Thursday morning, 10 a.m. Seventh-grade boys, all young men of color, are hunched over worksheets on subtracting polynomials. (You remember: (x^3 + 4x^2 + 3x – 8) – (5x^3 – 7x^2 – 3x + 2).) Their teacher, a college student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, asks if anyone needs extra time. Hands go up and mentors — older high schoolers in white shirts — help those who are stuck.
Across the hall, a student from Northwestern University in Illinois is instructing sixth-grade boys on personal essays. A chatty buzz fills in the room as mentors read over first drafts and point out errors to small groups of eager learners.
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The multiple “generations” all working in one classroom — a college student delivering a lesson to middle schoolers, coached by a full-time teacher and assisted by high-school-age aides — makes for an unique sight. But it’s even more unusual at I.S. 392, a highly successful middle school that sticks out from the rest of Brownsville, an area that’s long been known as one of Brooklyn’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Stranger still, it’s summer. These kids have voluntarily shown up for school while their buddies watch TV or play outside in the windless, 84-degree heat.
The classes are organized through Practice Makes Perfect, a New York City-based enrichment program now in its fifth year. The nonprofit’s goal: To close the achievement gap that creeps in when school’s not in session, says its founder and CEO Karim Abouelnaga. Known as the “summer slide,” researchers found lower-income students forget up to two months of schooling while their higher-income peers participate in summer reading, camps and other enrichment — exacerbating a divide that’s already wide during the regular school year. In Brownsville, Jamaica and the South Bronx, the program is helping 325 students, between third and seventh grade, get a head start on the next school year.
“As structured, summer school does not work,” Abouelnaga recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times. “The choice should not be between sending children to a broken summer school program or not. There is a third way: It means redesigning summer school, and making it challenging and engaging for children and teachers. Students need summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes that keep them from falling behind. They need summer programs where they feel welcome and where they want to learn. They need to be inspired to achieve.”
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The son of Egyptian immigrants, Abouelnaga grew up in Long Island City, Queens. He went to an underperforming high school, where just half of his classmates graduated with a diploma and less than one-fifth were college-ready. He applied to college almost on a whim, sending applications to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (because he’d liked the movie “Good Will Hunting”) and Baruch College, located across the bridge in Manhattan and where he eventually enrolled. Abouelnaga received a 1770 on his SAT, a score that put him in the top percentile for his class in Queens. But when arrived at Baruch, he found that same number placed him in the 70th percentile of his college classmates.
He eventually transferred to Cornell, where with five friends, he decided to start a nonprofit addressing the achievement gap. Nearly two-thirds of the difference between wealthy students and their less well-off counterparts can be tied to summer learning loss. Few nonprofits were working to solve the problem, so Abouelnaga decided to focus his efforts on those crucial months when school’s not in session. He founded the offices for his 12-person team in the neighborhood where he once grew up.
“So many educational initiatives are sympathetic, instead of empathetic,” he says. “I was that kid who sat here, even though I was blessed with an elite education. I bring a unique perspective.”
On a recent site visit to I.S. 392, Abouelnaga is dressed in a navy blue pinstripe suit, purple tie and matching purple pocket square — business attire that he says sets “an expectation of excellence” for his students. At 23 years old, he projects high ambitions for himself and the growing organization. He wants to completely reform a disciplinary or remedial punishment into an exciting opportunity. He wants kids asking parents to sign them up for summer classes.
“Our brand is relationship-driven. There’s so much emphasis on technology and testing, that we can forget how much relationships matter in education,” he says. “Our mentors are what keeps kids coming back here.”
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The walls of Practice Makes Perfect classrooms are decorated with posters. In bright marker, there’s the expected motivational phrases and standard ground rules (“Respect your classmates,” “If you want to be heard, RAISE YOUR HANDS”) along with some tougher expectations (“Goals: Must have 80% mastery in ELA” — English Language Arts — “and Math”). Beside that are poems written by the young boys. A representative quatrain sounds like this: “I remember the night when I ran from the bullet. / All I heard was clik-clak POW, it was more than five bullets. / I was running non-stop, hoping I didn’t get hit. / I was sprinting so fast that I almost tripped.” Another: “People think that black men won’t / accomplish anything but / that’s not true. / White men beat slaves till they were / black and blue.”
Rather than avoiding current events, Abouelnaga and his team have made them an essential part of the curriculum. Students read recent articles deemed newsworthy, like about the merits of body cameras for police officers. It’s all part of boosting Common Core test scores, which Practice Makes Perfect tries to measure rigorously. Every Thursday, teachers input students’ scores into a system to track progress and identify those that may be in need of more targeted intervention with the help of the mentors.
Through Practice Makes Perfect’s rigorous and engaging curriculum, students so far have made tangible academic gains. Last year, the middle school math scores improved by three percent, on average, and reading by seven percent; the high school mentors, who study the SAT before and after the youngsters show up, improved their scores on the college admission test by an average of 170 points.
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But the program is about more than scores; empowerment is one of its core values. Abouelnaga’s summer school creates a permanently visible institution for the surrounding community, instead of empty hallways and classrooms — in Abouelnaga’s words, “unused real estate.” The children spend at least one day on a community service project, which demonstrates they can “make a difference in their neighborhood.” Some kids in Brownsville picked up trash around their school, one group in Bushwick volunteered at a community center and another class in Jamaica did group activities with younger kids.
