Want Your Kid to Pursue Science? Have Them Dress the Part

In order to encourage more of the nation’s young people to pursue careers in science, it pays to help them dress the part.
That is the key finding of a study we conducted recently to determine what kind of effect a simple article of clothing – in this case white lab coats – have on students’ confidence in their ability to do science. We also wanted to know if lab coats help students see themselves as scientists and aspire to science careers.
We are science education researchers interested in understanding how the symbols and tools of science can promote students’ interest in studying science.
This is an important topic because jobs in science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM jobs — are not only important for the economy, but are also growing faster and pay more than many other fields.
Although the number of jobs in STEM fields are increasing, the number of people choosing to major in those fields remains below what is needed to fill the positions.

THE POWER OF CLOTHING

In order to encourage more young people to choose to major in STEM fields and pursue STEM careers, we believe it is important to help them see themselves as someone who can be successful in those fields. One item often associated with scientists is the white lab coat.
Clothing can be a powerful tool for changing one’s self-image, as seen in previous studies of the effects of suits and lab coats on adults.
In an effort to help students see themselves as scientists and as individuals who can be successful in science, we conducted a study that put students in lab coats for science instruction. Our team worked with five fifth-grade teachers from four rural schools who taught at least two science classes.

Can lab coats lead kids to feel more like scientists?

SAME LESSONS, DIFFERENT ATTIRE

For each teacher, students in one of the classes wore lab coats for at least 10 class periods over the course of two months. The other class did not wear lab coats. The teachers taught the same lessons to each class to minimize the differences between teachers. The participants were interviewed before and after the 10 lessons and also took a pre- and post-survey that explored many factors, such as their sense of self as a scientist, their confidence in their skills related to science, and whether they had career goals related to STEM fields.
For the 110 youth in the group who didn’t wear lab coats, there were no statistically significant changes in their responses from the pretest to post-test for any question on the written survey. However, for the students who wore the lab coats, there was a significant increase in their perceptions of whether others see them as scientists.
More specifically, of the 72 students who wore lab coats, 47 percent changed their responses on the post-survey to indicate they feel like others see them as someone who likes science.
Also, of the 42 lab coat–wearing students who had low levels of confidence in their science skills, 45 percent changed their responses on the post-test to positive responses. Another 36 percent of the students in lab coats with low levels of self-confidence did not change their response from the pre- to post-test but this included the students who already felt they had high levels of recognition.

POSITIVE EFFECTS

To test for performance and competence in science, students were asked questions such as “I think I am good at science” and “I am good at using science tools like thermometers, rulers or magnifying glasses.” The youth who wore lab coats but had low levels of self-confidence had a significant increase in their responses to these questions. More specifically, 60 percent of the students changed their answer from disagree to agree.
To test for career aspirations, the students were asked questions such as “I would like to have a job that uses science.” For the students wearing the lab coats who had low confidence in their science skills, 50 percent changed their answers from disagree to agree.

A WORTHY INVESTMENT

The bottom line: is that for youth who initially had low levels of confidence in their science skills, the lab coats had a significant improvement in their beliefs in their abilities, their levels of recognition and their science career aspirations.
The ConversationOf course, lab coats cannot supplant a solid science education. At the same time, these simple articles of clothing may represent an inexpensive way to help more young people get interested in science and see themselves as future scientists.

Megan Ennes is a graduate research assistant and M. Gail Jones is a professor of STEM education, both at North Carolina State University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

A Bold Law Aims to Eliminate the Gender Wage Gap, School Integration Finally Gets the Funding It Deserves and More

