Elisabeth Stock founded PowerMyLearning, a national nonprofit that leverages technology to transform teaching and learning in low-income communities, in 1999 — a time when the cloud was still in the sky, the search engine Google was only a year old and most still logged on via a dialup connection. Even then, Stock saw software’s potential to boost students’ learning, but she didn’t want to replace classroom teachers with lessons on a screen; instead, she wanted the technology to strengthen the learning relationships among students, teachers and families. Today, Stock points to growth in math proficiency (and great gains amongst children with learning disabilities) at PowerMyLearning partner schools across the country compared to similar schools.
NationSwell sat down with Stock at the organization’s offices in the Garment District of Midtown Manhattan and discussed her outlook on leadership, learning and racing a Chevy Impala with her dad.
What’s the best advice you’ve received on leadership?
There’s this expression of the mirror and the window. What really strong leaders do is this: when things go right, they look out the window to see who they can give credit to. And when things don’t go well, they look in the mirror, and say, “What did I do wrong?” Really lousy leaders do the reverse. When things go badly, they look through the window and ask, “Who can I blame?” And when things go really great, they say, “Oh, look at me! I’m so great!”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I’m very excited about how the technology is becoming much more user-friendly for teachers to do data-driven instruction and support student-driven learning. I also think we’re at a particularly exciting moment in time because the prevalence of cell phones and smartphones in the inner city has gotten really high, which provides the ability to combine texting with other things we’re doing to help parents stay in the game with their kids’ education.
What’s on your nightstand?
It’s depressing. You really want to hear it? I’m reading “When Breath Becomes Air,” which is a book about a young doctor [Paul Kalanithi] who gets diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and decides he’s going to write a book before he dies. And then the other one I always have is “Thinking Fast and Slow,” [by winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daniel Kahneman].
What’s your biggest need right now?
PowerMyLearning is in the process of developing our national board. Finding people who want to get involved in our work and will bring their networks, hearts, heads and wallets — all those pieces that will help us get better — is probably our number one need.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first started this job?
The key thing is to surround yourself with good people and to surround yourself with people who really believe in what you’re doing. You may meet somebody who has the best skill set for what you’re looking for, but if that person is not super excited about what you’re doing, it’s not worth it to bring them on board. They don’t have to work the same hours as you, but they have to be as committed and passionate as you.
What inspires you?
The thing that inspires me is this really strong sense of unfairness that exists, that if you are born in a certain zip code, you have different outcomes than someone else. It just seems, to me, so wrong, and I’m very driven to change that.
What’s the accomplishment that you’re most proud of?
I think it’s two things. We’re all about developing the capacity of people, so I’m very proud of helping teachers become better teachers and helping parents know how they can be more helpful for their kids at home, and then, seeing my staff do the same thing. We have people on staff who have been here for a long time and seeing them grow and develop is just so rewarding. If you can do that, you can do anything. All these other things we’re trying to make happen (like kids having better academic outcomes and socio-emotional learning), will happen if capacity is developed.
What’s something that most people don’t know about you?
Growing up, my father was a psychiatrist, so you’d assume that he’d be this kind of quiet, docile, glasses-wearing kind of guy. As my mom described it, she married Clark Kent but got Superman. The other side of my dad was that he was really into car racing. He could not wait until I turned 16, so I could start racing with him. He started me off taking the Chevy Impala out on weekends to race around cones in a parking lot, and eventually I graduated to a real track going 100 mile per hour on the straightaways. I think that my interests in how things work physically (I studied biomechanical engineering as an undergrad), a lot of it came from my dad.
What does your perfect day look like?
Every day is a perfect day. I don’t complain a lot. I mean a perfect day is when everyone is healthy and putting in their all, including my kids and my husband. You go home and everyone’s happy, and at work, you’re strengthening your own relationships. I’m not going to say it’s a day where you hear about some big grant or we get state test results back and our kids have done well, because those are just easy days. Those aren’t necessarily the best days. The best days are when you work hard, right?
