merchandise as "a critical piece of the education jigsaw puzzle for student engagement, content delivery, platform creation.”

Rappaport goes on to explain how he thinks music is a powerful memory and recall tool and how we learn through songs as toddlers but that method of learning stops when we enter the classroom. Flocabulary really knew they had something when kids with learning disabilities who had been working with their product took to it so quickly.

“The first thing we noticed was that the students all knew the words,” Rappaport recalled. “And then, a tenth-grader came up to me and said, ‘Mister Alex, I used to study words in a perfunctory manner, now I love words.’"

This eureka moment only motivated Rapport and his partner, causing them to find out just how effective their program could be. So to testing they went. Including more than 1,200 students in six states, the test results of the independent study conducted by the Educational Research Institute of America showed that the middle school students who used the program for seven months had higher test scores than the group that did not use Flocabulary.

Flocabulary has since expanded its team and even hired established rappers to entice and make the material more relatable. With these type of results, especially in the special education department, one could almost call the sing-along learning method a no-brainer for classrooms going forward.

Hip-hop is not going anywhere anytime soon, so it will be interesting to see how we continue to motivate our youth through this powerful art form.

Black advantage

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