Illegal in Massachusetts: Asking Your Salary in a Job Interview, New York Times
With women only making 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man, how to close the gender wage gap is a hotly debated topic. Will bipartisan legislation in New England, which attempts to level the playing field by forbidding businesses from asking a prospect’s previous salary, be a model for other states to follow?
Is School Integration Finally Making the Grade?, New America Weekly
Dozens of studies prove that school integration leads to student success. President Obama’s new “Stronger Together” grant program encourages districts to fully integrate by income, not ethnicity — giving low-income children of all races the opportunity to receive a better education.
Meet the Mothers Who Have Been Fighting Police Brutality for Decades, BuzzFeed
Described as “ultimate activist mother,” Iris Baez founded the grassroots group Parents Against Police Brutality after her son was killed in 1994. Working alongside fellow grieving mothers, Baez already has scored several important policing reform victories, but the 70-year-old isn’t letting age slow her advocacy work.
MORE: 5 Ways to Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens
 

For Education to Improve, Emotional Learning Must Be Emphasized

In his 20s, as a Teach for America fellow in a Washington, D.C., classroom, Nick Ehrmann, found himself reading Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Little Blue Engine,” which satirizes the well-known kid’s story of the Little Engine That Could who repeats, “I think I can, I think I can,” to power its way up a steep hill. In Silverstein’s version, instead of reaching the summit, the train slips backwards and crashes: “If the track is tough and the hill is rough, / thinking you can just ain’t enough!” the poet writes. Ehrmann took the lesson to heart and, after completing graduate work in sociology at Princeton, founded the educational nonprofit Blue Engine, its name a nod to the poem.
As CEO, Ehrmann takes the hard look at the shortcomings in our nation’s secondary schools, rejects pat inspirational messages and instead provides students with critical support to succeed in higher education. Blue Engine’s most important innovation is the introduction of teaching assistants (known as BETAs), mostly recent college grads, in the classroom. By breaking up large classes into small groups, teaching assistants personalize lessons for class performance and learning styles. With 89 BETAs in seven schools today, the program has been shown to nearly double the number of college-ready students — a 73 percent increase at three schools, according to New York’s 2013-14 Regents test data — and cut the number of failing students by one third.
On a recent weekday morning, Ehrmann, wearing a scarf against the 34-degree chill, plopped down at a table at Au Bon Pain in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. NationSwell spoke to him about rethinking the education sector, leadership and fatherhood.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
There’s an expression that we have here that we have to earn the right to do this work. I think there’s a pervasive illusion that the fact that you have good intentions is going to lead to positive outcomes. And in actuality, it can lead to feelings of entitlement and arrogance and a lack of partnerships — true partnerships — in the communities in which we work. So from the minute we step foot into the office or to a school or to a classroom and sit across the table from a young person, who are we to say that we deserve to be there? We have to earn the right to be there in the eyes of young people, teachers, parents and each other. That’s number one. It feels like that’s the most grounding way to honor the work and not lose sight of what’s most important, which is achieving results.

Nick Ehrmann (far right) stands with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the College Opportunity Summit in Washington, D.C., Jan. 16, 2014.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Number one is broadening the evidence base in how we define success, continuing to embrace academic achievement outcomes, but also incorporating measures of student growth, social-emotional learning, learning climate and the ways that schools can and must nurture the growth of young people more holistically. Students aren’t just data points. They’re people, and I think we’re seeing a really reductionist narrowing of what success means into standardized test scores at the expense of things that help young people grow and learn and develop independently in their lives. I think the pendulum is swinging back.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Dude, I have like 5,000 books. Hmm…
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
I have three boys under five [years of age]…we’re watching “Cars 2” and “Wall-E” for the 14th time, and actually, I just watched the Star Wars trilogy — the original three — with my four-year-old, and he was glued to the set. It’s just amazing.
What’s your biggest need right now?
Sleep! No, I think I’ve got it: a relaxation of the assumption individual organizations can or should scale to solve social problems alone and to encourage the essential forms of collaboration in systemic partnerships, where the most promising organizations become part of a much broader theory of change in how problems get solved. Look at Malaria No More, for example. There was no single organization that would have set themselves up to become the global malaria response. Too often, I think, entrepreneurs face pressure to scale to the size of the problem alone.
What inspires you?
Working with an incredible team. Having the chance to be part of an organization that sees the strengths in young people, instead of their weaknesses and deficits, and builds from that strength without taking credit for it. And the sliver of possibility that this work is going to have a dramatic impact on how students learn across the country.
In turn, how do you try to inspire others?
It’s easy to lose sight of what drives us and unites us as an organization, when the work itself is so hard. And part of my role is to consistently hold that vision and sense of possibility, just grounded in young people, to hold that front and center, so we can recharge.
What’s your perfect day?
I thrive on routine. I’m just going to describe my current day. A perfect day: I’d say it starts with not waking up three times in the middle of the night, step one. Step two: Cook breakfast for my boys. Get in a quick run in Central Park. It’s equal parts being in the field at schools and managing teams. Getting home in time so that Annie [my wife] and I could put the boys to bed. And eking out 36 minutes of “Homeland,” before I fall asleep on the couch. #LivingTheDream.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I was a musician for most of my life. I come from a family of musicians. I play cello, so I grew up doing classical and jazz ensemble work most of my life. I miss it. That would be part of my perfect day, if I had the time. I started around [the age of] four and put it down in my early 20s.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this work?
To not to apologize for thinking big. And to not allow caution or fear to limit people’s sense of what’s possible.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.

