Nick Ehrmann founded Blue Engine in 2009 to help better prepare New York City’s low-income high school students for success in college.
According to a study by the Urban Institute, only 10 percent of low-income students get a college diploma, compared with about half of teens from higher-income families. To tackle this achievement gap, Blue Engine is focusing on the academic rigor of high schools in low-income neighborhoods. They deploy recent college grads to assist teachers in these schools (so far, they are partnering with five schools in New York City) and to provide small-group tutoring in the classroom.
According to Ehrmann, who began his career as a grade-school teacher in inner-city Washington, D.C., students attending Blue Engine partner schools are seeing huge performance gains. “We’ve seen college-ready rates anywhere from double to triple year after year,” says Ehrmann. “We’re finding failure rates on high-stakes exams plummet 30 percent or more.”
Since the original publication of this story, Nick Ehrmann, founder of Blue Engine, has become a NationSwell Council member.
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Tag: big bets
Big Bets: How to Bridge the Gap Between Practitioners and Policy Makers
In 1987, Alan Khazei co-founded City Year, an education-focused national service nonprofit that served as the model for AmeriCorps, the federal community service program that was created seven years later by President Bill Clinton. But in 2003 Khazei found himself fighting for the organization he helped inspire. AmeriCorps funding was cut by 80 percent that year, so Khazei and around 700 AmeriCorps members descended on Washington, D.C., and gave around-the-clock testimony to get the funding back. The campaign helped restore all financing, and it helped AmeriCorps get a $100 million increase the following year. The experience also spawned Khazei’s next big project: Be the Change, a coalition-building nonprofit that is dedicated to promoting national service, working on social problems and empowering veterans. “It’s very ambitious,” Khazei says, “but if you get people together that are working to solve problems, they have the answers. They’re not ideological, they just want to see what works and how to make it happen.”
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Watch: Our Q&A With FoodCorps, The Nutrition Movement Changing How American Kids Eat
Over the last few weeks NationSwell has been introducing you to a number of groundbreaking innovators who are making big bets to tackle even bigger national problems. The topics have ranged from education and national service to our recent installment featuring FoodCorps, an organization dedicated to teaching kids across 15 states how to grow and eat healthy food.
On June 24, NationSwell hosted its first ever live Google+ hangout to discuss these initiatives. NationSwell’s Special Projects Editor Cat Cheney, FoodCorps founder Curt Ellis, and FoodCorps service member Meghan McDermott elaborated on how specifically the organization is changing their communities for the better.
As Curt Ellis puts it, “There are 100,000 public schools in America. As we’ve learned in the first few years, changing a lunch line from serving french fries to fresh greens takes a great deal of work.” Not only that, but changing a child’s attitude toward food is not exactly a simple task either. To try to teach her students to have an open mind to foods they instinctively dismiss without trying, food service member Meghan McDermott’s motto in her classroom is ‘Don’t yuck my yum.’ “We try to teach kids to be respectful of other people’s eating habits and their likes and dislikes. We teach them that everyone’s tastebuds are different. They might like something now that they don’t like later, or they might not like something now that they might like prepared a different way.”
Watch the video above to learn more about the inner workings of FoodCorps and how you can get involved. To continue the conversation, share your thoughts with the hashtag #NSBigBets.
Big Bets: How Teaching Entrepreneurship Can Keep Kids in School
The Bay Area is known as a thriving startup community. But Suzanne McKechnie Klahr was struck by the inequality she saw there while working as a pro-bono lawyer in East Palo Alto. She wanted to make it easier for those with disadvantaged backgrounds to both get a good education and to find support for their small businesses. So in 1999 she founded BUILD, a nonprofit which gives entrepreneurial support and funding to disconnected high-schoolers with small business ideas.
BUILD now serves more than 930 students in three cities across the country, providing small business classes and start-up funding to the kids most likely to drop out of high school. “We are looking for students who were truant and had low test scores in middle school,” McKechnie Klahr says. “We want to engage them as soon as they get into 9th grade because disengagement in 9th grade is highly predictive of dropping out of high school.” Such intervention has already been successful. According to the folks at BUILD, 99 percent of seniors in the program have graduated from high school and 95 percent have been accepted to college.
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Big Bets: How a 12-Month Bootcamp Transforms Low-Income Youths Into Whiz Kids
Gerald Chertavian first met David Heredia, a 1o-year-old boy from the Dominican Republic, nearly 30 years ago; the relationship would prove to have lasting impact. Through a Big Brother program, Chertavian spent most of his Saturdays with the boy and his family in Rutgers Houses, one of New York City’s most dangerous housing projects at the time. “Talking with David and his four older brothers — seeing where they were starting from and what was in their grasp, listening to their dreams and hopes…that absolutely changed my life,” he says. Chertavian had a successful career on Wall Street and built a technology firm, which he and his partners sold for $83 million. But he never forgot Heredia and other low-income youths he met that weren’t part of the mainstream economy. So in 2000 he founded Year Up, a job training program for disadvantaged young adults that guides them into careers at large corporations.
In this first episode of our Big Bets series, Chertavian discusses the challenges he faces as he aspires to take Year Up from an organization that helps thousands of kids escape poverty to one that helps millions.
Since the original publication of this story, Gerald Chertavian, founder of Year Up, has become a NationSwell Council member.
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Big Bets: 8 Game-Changers Shake Things Up to Solve Our Country’s Challenges
We know about the challenges.
We know that too many young people are struggling to find employment and a ladder up; that too many children fail to receive the sort of education they need to flourish in the 21st century world; that more young people should be given the opportunity to partake in some form of national service — and that too few actually do.
At NationSwell, we are deeply concerned about these problems, and we are always grateful to find a smart report or analysis of the challenges. Developing a true and deep understanding of a problem is the first step in solving it.
But it’s what comes next that truly excites us — and defines our mission.
It’s the innovators, the pioneers, the change-makers who not only understand these national challenges and all of their complexity, but who also dare to solve them. At NationSwell, we are ever-focused on finding them, telling their powerful stories and driving action in support of their efforts.
Who are these leaders, what are their visions for change, what motivates them — and what, exactly, are the big bets they are making to advance our country?
NationSwell sat down with eight innovators at the Gathering of Leaders, an annual event held this past year in Napa, Calif., hosted by leading venture philanthropy organization New Profit, for a series of extraordinary conversations in which we posed some of those very questions.
The answers we got were as varied as they were illuminating — and, to us, heartening. If the odds are anything like Vegas, some of these risk-takers will fail and some will succeed. But, in thinking creatively and acting boldly, what these men and women are doing to tackle our biggest national challenges demands our consideration — and participation.
We invite you to watch and be part of the conversation as we present the NationSwell series: “Big Bets”.
All the best,
Greg Behrman
Editor-in-Chief
NationSwell
MORE:Big Bets: How to Bridge the Gap Between Practitioners and Policy Makers