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.
Tag: education
The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
Tech Visionaries Look to Disrupt Traditional Education, The Move to Make Climate Change a Nonpartisan Issue and More
Learn Different, The New Yorker
Brooklyn’s AltSchool is just one of seven “educational ecosystems” (there’s six in the Bay Area as well) that uses technology to create a personalized learning experience for each individual student. The brainchild of Max Ventilla, an entrepreneur and former Google employee, AltSchool aims to turn education on its head: teaching skills that are applicable to the 21st century workplace instead of the memorization of facts — creating an educational model grounded in Silicon Valley values. But can be replicated in existing public schools nationwide?
Can a GOP Donor Get Conservatives to Fight Climate Change?, CityLab
What can get politicians to put partisan bickering aside? North Carolina businessman Jay Faison is bringing congressional candidates from both sides of the aisle together to support clean energy initiatives, arguing that these policies (which are notoriously used to drive a wedge between the left and the right) increase jobs and energy independence, while also reducing carbon pollution.
Government Goes Agile, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Bringing the federal government into the digital age doesn’t have to increase the deficit — or be as disastrous as the rollout of HealthCare.gov. Implementing the commonly-used tech practice of agile development, groups like the United States Digital Services and 18F are giving citizens frustration-free, web-based opportunities to interact with their government for a fraction of the cost.
How One Local Government Intelligently Invests in Local Business, A City That’s Keeping Housing Affordable for All and More
Berkeley Votes to Boost Co-op Economy in the Face of Gentrification, YES! Magazine
The co-op already thrives in Northern California. But in an effort to keep locals in the area (which has an extremely high cost of living), the city council in Berkeley, Calif., is throwing even more support behind the model. Similar to initiatives already passed in New York City; Madison, Wisc.; Cleveland; and Richmond, Calif.; Berkeley’s move provides tax incentives, support for worker-owners and financial aid to small businesses — making it easier for co-ops to become powerful job generators.
The Miracle of Minneapolis, The Atlantic
The Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., metro area has a higher median household income than New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago. Despite the Twin Cities’ wealth, affordable housing remains in reach for most residents. Unusual plans that encourage rich neighborhoods to share tax revenue with middle class and low-income residents — a move referred to as “fiscal equalization” — means that the American Dream is alive and thriving in Minnesota.
Giving Students What They Really Need, Bright
No matter how good a school is, a child’s learning suffers when he or she is subjected to chronic stress. But schools often add to or ignore kids’ anxiety and tension, instead of teaching tips and strategies to diffuse it. Turnaround for Children* is teaching social-emotional skills, such as stress management and self-regulation, in the classroom, enabling all kids (namely low-income ones and those that suffer from abuse or neglect) to be high achievers in an academic setting.
*Editors’ note: Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children, is a NationSwell Council member.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Gazing out from the columned manor of Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., visitors can admire green gardens, footbridges over burbling canals and moss-cloaked cypress trees. When the azaleas bloom each spring, one can almost forget that these 500 acres (originally, it was 2,000 acres) of Lowcountry Field were once a working plantation where dozens of slaves toiled growing rice. Staring the brightly colored flora, it’s difficult to comprehend the majestic home hasn’t always been a place of beauty and was once a site of exploitation, whippings and sexual violence.
Out of sight from the main residence, stand four extant wood-sided cabins, painted white. Here, slaves slept and ate and prayed and sang, raising families in single rooms. Amid the lovely Southern grounds, these dwellings stand as a reminder of the captive men and women who lived and died on the land they were forced to cultivate.
Across the country, these shacks and cabins are under threat. Unlike the mansions where slaveowners displayed their wealth, these dwellings are far from magnificent. Housing fieldhands, many were built from the cheapest material available. Most resemble tool sheds, which, some might say, is effectively what they were. Among the catalog of historic homes, battlegrounds and memorials worthy of recognition, these hovels rarely make the list.