How Do You Truly Transform Education in America? Teach This Subject in Grammar Schools

Nothing stops Mike Erwin. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., he enlisted and served in the Army for three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s athletically fit — an endurance runner who’s finished 12 ultra-marathons — and mentally sharp — once a graduate student in psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who later taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He founded Team Red, White & Blue, a nonprofit consisting of 96,500 members in 178 chapters worldwide that enrich veterans’ lives by connecting them to their community through physical activity.
Lately, Erwin has focused on a very unique area than his military pedigree would suggest, but it’s one he believes is vital to the country’s future: How do you teach a second-grader about leadership?
It’s a question Erwin and several elementary school teachers in upstate New York have been contemplating over the past year as part of his latest venture, The Positivity Project. Originally sparked at a discussion group at West Point and later available only as a Facebook page, The Positivity Project now aims to be the defining curriculum for character education in America’s grade schools. (Talks are underway to see it in more than 20 schools across the country by next year.) Amid all the intense pressure to score highly on standardized tests and meet Common Core standards, Erwin is focusing on how public education can mold better citizens.
“I think a lot of people are scared right now. They see the levels of divisiveness. Just read the comments on Facebook threads on an article, they’re angry and negative,” Erwin says. “A lot of parents are looking at that and seeing we have got to create a better society for our children and how they interact with each other.”
Rooted in the concepts of positive psychology — a rigorous, if somewhat new, field of inquiry examining the conditions for happiness — Erwin and the teachers at Morgan Road Elementary School in the Liverpool, N.Y., school district are developing lesson plans based on the two dozen different character strengths at the core of the field, concepts like creativity, love, bravery, teamwork and forgiveness. For 10 to 15 minutes a day, four days a week, the teachings are a simple way to spark discussion in the classroom, a dialogue that’s continued outside of the school grounds via The Positivity Project’s savvy use of social media.
So how does The Positivity Project teach character? The short answer, the teachers say, is a subtle distinction in instruction: Don’t tell kids about behaviors — what they should be doing — and help them realize how their actions affect other people and their own identity — the why behind the behavior. That’s because, when it comes to character, a child is more likely to be respectful if he’s given models of courteous individuals (real or fictional) than if a teacher barks, “Be polite!”

Morgan Road Elementary School students listen as Mike Erwin speaks.

