In a year when policing controversies, mass shootings and debates over immigration have dominated the headlines and discourse, there’s a group of inspirational pioneers at work. Not all of these individuals, policy makers and entrepreneurs are household names, but they all are improving this country by developing new ways to solve America’s biggest challenges. Here, NationSwell’s favorite solutions of the year.
THE GUTSY DAD THAT STARTED A BUSINESS TO HELP HIS SON FIND PURPOSE
Eighty percent of the workers at Rising Tide Car Wash, located in Parkland, Fla., are on the autism spectrum. Started by the father-and-son team of John and Tom D’Eri, Rising Tide gives their son and brother, Andrew, who was identified as an autistic individual at the age of three, and its other employees the chance to lead a fulfilling life. John and Tom determined that the car wash industry is a good match for those with autism since they’re more likely to be engaged by detailed, repetitive processes than those not on the spectrum. [ph]
THE ALLSTARS THAT ARE TACKLING SOME OF AMERICA’S GREATEST CHALLENGES
The six NationSwell AllStars — Karen Washington, Eli Williamson, Rinku Sen, Seth Flaxman, DeVone Boggan and Amy Kaherl — are encouraging advancements in education and environmental sustainability, making government work better for its citizens, engaging people in national service, advancing the American dream and supporting our veterans. Click here to read and see how their individual projects are moving America forward. [ph]
THE INDIANA COUNTY THAT HAS DONE THE MOST TO REDUCE INCOME INEQUALITY IN AMERICA
The Midwest exurb of Boone County, Ind., has reduced the ratio of the top 20th percentile’s earnings compared to the bottom 80th percentile by 23 percent — the largest decline for any American county with more than 50,000 residents and an achievement stumped county officials. NationSwell pieced together the story of how a land battle and a statewide tax revolt altered the course of Boone County. Find out exactly how it happened here. [ph]
THE TESLA CO-FOUNDER THAT’S ELECTRIFYING GARBAGE TRUCKS
Ian Wright’s new venture, Wrightspeed, is far less glamorous than his previous venture creating luxury electric sedans. But Wrightspeed, which is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx, could have a greater impact on the environment than electrifying personal vehicles. Click here to learn how. [ph]
THE ORGANIZATION THAT IS TURNING A NOTORIOUS PROJECT INTO AN URBAN VILLAGE
Los Angeles’s large, 700-unit public housing development Jordan Downs consists of 103 identical buildings. Entryways to the two-story beige structures are darkened with black soot and grime, and the doors and windows are crossed with bars. Soon, the dilapidated complex will be revitalized by Joseph Paul, Jr., and his outreach team from SHIELDS for Families, which provides counseling, education and vocational training services. Read more about the plan, which calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing with 700 more units tiered at affordable and market rates. [ph]
THE HARDWORKING GROUP THAT’S RESTORING THE SHORELINE OF AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER
Chris Pallister and his small, devoted crew are leading the largest ongoing marine cleanup effort on the planet. Since 2002, Pallister’s organization, Gulf of Alaska Keeper, has been actively cleaning beaches in Prince William Sound and the Northern Gulf Coast. The nonprofit’s five boats, seasonal crew of 12 and dozens of regular volunteers has removed an estimated 2.5 million pounds of marine debris (mostly plastic items washed ashore from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) from more than 1,500 miles of coastline. [ph]
THE STATE THAT’S ENDING HOMELESSNESS WITH ONE SIMPLE IDEA
Utah set the ambitious goal to end homelessness in 2015. As the state’s decade-long “Housing First” program, an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites, wraps up this year, it’s already reduced chronic homelessness (those with deeper disabling conditions, like substance abuse or schizophrenia, who had been on the streets for a year or longer or four times within three years) by 72 percent and is on track to end it altogether by early next year. Read more about the initiative here. [ph]
THE RESIDENT THAT’S REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS’S MOST DEVASTATED WARD
New Orleans native Burnell Cotlon wants to feed his 3,000 neighbors. So he’s turned a two-story building that was destroyed by catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (along with most of the Lower 9th Ward community) into a shopping plaza. Already, he’s opened a barbershop, a convenience store, and a full-service grocery store in a neighborhood that has been identified as a food desert. [ph]
THE MAN THAT’S GIVING CAREERS TO UNEMPLOYED MILITARY VETERANS
“They had our backs, let’s keep the shirts on theirs” is more than just a motto for Mark Doyle. It’s the business model on which he built Rags of Honor, his silk-screen printing company based in Chicago that provides employment and other services to veterans. In the three years since its inception, Rags of Honor has grown from four employees to 22, all but one of whom are veterans at high risk of homelessness. [ph]
THE PRESIDENT THAT’S PRESERVING OUR ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
After promising to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal our planet during his 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama has faltered on environmental legislation during his first term, preferring to expend his political capital on the Affordable Care Act. But the 44th president’s use of regulatory authority and his agreement with China likely ensure his place in the pantheon of modern environmental champions. Here’s why. [ph]
Tag: education
The 10 Most Inspiring Books of 2015
In the waning years of the first African-American president’s time in office, a young black male can be gunned down by police with impunity and a young Hispanic girl can grow up in a neighborhood with limited educational horizons. As the wars in the Middle East draw to a close for American troops, veterans struggle to find work and housing and gun violence follows them back to their communities. In 2015, it often felt like progress was tempered by setbacks, so it’s important to look to journalists to provide the nuanced understanding of events, to historians to give them historical weight and to novelists and poets to distill their meaning. Our essential reading from this year:
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MORE: The 10 Most Inspiring Books of 2014
Why Helping Humanity Should Be Core to Learning
There are enormous push and pull forces emerging in education and something is going to have to give. The push force is the fact that traditional schooling is boring, and the more you go up the grade levels, the more boring it becomes. By the time you reach grades 9 or 10 only about a third of all students are engaged. The pull forces include the allure of explosive technology having a life of its own. This tension — between the dullness of schooling and the unbridled expansion of technology — makes the status quo untenable.
