Tag: Teach For America

After a Devastating Scandal, Can Reformers Clean Up Atlanta’s Schools?

Posted on by robbie

On April 2, 2013, wearing a pearl necklace and earrings, Atlanta’s former school superintendent Beverly Hall tilted her head for a mug shot. After a state investigation into cheating on standardized tests, a grand jury had indicted the one-time “National Superintendent of the Year,” along with 34 principals, teachers and testing coordinators, for posting illegitimate gains in struggling schools. In total, 185 educators were implicated in the scandal.
A jury eventually delivered 11 convictions on racketeering charges; Hall herself died of breast cancer before standing trial. But the sight of the district’s top employee marching into the Fulton County jail had a more immediate effect: Four young Teach for America (TFA) alumni all made bids to run in the school board race, just seven months away. The former TFA corps members included an incumbent — Courtney English, 31, a Morehouse alum who’d taught seventh-grade social studies in the same Northwest Atlanta classroom where he’d once taken the class — and three newcomers: Matt Westmoreland, 29, a high school history teacher whose father served as a county judge; Jason Esteves, 33, a lawyer from Texas running to be the board’s only Latino representative; and Eshe’ Collins, 36, also a lawyer with a passion for early childhood education.
Opponents warned of “a shadow conspiracy aimed at turning [Atlanta Public Schools] into an all-charter system,” as the city’s alt-weekly described it. Yet the fresh faces promised to fix a system that had lost its constituents’ trust. Despite only having served one term, English’s vision for comprehensive services, vocal calls for transparency during the cheating scandal and backing from TFA’s political arm won him Atlanta voters’ approval. He credits a mission of “keep[ing] it about the kids” for racking up his 23-point margin of victory. Esteves and Collins both triumphed in runoffs. (Westmoreland went unchallenged.) When the board, stacked with six new members, sat for their first meeting, a crowd of 200 admirers erupted in a standing ovation. English was unanimously selected leader — making him, at 28 years old, the youngest chairman in the district’s history. “It was a brand-new day in APS,” English recalls.
Far from the national spotlight, these four school board officials define Teach for America’s long-term strategy. The stated goal of the nonprofit, which placed 3,400 recent college grads in struggling public schools this year alone, is not to recruit career educators. (Indeed, you won’t find the word “teaching” anywhere in TFA’s mission statement.) Rather, the organization seeks to groom “future leaders” who will head a nationwide “movement for educational equity and excellence.” That coalition takes shape when former corps members, like English and Westmoreland, step away from the chalkboard and run for elected office.
The board’s decisions in Atlanta — where the newly elected seized a rare “opportunity to press the restart button on a school system,” as Esteves puts it — afford the clearest view of TFA’s mission in practice. In the South’s biggest city, the organization proved its former teachers could win elections and reshape an entire district. In 2015, the first full school year after the new board’s arrival, graduation rates shot up by 12 points. Meanwhile, charter enrollments since 2013 also increased by one-third. Whether those reforms have been effective or not will be judged by the voters in 2017.
A MOVEMENT FOR FAIRNESS
Critics regularly lob attacks against Teach for America for turnover among its ranks of new teachers. But these opponents misunderstand the purpose of the 27-year-old organization. “All you have to do is teach in today’s schools to realize we will never solve this problem [of educational inequality] from within the classrooms alone. … We actually think some of these folks have to leave,” Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2012. “We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement.” If TFA members are in law firms, hedge funds and hospitals, Westmoreland explains, their classroom experience will inform their decisions, the “things they might invest time and money in,” widening the coalition of those who care about schools beyond the people directly involved, like teachers and parents.
This long-term goal is instilled in corps members from the very first week of TFA’s summer training institute. “Before you start teaching, they’re already talking about your work as alumni,” says T. Jameson Brewer, a former corps member who’s since co-authored a book critical of TFA. Brewer recalled the executive director of the Atlanta branch saying he wanted TFA alums in leadership positions at all levels, from a high percentage of new principal hires and every seat on the local school board, all the way up to a sitting Supreme Court justice. (The director asked Brewer, who’d previously managed a gubernatorial campaign, to throw his name in to the school board race. He declined.)
Brewer questions whether the experience gained with TFA qualifies a person for those roles. “The idea is that you give these folks some manufactured expertise, that being a teacher in the trenches for two years somehow makes them an expert in policy or leadership,” he says. “For most people, I think that should be very troubling.”
Despite any qualms voters might have, TFA has proved very effective at propelling a number of its teachers into leadership positions. Leveraging assets worth $440 million and a 46,000-member alumni network, TFA alums currently occupy the offices of the state superintendent in Louisiana and North Carolina, the state education board in Nevada, the school board president’s chair in Los Angeles and seats on the board in Chicago, San Jose and Stockton, Calif.
Most of that work can be traced back to TFA’s sister organization, Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), a nonpartisan leadership-development program for former corps members founded in 2007. The nonprofit group, which is keen to note it does not endorse any specific policy prescriptions, organizes some 30,000 alums to translate their TFA experience into laws and regulations, whether it’s mobilizing voters through grassroots campaigns, attending summer fellowships, mentoring younger members or sharing policy ideas at conferences. A select few actually run themselves, and they’re supported by LEE’s donors and consultants. Nationwide, there’s now over a hundred LEE members in elected office, organizing roles and policy-making positions.