That’s why Joseph McGill, a Charleston native, began sleeping overnight in these crude shelters in 2010. Now nearing 80 overnight stays in 16 states, McGill says what started as a kind of publicity stunt to draw attention to the structures has grown into a movement. After the election of our nation’s first black president, the conversation around daily violence in urban communities and the retirement of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, McGill hopes the preservation of these makeshift homes will play a part in how America comes to terms with its racist past. Without the buildings, he argues, what’s there to remind us of the institution of slavery?
“One of the things that we need to understand is that 12 of our former presidents were slaveowners, eight of whom owned slaves while they were in office. Even those who contributed to those major documents that we live by today — you know, the Constitution’s ‘We, the people.’ It should have read, ‘We, the people,’ comma, ‘here in this room,’ because otherwise that document meant nothing to you,” McGill tells NationSwell. “Even after emancipation, there were obstacles put in place to deny those recently freed people their pursuit of happiness. Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow laws and white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. We’re still being denied opportunities to pursue that happiness. We’re dealing with the residuals of that today.”
McGill always loved history. In his prior day job at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he safeguarded America’s iconic buildings. And on weekends, he dressed up as a solider for Civil War reenactments. (As a black man and descendant of slaves, he “fought” for the Union.) But he began to notice that African-Americans’ place in history, especially antebellum history, was often glossed over. It’s undisputed in textbooks that landowners held slaves and a bloody conflict erupted over their freedoms. But outside of, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, there’s little public knowledge about the everyday lives and traditions of the enslaved. Across the South, McGill felt like he had a much easier time spotting statues of Johnny Reb (a personification of Southern states) than seeing plaques about early African-American figures.
McGill slept in his first cabin — on the oak-lined Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, S.C. — in 1999, as a way to get footage for a documentary about war reenactors. He didn’t think of the meager buildings again until 2010, when he was asked to consult on the restoration of Magnolia Plantation’s slave cabins. After his second overnight stay, he realized these places had to be preserved. “When the buildings aren’t there, it’s easier to deny the people who lived in those buildings,” he says. “The fact that they exist is an opportunity to let the world know that these people not only existed, but contributed highly to the fruits of this nation.”
McGill started contacting historic sites and preservation groups across the Palmetto State and soon, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard (including several in the North, where, we often forget, slavery persisted through the late 18th century), asking to visit their slave residences. Because of their enthusiastic responses, he created an official organization — the Slave Dwelling Project — that works to protect the homes that remain standing more than a century and a half after being erected.
Soon, people started reaching out to him (both individual families researching their lineage and established historical societies hoping to broaden their offerings), wanting to join his overnight visits. “I’m seldom sleeping in these places alone anymore.”
Putting together a group isn’t always easy. McGill has to fend off ghost hunters and treasure seekers. And some private hosts worry that descendants of slaves will knock on their door asking for what McGill calls the “r-word”: reparations. And interestingly, McGill says blacks can be hesitant to participate. “There are a lot of us, being African American, that don’t even want to set foot on a plantation,” he says, explaining that they don’t want to go to a place where their family was held as chattel. “I express to them that they are part of the problem, not the solution. As long as we continue to be afraid to even want to come to these places and have the courage to tell that story, [others] are going to tell it the way they want,” referencing tour guides who say masters were kind and treated their slaves well, calling that narrative, “junk history.” Once that message is delivered and it becomes clear that these stays are about African Americans and their history — revisiting history, not revising it — most agree to participate.
Once others started accompanying him, the project’s aims subtly shifted from an external campaign for recognition to an internal dialogue about race in America. Bringing together descendants of slaves and slaveowners in the very place where one group once shackled the other inevitably prompted soul-searching and candid discussion.
