When she was only 7-years-old, Jia Min “Carmen” Yang and her parents emigrated from China to the United States. At the time, Yang didn’t even speak English. Now, as an 18-year-old living in Chicago’s South Side, Yang is a young political activist, persuading other immigrants in her community to get involved in the political process and vote if they are able. She has witnessed firsthand the heartbreak caused by an immigration policy that can tear families apart — and she doesn’t want to see it happen again.
Last December, Yang visited Congress through Wish for the Holidays, an event organized by We Belong Together, a campaign that seeks to mobilize women in support of immigration reform. During this program, Yang heard the stories of many young immigrants whose families were torn apart by immigration laws. “Listening to them tell their personal stories about their families being separated breaks my heart,” Yang said in an interview with the National Journal. “I connect to them and feel their pain, and it only made me more passionate about this issue. It angers me to know this is happening, and I really want to help change it.”
MORE: Paperwork Stood Between Immigrants and Their Dream, So This Group Stepped In
Yang’s neighborhood is composed of a large immigrant population. At Thomas Kelly Public High School in Brighton Park (where she attends school), 96 percent of the 3,200 students come from low-income families. The student body is 87 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Asian, 3 percent white and 2 percent black. “Practically all my friends are immigrants,” she says. Because of this, the issue of immigration reform is very close to her heart. Yang tries to do her part by getting involved in the community. She’s dedicated more than 800 hours to improving the neighborhood. She also volunteers with the Chinese American Service League. But her biggest service is with the Mikva Challenge, an organization that gets youth involved with politics.
For several years now, Yang has been heavily involved in the Get Out the Vote campaign, where she worked to improve voter turnout in her community. She’s been a team captain, helping train new volunteers, working the phone bank and canvasing the neighborhood. “Working on these projects, I have learned that people have to be determined and cooperate together as one in order to make changes,” she says. “It may take a long time to see the results and get what we deserve, however, through handwork and commitment, those things will come.”
Yang hopes the same is true with immigration reform. She hopes that by making her voice heard that other families won’t be afraid to speak out to campaign for change. “There are a lot of people — 11 million in this country — who are undocumented, and 5.5 million of them are kids,” Yang says. “I’ll keep working until I’m reassured that no families are going to be separated, no parents are going to be sent back — and we can go to school without fear that someone will be gone when we get home.”
ALSO: This Nonprofit Is Teaching Immigrants Much More Than Language
Tag: Chicago
How Chicago’s Community Colleges Are Training the Next Generation of Business Leaders
Undoubtedly, when highly-skilled graduates enter the work force, everyone benefits. And that’s the aim of The City Colleges of Chicago, which are charging themselves with the task of providing companies with, quite simply, the perfect candidates.
To change the face of its curriculum and to better prepare its students to meet employers’ needs, Chicago’s community college system is undergoing a makeover. Gabriel Barrington, an uncertified welder studying at Richard J. Daley College on Chicago’s South Side, is just one of the 115,000 students that hopes to benefit from the system’s “reinvention.”
Barrington enrolled as soon as he read about about the program’s promise to not only teach him complex machining, but also to smooth a transfer to Illinois Institute of Technology, a four-year institution, for a bachelor’s degree. “As a welder, you see the stuff that comes off the machines and think, ‘Wow, I’d rather be a part of that.’” he told Governing. “There’s just such a wealth of materials and possibility.” Barrington, along with all of City Colleges of Chicago’s students, may be part of a wave of Chicago’s most talented job force yet.
Barrington has former mayor Richard M. Daley to thank for the welding education — a subject his college didn’t even teach four years ago. Daley initiated the top-to-bottom curriculum overhaul in 2010, based on the award-winning Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, which graduates nearly half of its full-time students in three years.
Daley tapped investment bank founder Martin Cabrera and City Colleges graduate-cum-ComEd executive Cheryl Hyman to create a blueprint. Their plan reads almost like a job market hack: The City Colleges have formal partnerships with more than 100 corporations, which give input into course sequences and selection. Advisers use this information to help students spin their education forward. They present 10 focus areas including health care and information technology at the start of school, each of which includes a set of certifications and job types. Then, academics advance somewhat on autopilot — students are automatically enrolled in courses of increasing difficulty with each semester. This kind of “stackable credential” system, which City Colleges is unveiling this semester, systematically qualifies a student for a higher pay grade with each course and directs them to a distinct job.
With the groundwork in place and much of it in practice, The City Colleges of Chicago has lofty expectations. It expects to see degrees go up 37 percent a year by 2018, and wants 55 percent of its students to transfer to four-year schools. If achieved, the city-school relationship will become more symbiotic; the job market has a bigger pool of qualified candidates from which to pick, and previously untrained or uneducated Chicagoans will learn a marketable and valuable skill.