At least that’s how second-grade teacher Amy Figger feels. Before The Positivity Project reinvigorated the school’s strategy for character education, several teachers had dropped it from their day, unwilling to sacrifice 15 minutes that could be used for test-prep skills, she says. But Figger never wavered. “This isn’t about elementary school; this is about something lifelong,” she says.
In her Morgan Road classroom, where she team-teaches 46 students with her colleague Marc Herron, another Positivity Project proponent, she says the focus on 24 character strengths gives them a way to pinpoint unique qualities in each 7-year-old student. “To be a leader, you have these strengths inside of you. Tap into them. And if something’s not your strength, surround yourself with other people to get something done,” Figger says. “You’re not teaching or telling, we’re saying you already have this inside of you. You only need to recognize it.”
Herron notes that character lessons can also help to create a conducive learning environment. Character strengths like curiosity come up in science lessons, and perseverance is noted after hard math problems. With the same lessons taught throughout the school, there’s a stronger sense of community. “We have a common language to use,” Herron says. Sometimes, the character strengths even make their way into faculty meetings, as the educators discuss a student’s progress or their own educational challenges.
Outside Morgan Road Elementary, clinical research seems to give credence to the effect of The Positivity Project on student behavior. Christopher J. Bryan, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, concluded that kids between three and six years old were up to 29 percent more likely to assist with a task when they were asked to “be a helper,” compared to children who were asked simply “to help.” Same went for cheating, which was reduced by half when youngsters were told, “Please don’t be a cheater,” compared to the other group, told, “Please don’t cheat.” (Younger children learn more from nouns than verbs.)
A similar study by Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler, psychologists at the University of Toronto, found that praise was better reinforced when it was tied to a fuller sense of self, rather than an isolated behavior. In an experiment, after giving marbles to other children, some kids were told “it was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” Others heard: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.” When researchers returned weeks later and gave the children another chance to share, those in the latter group was more generous because they felt their actions were essential to being a “nice and helpful person.”
Taken as a whole, the findings suggest that positive reinforcement is not just working Pavlovian tricks on kids. Instead, as soon as children begin to recognize their actions are intrinsically related to who they are, they begin to act with a clearer moral compass.
The entire Morgan Road Elementary School — students, teachers and administrators — form the Positivity Project logo.

Erwin steeped himself in this research as a graduate student at the University of Michigan under one of positive psychology’s co-founders, Dr. Chris Peterson, the co-author (along with Martin Seligman) of the influential text “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.” As a professor at West Point teaching about leadership, Erwin took heart in Peterson’s fundamental idea, “other people matter,” and invited him to speak to his students. But three weeks before the engagement, Peterson died of a heart attack.
Erwin grappled with how to memorialize Peterson’s legacy as he got Team Red, White & Blue — a organization Peterson inspired Erwin to create — up and running, On the side, he started a Facebook page that collected inspirational quotes on character strengths, drawing from the archives of Peterson’s research into how these ideals persisted back to ancient times: Plato, Aristotle, Sun Tsu and Lao Tsu. In March 2015, Herron, an old buddy, reached out to Erwin about the social media account, telling Erwin he loved sharing the quotes with his second graders. After more conversation about how the ideas could translate for young, The Positivity Project began.
Fitting with the times, Erwin’s curriculum has a special focus on technology and social media. Each classroom has a Twitter feed, where the teacher posts quotes that reinforce discussion and model good behavior online. Erwin concedes this focus is also a convenient marketing tool, spreading The Positivity Project’s message across the Internet. But his intentions are deeper. “We’re not very mature in how we [as a society] use our social media and technology. All this change has been thrust upon us so rapidly,” he says. “We need to make sure that we’re talking to our kids about being good people and about their strengths. Before you hit send on something or repost something or text something, okay, am I stopping to think what this is going to do to somebody?”
It all goes back to Peterson’s original message: Have I remembered that other people matter?
 