One night in Stagville, a historic North Carolina plantation, for example, young black men spoke by glinting lantern-light of the anger, fear and frustration they live with. In Mississippi, one female college student asked McGill if he had ever met a descendant of slaveowners who is proud of his family’s history. On South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island, a young black man, whose family had been enslaved there, stared at a wall built of tabby concrete, made from broken oyster shells, sand and ash. “I’m allergic to oysters,” he said. “I wonder if my ancestors were.” And in the coachman’s quarters on a Hillsborough, N.C., plantation, a 100-year-old matriarch told stories about her ancestors, who had been born into bondage on the property.
McGill’s stays are not just for African Americans; whites who want to revisit their history as a way of making amends often join him. Prinny Anderson, a leadership coach descended from Virginia slaveowners, has joined McGill on 22 stays to date — all within driving distance of her Durham, N.C., home. When descendants of slaves are sharing their family history, she’s largely silent, preferring to listen and absorb. But when the group is largely white, she says she’s an “instigator,” asking critical questions.
Anderson’s most moving trip was a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop estate in Charlottesville, Va., where she has family connections. She fell asleep in the basement (where the slave workplaces were constructed, hidden from sight), thinking about her distant cousins, white and black, and what it meant to revisit their shared home.
“That really felt like getting the blessing of my ancestors. You came home and slept where your great auntie slept,” Anderson says. “Nobody who lived in the big house during that day ever came down to the [slave] quarters and slept on the floor. In that sense, it was like crossing the bridge.” Spending the night there, it was like Anderson had atoned for something.
Part of the Slave Dwelling Project is to recover slaves’ individual narratives, finding personal stories amidst the black mass in chains. “I think the general perception is that enslaved people were brought here for the ability to do grunt work or heavy lifting: the physical labor. But there’s a lot more to their skills and abilities,” McGill says. From the engineering feat of “taming those cedar swamps” to growing rice and constructing building frames, ironwork, bricks and tools, slaves were vital to the plantation’s production, arguably much more so than any master lounging in the big house.
While the conversation at these places steeped in history may be the most candid talks you’ll hear these days on the subject of race, McGill knows it’s not the only forum for the issue. If anything, he hopes the talks will overflow into guests’ neighborhoods and university dorms. And there, discussion will be led by people who are better informed of their place in the long march for racial equality.
Above all, McGill wants his guests to remember that black history does not begin at a Montgomery bus stop in 1955 and end at a Memphis hotel room in 1968. It spans lifetimes, back to the auction block and long past when Obama leaves office. The recent conflict at the University of Missouri, which ended in the president’s removal, did not begin when these students arrived on campus or even when the school was ordered to integrate by a court order in 1950. Anyone who has listened to Billie Holiday croon “Strange Fruit” knows Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance featuring dancers in Black Panther uniforms was not the first to push the envelope. These victories, whether from the Civil Rights movement or Black Lives Matter, all date back to one common source: slavery, a period we cannot forget, McGill insists.
“Historically, these are some times we have not yet overcome. There’s still things that we have not yet dealt with, rooted in the institution of slavery,” McGill says. “If we should let these buildings go away, then we are going to allow this nation to continually perpetuate that false narrative. We shouldn’t allow that to stand. We shouldn’t let that narrative carry the day. The record needs to be corrected.”
Through McGill’s work, the authentic story is now being told.
Correction: This article originally stated that Magnolia Plantation was 390 acres in size and that slaves worked in cotton fields and later on as freed sharecroppers. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.
MORE: Fighting Prejudice in America: One Woman’s Battle to Change the Rhetoric Surrounding Race
A House That’s Actually Affordable to Those in Poverty, Stories of Innovation from Coast to Coast and More
This House Costs Just $20,000 — But It’s Nicer Than Yours, Fast Co.Exist
Is it possible to build a house that’s cost-effective to someone living below the poverty line? The answer is yes, according to students at Auburn University’s School of Architecture, who worked on the design and construction dilemma for more than 10 years. Last month, they revealed two tiny houses in a community outside of Atlanta that cost just $14,000 each.