There is a way to escape this, one that I explored in report form with Maria Langworthy in “A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning” which was published by Pearson in 2014. We’ve now extended this enquiry with over 500 schools in seven countries, that we are working with as part of our New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) initiative.*
We are helping clusters and networks of schools implement deep learning outcomes that we define as the 6Cs:
- Character education
- Citizenship
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Creativity
- Critical thinking
Moreover, as in “The Rich Seam,” we are working with school and system partners to establish the conditions and strategies at the local and state level to support NPDL in action. It is in the early stages, but we are discovering that students themselves are agents of change. They are catalysts for changing teaching and learning; they are also partners in changing the school and forces for change in society itself. In a very real sense, they are intergenerational change agents.
For example, our partner schools in Uruguay were given simple robotic kits with instructions via YouTube. The kits sat on the shelf until one day the students, which are 10 years old, asked the teacher if they could start to use them.
Quickly, they created the following: One group studied World War II and built a device that could detect land mines; another group solved the problem of birds eating vegetables in the garden by building a simple robot that vibrated when birds came near. A third group took up the issue that lightning killed five people on a beach, so they built a device that could detect imminent lightning and then sound an alarm.
One 10-year-old observed, “I am supposed to help humanity, so I decided to start in my own neighborhood.”
As another example, a school in Australia built its learning around what they called “enigma missions,” which are complex problems or issues to be solved. One group studied autism because they knew relatives who were autistic; another took up the issue of homelessness, and still another tackled DNA, which one boy observed is an enigma in itself. The students were incredibly engaged and came up with great insights. One pupil who examined homelessness and drew some important conclusions said, “I feel so complete,” not in the sense of being finished, but having brought something valuable to fruition.
We have vastly underestimated what students can do and what they value. We now say that one of the core learning goals for students is to help humanity. Children naturally take to this not because they are altruistic, but because they see this as a basic human motivator — they want to do it for their own good as well as for others. They learn a strong set of values and skills that will serve them for life. Teachers play a new role: helping students focus, giving them scope to engage with each other, examining learning designs, assessing results and deriving lessons for improving learning.
We are in the first phase, and it is very clear that the ‘seam’ is being opened and has the potential to be very rich indeed.
We have a feeling that from here on, these developments will move very fast for the very simple reason that it unleashes the individual and collective spirit for deep learning that gives all learners a role in helping humanity, thereby helping themselves. We will have more to report soon.
*Thanks to fellow NPDL directors Joanne Quinn and Joanne McEachen and all of our school partners.
Michael Fullan is Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto and Global Director Leadership, NPDL. The report “A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning” was published as a part of Open Ideas at Pearson.
Marriage Equality Happened, But LGBTQ Youth Still Face Acceptance Struggles. Not Here
At least four days a week, Qing, a 24-year-old black gay man, buzzes into an unassuming, century-old high-rise near New York University in lower Manhattan. Squished between an upscale fitness center and a Lebanese eatery, the building’s double glass doors are blank. Its dimly lit hallway appears to lead to a freight elevator. The only clue to what’s inside is a modest sign over the entrance, identifying it as “The Hetrick-Martin Institute.”
When the elevator doors open onto the third floor, the building’s drab exterior falls away like Dorothy’s first Technicolor step into Oz. Here, at the Institute (or HMI, for short), the walls are splashed with rainbow murals, a pointed reference to its work helping New York City’s gay youth. Qing comes here to work on his freelance fashion designs, eat a hot dinner at its cafe and participate in group discussions like “In the Clear” on Tuesdays, where homeless youth share tips on steering clear of rain and snow, or “Neutral Grounds” on Thursday, which focuses on HIV (for kids both positive and negative) and the stigma surrounding the disease.