“Today, there are many children in our country not receiving the education they deserve, and for a long time a movement has been building to address this problem in a systemic way,” says Michael Buman, LEE’s executive director. “This movement is diverse in many ways; it includes students, parents, teachers, advocates, and many, many others. LEE develops the leadership of Teach for America corps members and alumni to be a part of this movement.”

In the run up to the 2013 election in Atlanta, the organization gave the equivalent of $4,300 in services to the school-board campaigns. Simultaneously, money flowed in from Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist and partner in a charter-school management company; Rebecca Ledley, whose husband Charles, a hedge-fund manager, started Democrats for Education Reform; and Joel Klein, the former head of New York City schools.

A TURNAROUND PLAN

LEE’s public support, however small the contribution, drew fierce criticism. Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, wrote in a blog post, “At some point, TFA will be recognized as a crucial cog in the rightwing effort to destroy public education and dismantle the teaching profession,” a contention she stood by when NationSwell checked in with her recently, deriding TFA as “the workforce for charters.”

The four TFA alumni, for their part, adamantly maintained they would not bow to anyone who pulled out their checkbook. (“We’re not going to jump in there and hand over control of the school system to some for-profit charter monster,” Westmoreland told the AJC during the 2013 campaign, adding, “If they come at me with an idea that I don’t think is in the best interest of everyone in the city, I’m going to say no.”) And they took umbrage at the idea that their TFA experience automatically connects them with a pro-charter agenda. “Most people underestimate the difference of opinions in the alumni base,” Esteves says, pointing to fellow corps members who oppose school reform. “TFA does not impact whether I go one way or the other. What it does is give me that perspective that everything I do impacts kids.”

True to their word, English and Westmoreland can hardly be accused of straight up selling out the district to private managers. While the total share of Atlanta students in charters has risen, it’s largely because those approved by previous boards continue to add grades each year, Westmoreland explains. Under their watch, the total number of charter schools has actually decreased by two. The board declined to renew the contract for Intown Charter due to struggling academic performance, and it refused to bail out Atlanta Latin Academy Charter, which went belly-up after half a million went missing in a suspected theft.
But on the flip side, they’ve made it easier for future charters to set up shop in the city. In their first major decision, they hired Dr. Meria Carstarphen, who’d previously led schools in Texas, as superintendent. The turnaround plan she proposed this year included giving control of the city’s five worst schools to charter operators. She’d tried the idea once before in Austin, where she pushed for an in-district charter to take over an elementary school. Yet a single year into the plan, the charter’s contract was promptly cancelled, after parents staged a revolt and booted the experiment’s supporters from the school board.
Westmoreland says he signed on to Carstarphen’s idea after talking with fellow corps members at an LEE conference in Washington, D.C. — a gathering where TFA alums who’ve crossed over into politics share “war stories,” as English puts it. In January 2014, Westmoreland chatted with representatives from Nashville, who’d created a hybrid model of a neighborhood school managed by an outside operator in 2011. The primary criticism against charters is that they appear to achieve higher results by taking the most motivated students out of district schools, then kicking out underperfomers. (English calls it “creaming the top and skimming the bottom.”) Nashville, by forcing the charter to accept every student within a fixed attendance zone, seemed to have stumbled on a new model that prevents an operator from cooking its numbers.
Despite an outcry over the swiftness with which Carstarphen enacted her plan — “The community feels like it’s being sold out,” one parent remarked — the proposal, backed by Westmoreland, won unanimous approval from the board. Its passage marked the first time a charter was hired to run a neighborhood school in Georgia. So far, Westmoreland reports, the school’s seen better attendance and fewer disciplinary issues under its new management.