How America Is Putting Itself Back Together Again, The Atlantic
As writer James Fallows says, “As a whole, the country may seem to be going to hell.” But as he’s discovered while visiting various towns across America in his single-engine prop plane, there’s actually a groundswell of renewal and innovation already happening — from impressive economic growth in an impoverished area of Mississippi known as the Golden Triangle, to an investment in the Michigan public education system and a creative movement in more than 10 cities where artistic ventures are being celebrated.
Here’s What Happened When This School Made SATs Optional on Applications, Mic
Along with prom and getting your driver’s license, taking the SAT or ACT is a teenage rite of passage. But that’s no longer the case for some college-bound students. In a bold move, George Washington University made standardized test results optional for undergraduate applicants. The positive outcome: A more diverse candidate pool, including a sharp uptick in applications from African-American, Latino and first-generation college students.
MORE: Meet the Courageous Man Who Has Housed 1,393 Chronically Homeless Individuals in Utah
Meet the Self-Starting Millennial Who’s Mentoring the Next Generation of American Leaders
Daquan Oliver has entrepreneurialism in his blood. When he was a cute third-grader living in New Rochelle, N.Y., his mother Alison found out that he’d been wandering in a nearby housing project selling copies of “The Money Saver,” a free newspaper stuffed with coupons, door to door. “He’s trying to make his own money,” said one woman who had handed Oliver a five-dollar bill, “and I applaud him for that.”
In middle school, Oliver used his enterprising spirit to talk his way out of assignments. “With him, everything’s negotiable,” one teacher vented to Alison. But as a single mother who’d gotten pregnant at age 17 and was now working low-wage jobs around the clock, Alison wasn’t going to let her son get away with skipping homework. “You have two strikes against you. One, you’re African American. Two, you’re an African-American male,” Alison warned him. On top of his schoolwork, she assigned monthly book reports and made him copy words from the dictionary and write his own definitions in a composition notebook.
By senior year in high school, Oliver ran his own business. He bought Pop-Tarts, Capri Suns, candy and chips in bulk at Target, and three “employees” sold them to classmates, netting $1,000 in profit each month. Four years later, in 2014, as he was set to graduate from Babson College, a Massachusetts business school well known for incubating startups, Oliver founded the nonprofit WeThrive, to bring together middle and high schoolers and college students for near-peer mentoring, a model where both parties can connect emotionally over present challenges, not just distant objectives. Now 24, Oliver works in Los Angeles’s Silicon Beach and hopes WeThrive participants internalize the same lessons in entrepreneurship that helped him break the expectations of his upbringing.
For kids 13 years old and up, WeThrive’s mentoring program consists of at least eight weekly, 90-minute sessions on entrepreneurship. So far this semester, more than 100 have signed up to work with college students from Columbia, Cornell, Syracuse and the University of California, Los Angeles. Oliver thinks children learn best when doing, so the course is focused on launching an actual business. By the second class, groups “choose a problem that has a product or service-based solution,” and they have until the end of the semester to turn it into a working business model, Oliver says. In the past, one cohort founded UNI, an anti-bullying nonprofit, and sold water bottles that changed colors based on temperature and were emblazoned with the slogan “Be the Change.” Another started an apparel company called Difference that prints T-shirts with multicolored bar codes as an expression of individuality.
A typical WeThrive class might focus on finding a target market. Avoiding business jargon, the mentors ask: What what kind of customer would like to buy their product? A silent leader (who is discretely chosen by the mentor at the beginning of each class) manages the discussion and keeps everyone focused without calling attention to herself. Ninety minutes later, the kids fill out learning logs, writing one piece of knowledge they gained that day, how it applies to their life and how they will implement it through the next week.
Oliver wants students to learn goal setting, public speaking and personal finance, and lessons on these topics are reinforced week after week — like his mother’s vocabulary teachings — until they become habit. It doesn’t matter whether a business model finds financial success. What’s important is that those involved learn how to lead a team, assemble a team and can speak publicly about their business so that others believe in the concept and the vision.“This isn’t about creating a business; it’s about honing skills required to enter a lifestyle, so to speak.”