Why Helping Humanity Should Be Core to Learning

There are enormous push and pull forces emerging in education and something is going to have to give. The push force is the fact that traditional schooling is boring, and the more you go up the grade levels, the more boring it becomes. By the time you reach grades 9 or 10 only about a third of all students are engaged. The pull forces include the allure of explosive technology having a life of its own. This tension — between the dullness of schooling and the unbridled expansion of technology — makes the status quo untenable.
There is a way to escape this, one that I explored in report form with Maria Langworthy in “A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning” which was published by Pearson in 2014. We’ve now extended this enquiry with over 500 schools in seven countries, that we are working with as part of our New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) initiative.*
We are helping clusters and networks of schools implement deep learning outcomes that we define as the 6Cs:

  • Character education
  • Citizenship
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Creativity
  • Critical thinking

Moreover, as in “The Rich Seam,” we are working with school and system partners to establish the conditions and strategies at the local and state level to support NPDL in action. It is in the early stages, but we are discovering that students themselves are agents of change. They are catalysts for changing teaching and learning; they are also partners in changing the school and forces for change in society itself. In a very real sense, they are intergenerational change agents.
For example, our partner schools in Uruguay were given simple robotic kits with instructions via YouTube. The kits sat on the shelf until one day the students, which are 10 years old, asked the teacher if they could start to use them.
Quickly, they created the following: One group studied World War II and built a device that could detect land mines; another group solved the problem of birds eating vegetables in the garden by building a simple robot that vibrated when birds came near. A third group took up the issue that lightning killed five people on a beach, so they built a device that could detect imminent lightning and then sound an alarm.
One 10-year-old observed, “I am supposed to help humanity, so I decided to start in my own neighborhood.”
As another example, a school in Australia built its learning around what they called “enigma missions,” which are complex problems or issues to be solved. One group studied autism because they knew relatives who were autistic; another took up the issue of homelessness, and still another tackled DNA, which one boy observed is an enigma in itself. The students were incredibly engaged and came up with great insights. One pupil who examined homelessness and drew some important conclusions said, “I feel so complete,” not in the sense of being finished, but having brought something valuable to fruition.
We have vastly underestimated what students can do and what they value. We now say that one of the core learning goals for students is to help humanity. Children naturally take to this not because they are altruistic, but because they see this as a basic human motivator — they want to do it for their own good as well as for others. They learn a strong set of values and skills that will serve them for life. Teachers play a new role: helping students focus, giving them scope to engage with each other, examining learning designs, assessing results and deriving lessons for improving learning.
We are in the first phase, and it is very clear that the ‘seam’ is being opened and has the potential to be very rich indeed.
We have a feeling that from here on, these developments will move very fast for the very simple reason that it unleashes the individual and collective spirit for deep learning that gives all learners a role in helping humanity, thereby helping themselves. We will have more to report soon.
*Thanks to fellow NPDL directors Joanne Quinn and Joanne McEachen and all of our school partners.
Michael Fullan is Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto and Global Director Leadership, NPDL. The report “A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning” was published as a part of Open Ideas at Pearson.
 

Why Parents, Policymakers and Philanthropists Need to Look Elsewhere If We Are to Transform America’s Classrooms

School systems around the world spend billions on education “fixes” that, the evidence shows, are unlikely to deliver the impact that American parents are seeking and that students deserve.
One reason these “fixes” persist is that they are seemingly plausible. For example, take the familiar call for smaller class sizes, where many rigorous studies have found little impact. The explanation for such small gains is found in the messy reality of classrooms and the hard graft of changing teacher practice: In smaller classrooms, most teachers continue to teach in the same way that they always have. It’s simple, really — if you don’t change the pedagogy, you won’t change the learning.
Or take the popular “fix” of increasing school choice and inventing new types of schools. The mistake here is to misunderstand the unit that matters, which is much less the school and much more the classroom. Again, it comes down to the teaching skills and practices that the students experience.
What should we do, and how can we find a way through the forest that almost every intervention in education seems to have some supporting evidence (and a plausible narrative) that it makes a positive difference to student learning?
To answer this question, I used a new method (well, it was new in the 1980s) called meta-analysis, which allows researchers to merge many studies into one big study to estimate the average impact of the intervention in question. Then I went one step further and began synthesizing the meta-analyses.
This synthesis now contains more than 1,200 meta-analyses and 60,000 studies, representing about 250 million students. It allows us to move beyond asking, “what works?” and to start asking the more important question: “What works best?”
My claim is that the greatest influence on student progression in learning is having highly expert teachers and school leaders working together to maximize the effect of their teaching on all pupils in their care. I’ve called this Collaborative Expertise and describe it in more detail in a paper published by Pearson in June entitled “What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise.”
At its heart it involves:

  • Developing and nurturing inspired and passionate teachers who are experts at working out where students are in their learning, delivering multiple learning interventions each with a high probability of success and then re-starting this cycle in light of the impact achieved.
  • Creating a shared understanding of what one year’s worth of student learning should look like, and then getting all adults in the school to work to deliver that for each and every student, irrespective of their different starting points.
  • With that shared understanding in place, going on to create ways for all teachers to come together to share defensible evidence of their impact — and impact is what is important, this isn’t about sharing war stories in the teacher’s lounge.

What’s great about this list is that all of these strategies can begin now; they don’t require any permissions, and they cost relatively little. They are all related to the core of learning and teaching, and this is what we should be talking about even though this does lead into a difficult — but vital — acknowledgment that teachers do vary in their impact on students.
Acknowledging this shouldn’t lead us into the trap of proposing things like teacher performance pay — another topic where it is difficult to find a model that has made much, if any, difference to student learning. A much better approach is increasing the effectiveness of all teachers.
In my work, I have seen the transformational impact that this approach can have. Under the Visible Learning banner, my colleagues and I have worked with schools and teachers across the world to put the theory of collaborative expertise into use. One such school is the Wolford Elementary School in McKinney, Texas.
Students at Wolford Elementary were achieving good results. Despite this, teachers couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t as engaged in their learning as they could be. So they asked students what they thought good learning was all about. To the teachers’ surprise, the majority of pupils associated learning with good behavior in class.
In order to help students grow in autonomy and awareness as learners, school leaders developed a team-based program for teachers. In the teams, educators found a safe place in which to talk and share their expertise, which resulted in the co-design of challenging and engaging lessons using proven instructional practices.  Further, through their work together, the teachers developed a deepened focus on their role as evaluators responsible for constantly assessing their impact on student learning.
Wolford Elementary is a different place today, with the single biggest change being that language and behavior now focuses on learning, as opposed to teaching. Professional conversations abound, and teachers view themselves not as instructors, but as active facilitators of learning. During walkthroughs and classroom observations, school leaders note higher levels of student engagement in learning, and teachers are seen trying out instructional strategies like classroom discussion, reciprocal teaching, concept mapping and worked examples.
There is every reason to believe that if we leave behind the distractors and embrace Collaborative Expertise that we will see the changes in learning that American students deserve. This isn’t calling for some Utopia. It’s about having the courage to dependably recognize the excellence that is around us and building a coalition of success based on this excellence and inviting others to join.
This is where policymakers, parents and philanthropists should devote their energy (and dollars). If they do, the benefits will be manifest, powerful and exciting.
“What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise” by John Hattie is published as part of Open Ideas at Pearson, a series featuring independent insights on the big unanswered questions in education. Click here to find out more.
 
 

When This School Got Rid of Homework, It Saw a Dramatic Outcome

In 2010, when Principal Greg Green decided to “flip” one class in his failing high school, it was considered a radical idea.
Flipping a classroom essentially turns the typical school day on its head. Students receive video lessons online at home and do their homework during class, freeing up time so they can receive more one-on-one help from their teacher.
While other schools had adopted the flipped model with some success, Green was cautious. He wanted to see the results for himself. So he ran a 20-week-long trial at Clintondale High School in Clinton, Mich., which at the time, ranked in the lowest 5 percent of Michigan’s high schools. The test run applied the flipped classroom teaching model to a civics class that included 13 failing kids and compared it with another class using a traditional teaching method.
Green says that the results were staggering. “The at-risk class actually outperformed the traditional class using the same teacher, the same materials — just a little different method.”
The next year, Green flipped every class at Clintondale, making it the first school in the nation to do so. Since then, the school has seen an increase in attendance, college acceptance and a fairly significant reduction in failure rates — from 35 percent to 10 percent in just two years.