Atlanta school board member Courtney English speaks at the Governing for Impact summit in Washington, D.C., in 2015.

Would English like to see more charters open in the district? He won’t say. “Parents want good schools, period. If you’re a parent, you’re not thinking about the politics of education reform. You’re asking, ‘How can I help my third-grader get the best education possible?’ And I think when we speak to that, the other stuff becomes noise,” he says. “I’m not for more of one thing or the other. It is how you get more good schools faster” of any kind, he adds.
A CALLING TO HIGHER OFFICE
Next year, Atlanta’s Teach for America network will set its sights on a higher office, as both Westmoreland and English plan to run for Atlanta’s city council. In November, Westmoreland, who currently oversees programming to prevent summer learning loss at a nonprofit, will compete for an open seat, while English, now chief education officer of an ed-tech company, will duel with an incumbent councilman. Both will try to capitalize on a number of accomplishments during their school board tenure.
Westmoreland, as chair of the budget committee, is particularly proud of redirecting money away from administrators in the central office, hitting a high of 66 cents on every dollar being devoted to classroom use. He also won goodwill by providing teachers long overdue raises that had been frozen after the economic downturn in 2008.
English can also point to some big budget wins. This spring, voters approved a penny sales tax, which is expected to bring in $464 million to fund school construction. He also settled a longstanding dispute with Atlanta’s BeltLine over $162 million the school system was owed for its share of property tax diverted to funding the 22-mile loop. Another boast for English: a jump in graduation rates. When he joined the board in 2009, just over half of students graduated; in the seven years since, that number has jumped to 71 percent. (Part of this improvement resulted from doing away with exit exams as a graduation requirement; statewide, the rate increased 6 percent after the change.)
With those accomplishments under their belts, it’s a little surprising that English and Westmoreland still talk up their TFA experience, when the issue has proven polarizing. In highlighting their service, the debate becomes a referendum on Wendy Kopp’s idea; the men’s political capital rises and falls as the organization’s does. Their explanation? That TFA profoundly affected their worldview, and both now feel the obligation to give credit where it’s due.
English says TFA gave him an “opportunity to give back to the city that had given so much to me.” Westmoreland agrees. “I wouldn’t be on the school board and I wouldn’t have become a teacher if it weren’t for Teach for America. That organization and the experience I had at Carver [a public high school] and on the board really instilled in me how important this concept of equity is,” he says. “My takeaway is that if Teach for America’s idea was how to put passionate folks in the classroom, LEE’s was what we do with them if they choose to leave it. Either way, it’s how to make sure that whatever they do, they’re always thinking of equity.”

These Teach for America Graduates Left the Classroom. But They Didn’t Forget About the Kids

Posted on by robbie

Every year since 1990, in what is practically a fall tradition, idealistic college grads arrive in public school classrooms in New York City, Los Angeles and all of Teach for America’s 52 regions in between. Straight from seven to 10 weeks of summer training, these TFA corps members commit to work for two years in unfamiliar schools that desperately need strong educators. After that, they’re free to leave the classroom. While the majority of TFA’s 42,000 alumni do continue teaching, the program’s turnover rate has led some to question its success.
“My argument was: let’s take the resources you’re investing in a corps member — tens of thousands of dollars per year — and put that into professional development for training current staff on campuses,” says Robert Schwartz, a TFA alumnus and advisor at the nonprofit New Teacher Center. “You’ll see teachers that are going to stick around longer and are really invested in the community.” Schwartz’s alternative plan is voiced commonly in education circles, and it’s mild in comparison to some pointed criticism of TFA. Sarah Matsui, author of a book that gives TFA a negative assessment, argues to Jacobin that the program is mere resume fodder for Ivy League students on the way to jobs at well-heeled consulting firms like Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. In response, TFA’s spokesperson Takirra Winfield points out to NationSwell that 84 percent of alumni continue to work in fields related to education or serving low-income communities.
But perhaps the debate over retention rates misses the point entirely. TFA’s mission statement, after all, doesn’t reference teaching at all. Instead, the organization aims to enlist, develop and mobilize “our nation’s most promising future leaders” in pursuit of a larger movement for educational equity. NationSwell explored how five TFA alums are accomplishing that outside the classroom.