Oliver also wants to see them develop an emphasis on doing social good. So he seeks out participants who would have founded WeThrive if he hadn’t done it already, the students who are passionate about giving back but need a platform to get engaged.
Although Oliver starter WeThrive just two years ago, the idea for the nonprofit started percolating when he was a 14-year-old, a time that can be described as the worst of his life. His mother lost her hourly job, and while she looked for new work, she sent Oliver to live with his grandparents. The family soon didn’t have cash for deodorant, so he started dodging sports practice at a summer enrichment program. Several times, he and his mother skipped meals.
“He started getting that hopeless feeling. He was worried about the next move, how things were going to change, if they were going to change at all,” Alison recalls. “The situation, it kind of placed him in a position where he had to be a grown-up for a little bit. And when I say grown up, I mean as far as his thoughts, as far as processing things.”
Late one night, Oliver couldn’t fall asleep. He felt sick, sweating in his sheets. Normally a happy-go-lucky kid, his mind kept replaying how many hours his mother worked and how little her hard labor paid off. But in a sudden epiphany, he realized it wasn’t his mother’s fault. A structural barrier had “always been holding us here.” He promised himself that he would overcome it and return home to assist those like him.
That moment was where Oliver first came up with his definition of entrepreneurship, a broader approach — a lifestyle, really — beyond simple business advice. “Turning obstacles into opportunities,” he phrases it, adapting Niccolò Machiavelli’s definition from “The Prince.” “Every time I see a challenge, I think entrepreneurially about it and think my way through it.”
As WeThrive expands across the country, Oliver is looking for a way to beef up the curriculum’s incorporation of the latest technology, such as offering intros to coding or hosting off-site discussion via Slack. And he’s introducing more behavioral metrics to see if the lessons are changing behavior. Are kids reading more for pleasure, for instance, and do they feel they have a positive influence on their peers? Oliver admits it will be nearly impossible to gauge whether WeThrive has an impact on grades or graduation rates, since there’s a myriad of factors that affect academic success, but he hopes to determine whether entrepreneurship is becoming part of his students’ daily lives.
One can wonder if, in creating WeThrive, Oliver simply put together the education he wished he had on those tough days at his grandparent’s house in New Rochelle. But Oliver disputes that. “Maybe if I had this program, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that enabled me to live out my dreams.”
Oliver has seen more ups and downs than most who are twice his age. He knows what failure looks like; it surrounded him in his neighborhood and his high school classes. But at WeThrive, he’s getting — and sharing — a glimpse of success.
MORE: This 23-Year-Old Has Figured Out a Way to Make Kids Want to Attend Summer School
Emphasizing Learning over Memorization, This Group’s Students Achieve Life-Altering Success
Eric Eisner is that teacher you feared, the instructor who set high expectations and believed his students would push themselves to meet them. He praises success, but doesn’t shy away from criticism. Maddening as the workload could be, he was the teacher whose class you appreciated most, since the challenge gave you a better sense of your own capabilities. Tough love, some might call it. “I’m rough, I’m abrasive and blunt,” Eisner says of his teaching style. “The thing in the jungle that bites.”
Eisner has no formal background in education. He came to it, by chance, as a second career. After graduating from New York’s Columbia Law School in 1973, he crossed coasts and entered the glitzy entertainment business in Los Angeles, working his way to the top spot as president of the David Geffen Company. Big paychecks bought a home in the city’s western hills, paid for his kids’ private school tuitions and allowed him to retire in his late forties.
Looking for a way to occupy his time outside of improving his golf game, Eisner was persuaded to get involved in a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a low-income, predominantly Hispanic area. (It took some coaxing: “I had time, but I lacked the inclination to give it,” he confesses.) Eisner recalls not knowing what he could do for the families the nonprofit helped, but he wanted to meet the children to find out what made them tick. Partially, this was self-serving — he wanted to better understand his own children, whom he was losing in “the battle to pop culture” — but he also wanted to know why kids weren’t learning in school.