The program isn’t without its detractors, though. A student like Barrington will seemingly hit a goldmine when he graduates, receiving a welding degree linked to accrediting organizations so that it will acquire real industrial value, but Complete College America (a non-profit) said in 2010 that it had yet to find evidence that students “actually are stacking short-term certificates and building them into longer-term certificates or degree.” Other critics, including faculty members, are concerned that the program will result in too many qualified applicants for a limited number of higher-level jobs.
Only time will tell if they’re right. In the meantime, the reinvention’s biggest proponents make a good point: That career-based education with a focus on achievement is never a bad thing. The proof is in the short-term results. Since the overhaul began in 2010, the graduation rate has nearly doubled at the seven campuses. “It’s very hard to change entrenched public systems of any kind, to put a stake in the ground and say you’re really committed to it,” says Dr. Larry Goodman, Rush’s CEO told Governing. “But they’ve made it work.”
Sorry Kids: The Rise of Virtual Learning Might Mean the End of Snow Days
For any kid who has experienced the pure joy of waking up on a school day only to discover that it’s been canceled due to inclement weather, we hope you enjoy those memories. Because traditional snow days full of sleeping in, sledding, movie marathons and hot chocolate are over. This winter has been one of the snowiest and coldest on record for many parts of the country, forcing schools to shut their doors for days at a time. In the past, teachers would try to make up for lost time by squeezing multiple lesson plans into one day. But now teachers can connect with their students online by uploading digital lessons, holding classroom discussions and even allowing students to turn in homework assignments via email. In other words, much to students’ dismay, snow days are no excuse for a break anymore.
MORE: This Controversial Teaching Method Is Transforming Classrooms
In Chicago, which was slammed by the polar vortex earlier this year, “tele-schooling” is gaining popularity among teachers who say that missed class time can be a big problem in an era of high-stakes testing. As some of the more affluent school districts issue students laptops or tablets, weather is no longer a barrier for learning. “I told my kids, ‘If we’re not here, we can’t fall behind,'” Steve Kurfess, a math teacher at Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, told the Chicago Tribune. “Especially with math, every day is taken into account.” Kurfess has embraced online learning to bridge the gap between school attendance and required coursework. He’s uploaded all of his lessons — about 600 or 700 videos — so students can access them at any time. Save for tests and quizzes, his entire class is paperless. After the school was closed for two days earlier this month, Kurfess said that 98 percent of his students completed the required coursework. “I didn’t miss a day,” he said.
MORE: The Next Frontier in Online Education Isn’t What You’d Expect
As the idea of virtual classrooms continues to expand, Ohio has put a law on the books that allows schools to make up as many as three snow days a year online. This way, schools don’t have to extend the school year into summer to make up for lost time. While the plan was piloted a few years back in the Mississinawa Valley School District, a small, rural community near the Indiana border, it wasn’t until last month that teachers used their “e-days” as they call them. So far, the feedback has been positive, with more than 150 districts in the state having submitted “Blizzard Bags” plans, according to the Ohio Department of Education.
Of course, there are still some technological issues to mitigate before virtual learning becomes the new normal. Most importantly, officials are looking for ways to provide equal access to computers, tablets and Internet for students in less affluent school districts. Some are even partnering with organizations to provide free Internet access in areas where students live. Wifi-enabled school buses might soon become a reality, as well. But as access to technology and Internet grows more and more abundant, snow days as we know (and love) them may become a relic of days past.
ALSO: The Minerva Project: On Online College to Rival the Ivy League
These Workers Are There When We Need Them. Now We’ve Got to Keep Them Safe
Day laborers—those workmen for hire you might see gathered on a street corner—are often the targets of abuse, sometimes asked to work under unsafe conditions for low pay. Many become victims of wage theft, and because many of them are immigrants or have only a limited grasp of English, they have little recourse. According to a report by Baruch College, many day laborers employed to repair the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy became sick from contact with hazardous materials. But as Claudia Torrens reports for the Associated Press, several organizations across the country are working to make conditions fairer and safer for day laborers.
The Latin Union of Chicago hosts a worker’s center to help day laborers negotiate work contracts and educate them about safety. “In street corners the agreement is only verbal. We are more organized in the center,” Jose Luis Gallardo of the Latin Union told Torres. “We want to prevent wage theft. We want both the contractor and the day laborer to sign the work agreement.” Similar organizations are found in San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
New York City has three such centers, including the new Workers Justice Project in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. This nonprofit has helped 500 registered workers raise their average annual wage from $20,000 to $46,800. Representatives from this and other centers visit day laborers, educate them, and hand out gloves and masks to keep them safe.
These centers don’t only help the workers—they also help the employer find the right people for the job. Allan Suarez, whose company All Renovation works with the Workers Justice Project to find temporary help, told Torrens, “We have full faith that if we tell them we need a specific person they will bring us someone with that experience. It alleviates us from going out and trying to find someone when we have these good connections.”