In April, Sekou Biddle welcomes guests to the UNCF Education Summit, held in Atlanta.

Sekou Biddle, United Negro College Fund

A member of the United Negro College Fund’s leadership team, Biddle has always prized service, but as an aspiring management consultant at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, he figured giving back was something he’d do as a brief detour on the road to business school. Thinking that TFA sounded like an impactful way to give younger students the same educational opportunities he’d been afforded, Biddle joined the corps in 1993 and stayed in the classroom for a decade.
After, Biddle “wanted to share the things [he] had learned” and transitioned to policymaking as a school board representative and city council appointee in his hometown, Washington, D.C. He says his TFA experience informed his votes and taught him empathy for teachers, who throw themselves into a “180-day marathon grind,” and parents, whom schools too often failed. He keeps in mind one phone call on which a dad told him, “This is the first time someone has ever called to say something good about my child,” Biddle recalls. “I was struck by the power of a relatively simple thing. Just a call certainly had an impact on this parent’s perception on what the relationship with a school and teacher could be.”
In his current role as UNCF’s vice president of advocacy, Biddle engages local leaders and school administrators with the same personal touch. Explaining the achievement gap, he lobbies for more academic and financial support for minority students, ultimately to increase the number of black college graduates. “I thought I was going to do [TFA] for a few years and feel I had done some good in the world, put enough in the bank and be ready to move on,” Biddle says. “I committed to doing two years, and 22 years later, I’m still at it.”

Mike Feinberg of the KIPP Foundation.

Mike Feinberg, KIPP Schools

While working in the classroom, Mike Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP, America’s largest network of charter schools (with 183 and counting), with fellow TFA alum Dave Levin, became “acutely aware that our students were not receiving an education that would set them up for success in college and life,” so late one night he and Levin laid out plans for a new educational model that refused to let children’s “demographics define their destiny.”
As a teacher, Feinberg saw firsthand student accomplishments that were a result of the belief that kids could and would learn. “If we believe there are solutions to problems, we can create a learning environment where we set high expectations for our students and they not only meet them, but surpass them.” Feinberg readily admits that growing up in poverty creates enormous challenges, but he reaffirms the principle that, if given a chance, education can level the playing field for those students. TFA “shaped my understanding of what education and social justice could accomplish,” he says.

Mayor Jonathan Rothschild (orange shirt) and Andrew Greenhill leading a Bike-to-Work Week ride.

Andrew Greenhill, City of Tucson

Now chief of staff for the mayor of Tucson, Ariz., Greenhill entered a career in government after TFA, inspired to take a broader look at how the delivery of public services can be improved. During his time as a teacher, in addition to the regular curriculum, he seemed to be teaching an impromptu course on how to make it in America. “Students looked to me for all kinds of assistance and information. Most were new arrivals in the country,” he recalls of his middle school class. Greenhill took families to free healthcare clinics, to the library to check out books, to Western Union to send money home and even to the supermarket to show them how to ring up groceries. That non-traditional teaching translated well to local government, where Greenhill has “played a role in helping to understand and support and in some cases even streamline the different programs provided by the city and local nonprofits.”
“I think the more people know about how the education system works, the better informed they will be in helping community-wide efforts, whether they’re inside the classroom, an administrator or a citizen participating in the debates that we have at the local and national level about education,” he says. As a city official, Greenhill doesn’t believe he’s given up on his old students; in fact, he’s still trying to take care of their day-to-day needs, so that classroom teachers can stick to teaching.

Olympian Tim Morehouse works with students.