The roundabout answer to those questions led to the founding of Young Eisner Scholars (YES) in 1998, a group that took the “smart kids” out of regular classes for biweekly lessons on debate and language, helped them transfer to private, high-performing high schools and mentored them through college graduation and their first jobs.
YES has mobilized $50 million in financial aid and scholarships to fund its scholars’ tuition and underwrites college tours, application fees, summer programs and medical bills beyond a family’s budget. All that capital seems to have paid off. The scholars come from neighborhoods where two-thirds of students drop out of high school, but YES’s participants have been accepted to top-tier universities and won prestigious awards like the Fulbright, QuestBridge and Gates Millennium scholarships.
Eisner admits that YES was never founded with a long-term vision in mind. Instead, the group pivoted as they learned more, reacting with the critical thinking Eisner wants to see his kids develop. The program has found success in urban Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, and this school year, it’s testing its worth in four schools in western North Carolina. (The expansion into Appalachia drastically increased the number of white children participating in YES.)
Justin Hicks, YES’s Appalachia program coordinator, says he spends much of his day in the car, driving 45 minutes to each school on one-lane switchbacked roads. A graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Hicks pitched the idea for a rural version of YES during his first phone interview with Eisner. In this role for less than a year (previously, he was an intern with the organization), Hicks sees cultural differences in what these children hope to be — youth saying they want to be carpenters and farmers when they grow up, instead of lawyers or doctors — but he doesn’t see a difference in their ambition, the way they learn or their intellect. For now, the program is waiting to see if children from rural backgrounds will express interest in attending first-rate schools far from home, like their first-generation immigrant, urban counterparts.
An essential part of YES’s strategy and the way Hicks runs his classrooms is with an emphasis on language. Typically in schools, children are judged by how they perform on tests. If they score well, they’re considered to be smarter. But once Eisner started prying into how much his students actually comprehend, he realized that they were often memorizing answers that would later appear on exams, rather than learning concepts.
In hour-long sessions during the school day, YES reverses the “I, We, You” model (the teacher demonstrates, the students practice with her aid, the kids do homework alone) into something closer to the Socratic method. There’s no instruction without student participation. In math lessons, this means that there are no equations, only word problems like “If two trains, 56 miles apart, leave stations at the same time…,” although the instructors often deliberately leave out the question. When learning vocabulary, flash cards are practically banned, because Eisner says, they often define words using other terms the kids barely understand. Instead, YES sessions involve personal discussion and debate over contemporary issues.
While its students are thriving, Eisner’s answer might not be a scalable solution to our nation’s failing public schools. For one, YES requires huge sums of cash, which bars it from assisting more than a few dozen students in any given city. And troubling for some is the fact that YES plucks only the best students — the talented tenth, to use W.E.B. DuBois’s words — out of the public school system, leaving the most troubled students behind.
Eisner, for his part, would agree with DuBois about elevating the most exceptional students from low-income backgrounds is a way to bring along the rest of the class. He updates DuBois’s 1903 essay with a modern spin. “We are an advertising agency for educational aspiration. The fact that a kid goes to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Columbia, there’s a little perfume that goes with them when they come home from school. It might reach a friend or cousin,” he says. “We succeed when these kids become glamorously successful.”
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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!”
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.
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?
Minorities Only Make Up 13 Percent of Tech Workers. This School Is Changing That
Lyn Muldrow says she’s always been a “computer nerd.” At 14 years old, she started playing with code, building websites, “trying to create things online.” As an adult, she was good enough to freelance her web design skills, setting up home pages for mom-and-pop stores or creating message boards for community groups. Muldrow wanted to be more involved in programming, but she realized the tech sector didn’t look like her, an African-American female from Baltimore raising her kids as a single mom.