MORE: Think You Can’t Afford to Give? These Inspirational Immigrants Will Change Your Mind
Meet the ‘Million-Dollar Scholar’ Who Wants to Help Other Disadvantaged Kids Pay for College
A year after Chicago native Derrius Quarles’ father was murdered, social services took the five-year-old and his brother from his mother’s custody. He spent the next nine years in foster care and began a dangerous life of “crime and fast money” until one simple act of kindness turned everything around. After arriving late to a high school biology class one day, Quarles was confronted by his teacher, who took him aside and told him, “You have so much potential, and yet you choose to waste it.”
That display of encouragement was enough to inspire Quarles to dedicate himself to his studies and earn more than $1 million in academic scholarships and financial aid. He graduated from Morehouse College, determined to help other young people finance their education. So he wrote a book on the subject, “MillionDollarScholar: Winning the Scholarship Race,” and founded the business Million Dollar Scholar, offering downloads and an app that can help high school students discover scholarships they qualify for, free writing evaluation, resume templates, and online practice interviews.
In a video on his website, Quarles said, “I was going to use what happened in the past as a catalyst to really be able to change myself and use that as some type of inspiration to say that is not what I want for my family when I get older, that is not what I want for myself. I can be different.”
MORE: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
Chicago Schools Just Made This Tech-Savvy Move. The Rest of the Country Is Next
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are making a serious investment in the future of its students by adding computer science to its high school core curriculum, and offering it starting in kindergarten — the first urban school district to do so. CPS high schools will begin including a foundational computer science class within three years, upgrading the subject from elective to core; within five years, kindergarten through eighth-graders will be able to take computer courses as well. The goal is to increase kids’ computer literacy and get them coding at a young age, so they can compete for high-paying jobs. Anyone who’s been paying attention to education trends lately knows that globally American kids have fallen behind in the S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. “The new bilingual is knowing computer code writing, and what we’re setting up today, while it’s a good foundation, the fact is that in the U.K. and in China, computer science and computer coding is now fundamental to elementary school education, and we’re playing catch-up to that effort,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
MORE: The High-Tech Ride That’s Getting Kids Excited About Coding
How to Turn a Vending Machine into a Farmers’ Market
Ready for a healthy meal? Hit the vending machine. Luke Saunders put up the first Farmer’s Fridge at Garvey Food Court in the Chicago Loop, and the smart idea is already expanding. It’s a high-tech, low-cost spin on vending machines: The automated, refrigerated kiosk dispenses fresh, healthy salads for as little as $6.99. In addition to gourmet salads, Farmer’s Fridges serve healthy breakfasts and snacks, with local, nutrient-dense ingredients. The team makes everything fresh each weekday morning, seals the items in recyclable plastic jars, and delivers them daily by 10 a.m., keeping internal costs low enough to offer low prices to rushed workers and hurried shoppers. They cut no corners on health, sourcing and preparing each meal carefully, and partnering with New York-based SPE Certified for independent validation of their products’ nutritional values. Customers are flocking to their smart balances of whole grains, veggies and lean protein, and if any items are left at the end of the day, Farmer’s Fridge donates the food to local charities. Look out, Chicagoans, a new kiosk might be in your neighborhood soon.
Chicago Wants to Teach African-American History Year Round. Here’s Why.
The state of Illinois requires that schools teach African-American history, but in most schools, that really only happens during Black History Month or around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. So Chicago Public Schools introduced a new curriculum guide to help teachers discuss African and African American subjects during core classes throughout the year. The interdisciplinary curriculum goes beyond slavery and the civil rights movement to engage students in lessons on the contributions Africans and African Americans have made at the local and national levels throughout history. The Chicago school district has also begun designing a similar curriculum for Latino and Latin American studies. Officials hope the new programs will not only deepen students’ knowledge and appreciation for their cultures, but will help build stronger student communities within Chicago schools.
Why It’s Time to Forget About “Food Deserts”
Innovation is often about changing the way we think about a problem, sometimes even changing the terminology so that we can focus on a better solution. That’s what John Bare wants to do: Instead of diagnosing and pointing out the nation’s food deserts, he wants to empower a cure for the problem with a name. In creating the Food Oasis Movement, Bare shifts the attention to meeting the demand for fresh fruits and vegetables, rather than assigning blame for the lack of healthy produce. He’s identifying innovators and their creative ideas for engaging families and supporting their desire to learn about healthy cooking and choose nutritious foods. With new programs emerging in cities including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta, the oasis is certainly growing.
Walking 921 Miles and Placing 921 Ribbons to Stop Bullying and Celebrate a Life
Ronnie Kroell and Elliot Dal Pra London don’t just take a stand against bullying, they take a walk—a 921-mile walk from Chicago to New York City. They’ve brought the purple anti-bullying ribbon through Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and other cities on their way to the George Washington Bridge, where Tyler Clementi committed suicide in 2010. Clementi’s death inspired the Friend Movement, which has worked to use art and media to stop bullying. This particular effort has drawn funds for their cause and certainly grabbed attention as they placed 921 ribbons along the path, one at each mile. The emotional side really emerged with Clementi’s mother Jane and brother James joining the walk for its final mile over the bridge; they were met by dozens of supporters with purple ribbons and flowers.