Tim Morehouse, Olympic fencer

A silver medal-winning fencer at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Tim Morehouse has a stellar pedigree to match the perceived elitism of his sport. He attended a rigorous prep school in the Bronx (where tuition today costs $40,660) and Brandeis University, a top-ranked liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until Morehouse signed up for TFA in 2000 that he saw how different his path could have been. Assigned to teach seventh grade at a public school six blocks from where he grew up in upper Manhattan, Morehouse realized how privileged his education had been, compared to the schooling that most children receive.
Because of his TFA experience, Morehouse returned to public schools in Washington Heights and Harlem before the 2012 London Olympic Games to coach fencing, with the hope of giving students an extracurricular to bolster their college applications and a chance at athletic scholarships. His foundation, Fencing in the Schools, last year served 15,000 students in 11 states. Like TFA, Morehouse recruited other Olympic fencers to teach kids the sport and mentor the youngsters in life skills. He says he hopes the foundation will help kids not only get to college, but also succeed there. And who knows? “Maybe they can even go to the Olympics,” he says.

Jessica Stewart welcomes guests to a debate on education issues between Oakland, Calif., mayoral candidates.

Jessica Stewart, Great Oakland Public Schools

A onetime political junkie and head of the College Democrats at Auburn University in Alabama, Stewart moved to Oakland, Calif., to teach sixth-grade math in 2005 and fell head over heels for the Bay Area City. Politics took a backseat to her work in the classroom, but Stewart’s activist streak resurfaced in 2008 when the city’s superintendent threatened to close 17 schools and a budget crisis post-financial crash generated a multi-million dollar budget shortfall.
Great Oakland Public Schools, where Stewart is senior managing director, was founded in the wake of those disasters and went on to become a major voice in city politics. In 2012, the coalition endorsed three people running for seats on the school board. “To support our candidates, we had 300 volunteers do 60,000 phone calls and 12,000 door knocks,” Stewart recalls. “On any given night in October 2012, walking into the office, you’d see people sitting on the floor (because we only had five staff members at the time) talking to voters. It would be a student next to a principal next to a parent next to a teacher. It was so inspiring to see people coming together to fight for equality.” All three candidates won soundly, but Stewart isn’t resting on her laurels, explaining, “There is still so much work to be done in our education system.”
Editors’ note: This story originally stated that Teach for America was founded in 1989. We apologize for the error.

Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That

Posted on by robbie

It’s a sad fact that fewer than one in 10 American kids raised in impoverished neighborhoods will graduate from college. But in two major U.S. cities, one organization successfully has flipped that statistic on its head.
OneGoal, an educational nonprofit geared to low-performing students in low-income Chicago and Houston neighborhoods, has demonstrated its worth: 83 percent of OneGoal fellows have earned or are actively pursuing a college degree.
That’s why the organization’s leadership is ready to take OneGoal’s proven model to New York City, America’s largest school district and the place where education reforms either make it big or fall apart. Once there, they’ll be graded alongside Harlem Children’s Zone, InBloom (which, it should be noted, got an F), Amplify, Knewton and other innovators changing the way classrooms work.
The city has an acute need for OneGoal: 12 years after entering public high school, only one in five New Yorkers will earn a college degree. Plus, a quarter of the city’s high school grads drop out of college during their freshman year.
“We have been in Chicago for the last eight years, and we’ve really proved what’s possible with a set of students. Once we started to see real results, we almost had a moral imperative to work to serve more students,” explains Nikki Thompson, executive director of OneGoal’s New York operation. After the expansion to Houston in 2013, “it became clear that we could replicate it in other cities. And in the world of social justice, there’s no school system like New York.”
OneGoal’s key belief is that students succeed by empowering themselves. The program’s teacher-led model focuses on training educators to boost the lowest achievers by conducting an intervention with the ones who are usually overlooked: OneGoal’s fellows begin with an average GPA of 2.7 (B-) and a 729 SAT score. Half are black, 42 percent are Latino and 90 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. In contrast, QuestBridge, an organization with a similar mission, tries to pluck out what Thompson calls “the talented tenth,” students most likely to succeed at a selective college.
Pioneering a form of character development, OneGoal’s unique three-year curriculum spans from junior year of high school to freshman year of college and is centered on shattering stereotype disadvantaged students’ carry about themselves so they come to see college as “realistic” and “attainable.” Project directors hone a student’s ability to ace standardized tests, admissions essays and financial aid applications, instilling them with leadership skills of “professionalism, ambition, integrity, resilience and resourcefulness” early — all of which puts them on a path bound for college, and from there, gives them the tools to succeed.
In classes of 25 to 30 kids, “we do actual role-play with the students, not just reading the material,” Thompson says. Analyzing real-world situations, they discuss what actions to take when you and your roommate get into a fight, for instance, or how to manage when there isn’t a teacher saying, “Make sure to bring your homework.” “Once they’re in college,” Thompson says, “it becomes almost muscle memory.”
In New York City, OneGoal is looking to replicate success stories like that of Kewauna Lerma, who was profiled in Paul Tough’s “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.” Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Lerma was barely pulling in a C- average and already had a rap sheet when she became a OneGoal fellow. “I didn’t really have a family. I was scattered all over the place, no father, with my grandma sometimes,” she says in the book. “It was all messed up. Jacked up.” Through the program, she went from being the girl who scored in the bottom percentile on a practice ACT test to having straight A’s on her report card senior year of high school.
Freshman year at Western Illinois University brought Lerma new difficulties, like a tough biology class that seemed far over her head. She didn’t know half the big words her professor used, but she sat in the front row. After class, she always asked him to definitions the words that stumped her. Money was always tight, and Lerma says she once didn’t eat for two days when she had no cash. But she persisted, as OneGoal taught her to do. Her biology grade? A+.
Like Lerma, OneGoal will face many challenges when it makes the move to the Big Apple, particularly in winning support from key political players and making sure they don’t overstep any boundaries with the powerful teachers union. “New York is just so different when you talk about size and scale and competition. There are 100 high schools in Chicago. In New York, there are over 500 high schools. It’s just a different ballgame,” Thomson says. “The challenge is differentiating ourselves.” Additionally, the New York City pilot will need to navigate through a few changes OneGoal is making to its Chicago model, including a fee structure to help fund the nonprofit’s work and a data systems program to help track academic and non-cognitive progress.
But Thompson, a Teach for America alum and chief of staff while Joel Klein served as NYC’s school chancellor, has a network of connections she can draw on. Her efforts so far are showing results. After a roundtable last year, Acorn Community High School in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights signed on to host one of the seven to 10 pilot classes that are anticipated for fall. And the Arbor Brothers, a philanthropic organization that funds social entrepreneurs in the Tri-State area, gave a $60,000 grant to the expansion efforts.
After New York, the group plans to take on five more school districts by 2017. For all their rapid success, OneGoal’s staff has never lost sight of their mission. Whether for seven students or 7,000, the group’s “one goal” remains the same: College graduation. Period.
LISTEN: To This American Life episode, which features former OneGoal Fellow Kewauna Lerma.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that there are 40 or 50 high schools in Chicago. The correct number is 100.
(Homepage photograph: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
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Children Can’t Learn When There Are Problems At Home. That’s Where Community Schools Come In