“Most of the time, if I need a safe space to go to, a place to digress, just to feel cared for and loved, I will always come to HMI,” he tells NationSwell, sitting in a classroom at HMI.
The son of a“deadbeat dad” that was in and out of prison and didn’t “want to change or help himself,” Qing (who asked that his last name not be used), grew up in rough part of the Washington, D.C., area, with his mother and sisters. Homeless for a five-year period, Qing drifted through eight different schools by the time he reached eighth grade. “Sometimes I feel like I’m destined to be like my dad,” he worries before adding, “I use my past as my motivation.”
Qing left his family in Virginia to pursue his fashion and design dreams in the Big Apple. As a child, he escaped life’s commotion by sewing or sketching outfits. “I want to have my own fashion house one day,” he says. “They have an open studio [at HMI], which I can’t find anywhere else. The space, the materials, the proper tools are there to use: my mannequins, fabric, pattern paper.” Recently, he painted, glittered and bedazzled a shoe to turn it into a flower pot. He shipped it home as a gift for his mom.
“Here at HMI, I actually learned how I am more, how I want to be. I came to understand that I live in color and that I don’t have this monotone life, I guess. We always learn to walk in your truth. I practice that every day — being more authentic — like myself all the time,” he says. When visiting certain New York City neighborhoods, like Harlem, people would stare at Qing. “Now, they respond differently. If you show that you respect yourself and love yourself, they will treat you the same way.”
The Hetrick-Martin Institute was founded in 1979 when Dr. Emery Hetrick, a psychiatrist, and his partner, NYU professor Dr. Damien Martin, heard about a 15-year-old runaway who was beaten and tossed out of a group home because of his sexuality. Outraged, they mobilized advocates and welcomed LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) youth into their West Village living room. (The organization, formerly the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, was renamed in their honor when both died from AIDS.)
“It was a very different planet. This was a time when ‘homosexuality’ was in the same paragraph as mental retardation in the [American Medical Association] Journal,” says Thomas Krever, HMI’s CEO, a native New Yorker who previously ran gang intervention programs in Brooklyn and knows firsthand what it’s like to be young and gay. He praises recent significant gains, but acknowledges that homosexuals are still a long way from equality. (For instance, you can read national headlines about a judge in Utah who took a 1-year-old girl away from her lesbian foster mothers, how Houston voters rejected an ordinance protecting gays from discrimination or the latest on Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who became a poster child for Christian conservatives for denying marriage licenses to gays. Even in the liberal mecca of New York City, slurs are hurled at same-sex couples walking in Central Park.) And as Krever points out, “I can get married on Sunday and fired on Monday in more states than not.”
HMI has sometimes been pigeonholed as an after-school program for gay youth, but Krever articulates a much more comprehensive vision, inspired by Hetrick and Martin’s initial outreach. At its location on Astor Place, which it co-inhabits with Harvey Milk High School, a public transfer school for kids who were bullied at other schools, HMI wants to create a safe space for 13- to 24-years-olds to be who they are, “where they can get information that is accurate, maybe meet somebody that looks like themselves and has a similar history and experience the rites of passage that this population doesn’t have,” Krever says. (“I know for myself, at high school prom, I was dancing with my [female] date but staring longingly at the boy I had a crush on,” he says.) “It doesn’t mean teaching them fear and how to deny who they are, but how to navigate a system that is not tolerant and accepting,” Krever adds. Through discussion groups, career readiness classes, health programs, academic enrichment and extracurriculars, HMI encourages the 2,000 youth who come through their doors annually to thrive. In the process, it may also shift the opinions of hundreds of thousands of others who witness the teenagers’ successes.
Like the wraparound model at Harlem Children’s Zone, HMI focuses its work on the young person as a whole, addressing homelessness, substance use and risky sexual behavior as symptoms of underlying trauma, rather than as isolated problems. Five counselors provide rigorous therapy for LGBTQ kids who are struggling with their sense of self or are frustrated by feelings of repression and a thwarted desire for certain social interactions.
“Through those double doors in the counseling wing, you have young people that are literally in crisis, with therapists and social workers who are getting at complex trauma and a history of mental health issues,” says Rofofsky.
A typical session might start with a young person revealing his desire to come out to his parents. A counselor will respond, “How about the goal is not whether you’re going to come out or not, but why don’t we explore all the areas in your life that could be safe or unsafe?” As the conversation unfolds, they might explore the details of what coming out would look like at home, in the neighborhood and in the classroom. Often, the teenager may indicate other issues. Worries about a parent getting physically violent upon the revelation of their sexuality, for instance, might lead to more sessions about any underlying childhood abuse.