How a Two-Week Bootcamp is Getting Vets Ready for Higher Learning

In 2008, Chris Howell began thinking of life after the military. He was serving in the Australian Army, Special Operations Command and was eager to head back to school, reinforced by some timely advice from his younger brother, David. “He said to me, ‘look, you can blow in a door and attack a room, but you need to learn how to read and write an essay.'” David, a top student at Sydney University at the time, took it one step further, putting together a crash-course of materials to help Chris prepare for college life. Five years later, this informal boot-camp became the basis of the Warrior-Scholar Project.
In 2012, Chris Howell partnered with Jesse Reisling and launched the project from Yale, offering a two-week intensive bootcamp for veterans returning to school. In addition to offering classes at Yale this year, they were also available at Harvard and the University of Michigan. By next year, the group plans to hold classes on 10 campuses.
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Jesse Reising, founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has become a NationSwell Council member.

Big Bets: Working With Schools to Reduce Dropout Rates of Low-Income College Students

Alexandra Bernadotte was the first in her family to attend college. The Haitian-born first-generation American remembers the day her acceptance letter to Dartmouth College arrived, and the celebration that followed.  “We treated the moment almost as though we won the lottery. We thought OK, we’ve made it, this was what the dream was about,” she says. Bernadotte’s parents had moved to the United States when she was very young, leaving her to grow up with her grandmother in Port-au-Prince. She eventually joined her parents and sister in inner-city Boston, and from that point on had been instructed that getting into college was the path to a better life in this country. But, she says, even though she was accepted to the college of her choice, the real challenge was yet to come. “We assumed the most difficult part of the journey was over… But I completely bombed my first year at Dartmouth. I failed academically, socially and emotionally.”
Bernadotte learned a lot from her first year at college. She sought help, bounced back and graduated. But most low-income students in college aren’t so lucky. According to a recent New York Times article, roughly 25 percent of college freshman from poorer backgrounds will end up getting their diploma. Bernadotte founded the national nonprofit Beyond 12 to try and increase that number by providing high schools and colleges with more information so they can better prepare low-income and immigrant students like herself for a successful postsecondary education.
MORE: Delaware Pushes to Get More Low-Income Students Enrolled in Higher Education
 

These Coaches Make Recess Work for Kids

Recess can be chaos.
As a result, disciplinary problems can lead schools to reduce playground outings significantly — if not eradicate them altogether. Just look at Seattle, where a new report from KUOW found that schools serving the poorest students might offer 15 minutes of outdoor play a day. And that’s if the kids are lucky.
The adults say it’s just too much trouble to let the children play on their own. But that’s backwards, experts say.
Nationally, almost 18 percent of kids ages six to 11 years old are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Factor in adolescents, and the number of overweight or obese kids rises above one third. Physical activity during recess can help combat this. And adding to the importance of recess are studies that have found it can improve academic performance.
“Those students are the ones we also know have higher rates of obesity, and for whom academic achievement in school is even more important,” pediatrician Paula Lozano told the Seattle station, speaking about kids from low-income areas.
Across the county in the Bronx, New York, the group Asphalt Green may have a solution — turn recess into structured exercise time. Don’t call it physical education, like the dreaded gym class. This is supposed to be all fun and games, just with a very serious mission.
The nonprofit works with some 27,000 kids and can squeeze fitness fun into any hallway or corridor, a big plus for city schools often strained for space, organizers told the station. “Any space you give us, we can be active in,” says Arlen Zamula, the program’s Associate Director of the Recess Enhancement Program.
Asphalt Green’s programs may not look like the free-for-all tag games of yore, but organizers say they’re helping kids have fun while practicing fitness — and hopefully learning a truly life-long physical lesson in the process.