Posted on by robbie

Walking down a hallway of Chicago’s South Loop Elementary School, Melissa Mitchell heard a first grader unleash a string of profanities inside a classroom.
“I hear this little voice screaming every curse word I’ve ever heard,” Mitchell says. She looked inside and saw “teeny, teeny” Brianne, standing on top of a desk.
“I’m not going to do this — every word you can think of — spelling test!” the little girl screamed, Mitchell recalls.
At most schools, Brianne would’ve ended up in the principal’s office for discipline. But South Loop is a community school that includes a variety of social services for kids and parents — from medical care and counseling to food pantries and adult GED classes. These facilities, which are gaining in popularity, are based on the idea that no matter how great a teacher is or how many high-tech gadgets a classroom has, kids can’t learn if they’re struggling with challenges at home (think: unemployed parents, a lack of food, the threat of eviction).
Instead of being sent to the principal, Brianne ended up in Mitchell’s office. At the time, Mitchell served as the school’s resource coordinator and was in charge of determining what social supports the South Loop community needs and finding ways to meet them.
Mitchell learned that Brianne wasn’t simply being a brat. The little girl’s parents were going through an acrimonious separation, creating an unstable environment at home. At six years of age, Brianne didn’t understand everything that was happening; nevertheless, it was upsetting her and spilling over into the school day.
After identifying the source of the behavior problem, Mitchell worked with Brianne’s family to address some of the trouble at home. She helped the mother find stable housing and childcare subsidies and connected Brianne and her family to a counselor.
While the community school model that helped Brianne and her family has been around for years — maybe over a century — it’s recently been gathering steam as more and more educators and elected officials see the value of a holistic approach to education reform.
Advocates currently estimate that as many as 5,000 community schools exist in the U.S., with more on the way.
Last year, Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder expanded a program placing social workers in schools — a step toward community schools. In June, Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio announced plans to spend $52 million to open 40 community schools in New York City. And in July, Maryland U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer and Illinois U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock introduced a bipartisan bill that would establish a grant program to create more community schools nationwide.
A strategy, not a program
Each of the community schools created by these efforts will look different. That’s because their underlying philosophy holds that each one should grow and develop in response to the needs of the community it’s in, not according to some pre-ordained plan.
“It’s a strategy, not a program,” says Jane Quinn, Director of the National Center for Community Schools, part of the Children’s Aid Society.
Community schools each do a comprehensive needs assessment to determine what supports are most needed and often end up with school-based health clinics to address student’s physical, mental and dental health needs, including vision-correction to make sure kids that can see the lessons on the chalkboard.
There’s a lot of evidence that wealthy kids succeed partly because they can take advantage of “out of school enrichment,” Quinn says. Community schools can level the playing field with an extended school day and more academic and extra-curricular offerings outside of the traditional school day.
At Earle STEM Academy in Chicago’s impoverished Englewood neighborhood, program supervisor Quintella Rodgers says that after-school activities include a job club that teaches financial literacy, a power group that focuses on social and emotional health and individual academic help, plus photography, karate, Pilates, volleyball, basketball and DJing classes.
For the whole family
In community schools, “the primary allegiance is to the kids in the schools,” said Sarah Zeller-Berkman, who works for Youth Development Institute, which runs Beacon Community Schools in New York City. “But they still need and want to serve the broader community.” One way they accomplish this is by offering programs for parents and finding ways to integrate them into the school.
Community schools offer extra programming by creating partnerships with existing organizations, like colleges offering classes or not-for-profits running mentoring programs. The social services offered in community schools don’t usually duplicate ongoing efforts, but seek to bring them together under one roof.
At Salomé Ureña de Henríquez, a Children’s Aid Society community school in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, for example, the additional services offered include a variety of classes and programs for parents.
On a recent tour of the building, Director Migdalia Cortes-Torres pointed out photographs depicting some recent grads, resplendent in caps and gowns, on a bulletin board outside the school’s health clinic. But they weren’t pictures of students who had finished high school or junior high; they were pictures of students’ parents who had received their GEDs through a program at the school.
In addition to the GED program, Cortes-Torres said the school, which serves a largely Dominican population, offers classes for parents in nutrition and cooking, child development, English language and computer skills. They can learn art history, go on poetry retreats and even travel internationally with other parents.
Lidia Aguasanta, the school’s parent coordinator, says that she’s been helping parents to not only get their high-school diplomas, but to go for college degrees as well. “I do trips with them” to local universities because, she says, “they’re scared to leave the community” and are intimated by the complicated process of enrolling in college since many don’t speak English.
In community schools, support for parents help students achieve success, too. Aguasanta recalls a struggling mom that she convinced to enroll at Boricua College in New York City. The woman is now thriving and the simple fact that she’s now pursuing higher ed makes it more likely that her daughter, a 7th grader at the school, will too, Aguasanta says.
Studies indicate success
Beyond anecdotes like this one, research studies are pointing to hard evidence that community schools can reduce absenteeism and dropout levels and improve grades and test scores.
Not everybody is sold on community schools, however. Jason Bedrick, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, tells the Wall Street Journal that the model needs more study before people invest in it on a large scale. And the New York Times reported last year that while the creation of community schools in Cincinnati has led to some improvements, many of the schools “are still in dire academic straits.”
Nevertheless, staunch opposition to the model is rare. “Community schools have no natural enemies,” says Quinn, quoting Martin Blank, head of the Coalition for Community Schools. Instructors, including those that belong to the American Federation of Teachers, like community schools because they can focus on teaching, not on whether their students are hungry or in trouble at home.
There are, however, “rival hypotheses” about where school resources should go, Quinn says. Some people believe, for instance, that the key to improving education is high-quality teaching and that anything else is just a distraction.
Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, has dedicated decades to putting new young teachers in schools, based partly on the idea that better teaching is central to better education. But, she also voices support for the principals of community schools.
“All the successful schools … are taking a community approach,” she said at a recent NationSwell event. It’s important that schools are responsive to people on the ground, not to theorists with big fix-all theories. “You need to empower people at the local level.”
At South Loop Elementary, where locals can address education holistically, Melissa Mitchell’s response to Brianne’s profanity-laced tantrum worked.
“It wasn’t a perfect rainbows and butterflies outcome,” says Mitchell, who’s now the head of Illinois’ Federation For Community Schools. But Brianne did settle down and “the father and mother came to a reasonable custody agreement.”
Leaving Brianne with a little less on her mind and giving her the ability to focus on what she was really in school for: Learning.
 