“I almost didn’t pursue tech, because I felt, maybe as a black woman, my opinions would not be validated,” she says. Despite her doubts, she enrolled in an intensive training program from General Assembly, a coding and design school, and received financial support from its Opportunity Fund. Thanks to both, Muldrow was able to switch careers and open her own firm about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “I sort of had to start from nothing,” she says.
Tech was — and in some ways, still largely is — a privileged white man’s world. Facebook doubled the number of black workers on staff two years ago, but they still numbered only 81 on a force of 5,470, according to a 2014 filing. It’s a problem that holds true across Silicon Valley. African-American and Hispanic workers together make up more than a quarter of the general labor force, but fill only 13 percent of computer and math jobs. Women are earning only one quarter of the country’s computer science degrees, down from 37 percent in 1983.
With workshops and full-time classes, General Assembly aims to change those numbers to reflect the diversity of those who want to pursue careers in tech. Ultimately, they want to see people doing work they love, says Megan Nesbeth, head of the Opportunity Fund. At its 14 locations on four continents, the school has trained 240,000 students in web development (the course Muldrow enrolled in), user experience design, product management, digital marketing, data science and business — fundamental skills that can be difficult to self-teach but necessary to enter the tech world.
Muldrow recognizes that challenge from experience. “Back then, I didn’t have a frame of reference of what it meant to be a programmer or developer. Especially when I was younger, I thought it was all numbers and math and algorithms, things you had to know and learn and do to create something on the web, to make something functional,” she recalls. Only after years of attempts did she start to realize that web design is fundamentally about languages. She didn’t need to memorize lines of code, only to learn how to speak the right commands to build what she envisioned. Which, she admits, is easier said than done.
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Muldrow’s progress started with signing up for General Assembly’s immersion class. With backing from the Opportunity Fund for tuition (which ranges from about $10,000 to $15,000), she enrolled in a 12-week course. To support her kids, she still had to work nights 40 hours a week. After the 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day ended, she answered customer service questions from Uber riders and drivers at home for an annual salary of just $28,000. “My body was exhausted and I was running out of money,” Muldrow broke down and confessed to a General Assembly counselor three weeks in. She had spent all her savings to come to San Francisco, and because of her past, a loan seemed out of the question. Muldrow didn’t know if she could handle the stress. “I was really at the point where I wanted to go back home.”
The counselor told Muldrow she admired how hard she was working and promised to find a solution. Two weeks later, the Opportunity Fund helped subsidize those extra costs, so she could focus on her coursework. “I literally broke down when she told me, because you know I’m so used to doing things on my own as a single mom,” Muldrow says. “Honestly I’m just so grateful to them for believing in me.”
General Assembly recognized the huge obstacles to a career change — loans for training and tuition, months without work, a cross-country move — when they set up the Opportunity Fund with CapitalOne and AT&T. A college grad might have savings or be able to take out a loan, but the fund backs low-income individuals who don’t have any other options. “If you think about somebody from a lower-income bracket, with no line of credit, taking money out of savings they need to support their families, those odds are very much against them,” says Nesbeth, who previously worked on increasing diversity in higher education. “These are people who face some type of barrier to access to the tech industry. It takes a lot of different forms, but it’s really about socioeconomics.” Helping them overcome various individual circumstances, the fund has supported 125 fellows, usually awarding $10,000 each.
Muldrow’s story adds one more number to tech’s diversity stats, an almost imperceptible change when looking at the country’s entire labor force. But Muldrow sees herself as a trailblazer and wants to do her part to give back. After General Assembly, she worked as an instructor for Hack the Hood, a web design boot camp for kids in Oakland, and she now leads a chapter of Lesbians Who Tech. “I feel like I have a lot of responsibility to help others to understand that tech is for everyone,” she says. “You don’t have to be a white guy to be a web developer. You can look like yourself and build something amazing. It isn’t all ones and zeroes.”