Practice Makes Perfect is also creating ties between generations, in the hopes that middle-school students eventually come back as mentors in high school and advise everyone else once they’re off to college. It’s part of the reason why Abouelnaga has his college students do home visits before they start teaching — to break and confirm stereotypes and to create ties with the community.
What’s next for the organization? “There’s 1.1 million schoolchildren in New York City,” Abouelnaga says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface.”
Tag: achievement gap
When a Public High School Experiments With the Charter Model, Here’s What Happens
At the Lincoln High School in Tacoma, Wash., some students go to school from 7:20 a.m. to 5 p.m., including Saturdays and throughout summer. If this intense amount of schooling sounds familiar, that’s because there are charter schools across the country that are already doing this with their students in order to prepare them for college. So what’s notable about this schedule?
It’s going on at a public high school.
As Al Jazeera America reports, six years ago, Lincoln High School principal Pat Erwin decided to apply charter school methods to his own public school, launching the Lincoln Center High School for 350 of the school’s 1,500 students.
Besides the long and rigorous school hours, students in the program must take honors and AP level courses in every subject — from history to math. Students must also participate in clubs or sports.
“It adds up to 540 hours of extra academic support, enrichment and teacher contact,” Erwin says.
MORE: This 6-Year High School Challenges Everything We Thought We Knew About American Education
The extended hours certainly made a difference. According to Al Jazeera America, 95 percent of the senior class graduated from charter portion of the school, compared to only 61 percent of the larger Lincoln student population. Additionally, 82 percent of the first Lincoln Center senior class were accepted into two or four-year colleges, receiving almost $2 million in scholarships, the school says.
Based upon its success, the principal will be applying a modified extended-day approach to the entire student body. Every student will now be required to take honors classes and attend school from 7:30 a.m. to 3:05 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and Fridays at the former regular time of 2:05 p.m. The extra hour is meant for homework help and academic advising.
Al Jazeera America notes, however, that the expanded Lincoln Center model is expensive and controversial and has drawn opposition from staff members.
However, many feel that this approach is what’s best for the students. Although the students and teachers will be in school for longer hours, this experiment could help close the achievement gap for Lincoln’s mostly low-income student population (about 82 percent qualifying for free or reduced-priced meals).
“Our goal in all of this is to see your child graduate from high school and be prepared for college, work, or service to their country,” says Erwin in a statement. “We have seen rising levels of success over the years and by providing more support, more time, greater access to the best teachers in the state, we will see these desired results.”
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DON’T MISS: Are Community Schools the Key to Fixing Education?
It May Only Take One Hour to Seriously Cut the College Dropout Rate
No matter how smart or capable they are, many first-generation college students come with an immediate disadvantage before they step foot on campus. Because they’re the first in their family to attend college, these students might feel culturally different, alienated, estranged from their peers whose parents attended college. It’s no wonder, then, that many of these students are more likely to drop out than their peers. However, a new report from Reuters suggests that this achievement gap can be closed with a simple, one-hour intervention session that allows these students to simply talk about their social class backgrounds.
According to the report, researchers found that the first-generation students who attended this “diversity education” panel at an unnamed private college went on to earn higher grades and were more likely to use campus resources such as tutoring. At the panel, these first-generation students discussed how their social class backgrounds made college more difficult for them. “I didn’t want people to see me struggling with the novelty of college or thinking that anything was wrong,” a panelist shared. “Putting up such a front when I was overwhelmed by a new city, new difficult classes, making new friends was beyond hard.”
MORE: Can Software Close the SAT Achievement Gap?
The students also learned there were resources at the school to help them succeed. After the panel, the attendees reported “less stress and anxiety, better adjustment to college life, more social engagement, and increased recognition of multiple perspectives,” Reuters reports. Encouragingly, the study also found that the achievement gap between the first-generation students who attended this session and their peers whose parents had college educations shrank by 63 percent. And that may be reason enough for colleges across the country to consider this path to keep all of our students in school.
The Bay Area’s New Boom Will Change the Face of Silicon Valley
Like many families across America, the Youngs had holiday traditions. On Christmas Eve, they ate gumbo at Grandma’s house. On Christmas Day, they opened gifts near the tree. And on the morning after Christmas, they relaxed. That is, until 2001, when Jason Young, then a college sophomore, learned that he had just spent his last holiday in his family’s Inglewood, Calif., home. On that Dec. 26, the Youngs’ house, already in foreclosure, was taken from them for good. “It’s a surreal experience to have someone knock on your door and ask you to leave immediately,” he says. “We’d always struggled with money, but I had no idea we were going to be evicted.”
The eviction may have ruined a favorite holiday for Young, but it taught him an important lesson about fiscal responsibility—one that has informed his career since. After his family lost their home, Young learned that his single mother had accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt in an attempt to save her home; she eventually filed for bankruptcy. “It became clear to me that the math didn’t add up,” he says. “I’d always been conscientious of money, but the experience made me want to make even better financial decisions. I never wanted to be in that situation again.”
And he didn’t want other low-income kids to find themselves in that situation either, which was one of the reasons he founded Mindblown Labs in 2011. The Oakland, Calif.-based company creates mobile, educational games geared to improving financial literacy among underserved youth.
The games were an instant success. But as Young taught students how to manage their money, he also recognized a need to help them learn how to make that money in the first place. This prompted him to co-found The Hidden Genius Project, a two-year training program designed to teach young black men science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills through lectures and project-based workshops. Continue reading “The Bay Area’s New Boom Will Change the Face of Silicon Valley”