 

Why Are America’s Innovations in Education Spreading Worldwide But Not Here?

Posted on by robbie

At a recent NationSwell Council event, Wendy Kopp spoke about the irony of having American innovations in education being put to use all over the world, but failing to find momentum to spread them far and wide here in the U.S.

Top Educators on the Important Role of Families in Schools

Posted on by robbie

Veronica Palmer has seen firsthand the importance of family engagement in a child’s education. She grew up in a household that emphasized getting good grades and attending university, something she says was passed down from her grandmother, a former gang member who escaped poverty through education. “She just woke up one day and said ‘there has to be a better way'” says Palmer, explaining her grandmother’s decision that eventually lead to a master’s degree in social work from the University of Denver. “That decision to pursue an education completely transformed my family for decades to come.”
Palmer believes that family investment is vital for kids’ educational success. She encouraged that involvement in her classroom when she served as a Teach For America Corps member back in 2006 and continues to do so today as she serves as the co-founder of RISE Colorado, an organization that educates and empowers minority families to take greater ownership in their kids’ learning.
 
 

NationSwell Asks: What Inspires You To Serve?

Posted on by robbie

National leaders are currently gathering on one of the most sacred pieces of land in the United States in an effort to awaken a new citizenship in the country.
Retired General Stanley McChrystal kicked off The Gettysburg Summit in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by framing his vision for the days ahead. Standing in front of the headquarters of General George Meade, who commanded the Union Army in the Civil War, McChrystal called Gettysburg National Military Park hallowed ground not because a battle was fought there, but “because people came here on both sides committed to something that was not for their personal profit, not for their personal glory, but for something that they felt warranted real sacrifice.”
“Our vision is bold and simple: A nation where a year of full-time national service is a cultural expectation, common opportunity, and a civic rite of passage for every young American,” he said, explaining that the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute is working to meet our national challenges by harnessing the energy and enthusiasm of the country’s citizens.
“This is the unfinished work of our time,” he continued, referencing the conference theme “our unfinished work” and the commitment of those gathered beneath the tent where he stood to fulfill “the promise of what it means to be an American” by creating one million service year positions annually within the next 10 years.
This “call to service” was a powerful start to a summit focused on what plan of action is needed to bring about this new citizenship — from building infrastructure and supporting new service opportunities, to turning national service into a cultural expectation and maintaining this commitment over the long term.
NationSwell spoke with General McChrystal and others working to make this vision a reality about what inspires them to serve. See what they had to say, then take action by learning how you can help to leave a legacy of active citizenship through national service.
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The Coolest Jobs Aren’t Just For Millennials Anymore

Posted on by robbie

The digital landscape is changing right before our eyes. The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-65 year age bracket, which has grown 79% since 2012. Seasoned pros are going digital and that means the coolest jobs, fellowships, and internships are not just for twentysomethings or millennials. Teach For America has recently made a concerted effort to tap into the Internet’s fastest growing group by stepping up recruitment efforts away from college campuses. The non-profit recently partnered with Encore.org, a site dedicated to people over 50 starting a second or third career, to help reach the coveted age group. “For every teacher getting ready to move on, there seems to be someone at the conclusion of another line of work eager to get into a classroom and mentor the next generation of students,” says Marci Alboher, author and Vice President of Encore.org, “If you thought Teach for America was just for high achieving twentysomethings, think again.”