Some discussions happen in a group setting, like the ones that Qing attends, or through an art therapy class, which 21-year-old Kahdija, a straight ally from Brooklyn, enjoys. Kahdija first heard about HMI from her older sister, who came out as bisexual. She was scared and unsure of what to expect when she first took the elevator up, but she walked in and found a lot of “very flamboyant” guys — all dancing. “I’m here everyday, even on Saturday,” she says. “Yesterday, I stayed at school to finish up work and I kept looking up at the clock to see if I had time to make it to HMI.” When NationSwell visited HMI, Kahdija was finishing up a painting of a snake, refining the colors so that the reptile’s skin was dark with shade in all the right places.
Kahdija says participating in discussions has already changed her viewpoints. A few blocks from where she lives in Flatbush, she once saw a transgender woman harassed by a man yelling obscenities. Kahdija, across the street, watched in horror, but remained silent. After spending time at HMI, she’s now ashamed by her inaction. If she were faced with the same scenario today, she says she’d tell the guys off and suggest the woman go inside where she’d be safe.
It’s precisely that kind of leadership and understanding of the challenges faced by LGBTQ youth that Krever wants to see. He still vividly remembers his first months on the job in 2003, when members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who hold the infamous “God Hates Fags” signs) planned a protest outside the Institute’s doors to mark the start of the school year. Exiting the nearby subway station, Krever heard a roar and his stomach dropped in fear. He turned the corner to discover that the noise came from more than 500 supporters who had made a human chain to allow safe passage for the kids. “It’s how I knew I was at the right place and at the right time,” he recounts tearfully in his office. “I long for the day when it’s not a big deal when another CEO says he’s gay,” Krever says. Today’s not that day, but with HMI’s work, it can’t be far off.
This Exciting Program Moves Struggling Students to the Head of the Class
The statistics are troubling. Only about 16 percent of students in Harlem pass the New York State English Language Arts exam. And just 31 percent of children across New York City pass it. But one group is changing that.
The Reading Team, a Harlem-based literacy organization, is working to make children who are at high risk of reading failure active and excited learners. And it’s finding success: In 2015, 80 percent of Reading Team children passed the New York State English Language Arts exam.
How are they doing it? By making literacy relevant to every activity. Watch the video above to see how the organization uses computer coding, chess, and more to support the children’s success in school and in life.
The School That’s Making a Career in Tech Possible for Everyone
Lyn Muldrow needed something in her life to change. She was a single mother living in Baltimore, eight months pregnant with her second child. After a long bought with unemployment, she found work as a customer support agent for a marketing company, but she wanted more for her family. That’s when Muldrow discovered General Assembly, where she was the recipient of the coding and design school’s Opportunity Fund fellowship.
Check out the video above to see how the scholarship enabled Muldrow to be successful in the technology field and to extend the same opportunities she received to a younger generation.
To learn how to support this initiative, click here.
These Teach for America Graduates Left the Classroom. But They Didn’t Forget About the Kids
Every year since 1990, in what is practically a fall tradition, idealistic college grads arrive in public school classrooms in New York City, Los Angeles and all of Teach for America’s 52 regions in between. Straight from seven to 10 weeks of summer training, these TFA corps members commit to work for two years in unfamiliar schools that desperately need strong educators. After that, they’re free to leave the classroom. While the majority of TFA’s 42,000 alumni do continue teaching, the program’s turnover rate has led some to question its success.
“My argument was: let’s take the resources you’re investing in a corps member — tens of thousands of dollars per year — and put that into professional development for training current staff on campuses,” says Robert Schwartz, a TFA alumnus and advisor at the nonprofit New Teacher Center. “You’ll see teachers that are going to stick around longer and are really invested in the community.” Schwartz’s alternative plan is voiced commonly in education circles, and it’s mild in comparison to some pointed criticism of TFA. Sarah Matsui, author of a book that gives TFA a negative assessment, argues to Jacobin that the program is mere resume fodder for Ivy League students on the way to jobs at well-heeled consulting firms like Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. In response, TFA’s spokesperson Takirra Winfield points out to NationSwell that 84 percent of alumni continue to work in fields related to education or serving low-income communities.
But perhaps the debate over retention rates misses the point entirely. TFA’s mission statement, after all, doesn’t reference teaching at all. Instead, the organization aims to enlist, develop and mobilize “our nation’s most promising future leaders” in pursuit of a larger movement for educational equity. NationSwell explored how five TFA alums are accomplishing that outside the classroom.
Sekou Biddle, United Negro College Fund
A member of the United Negro College Fund’s leadership team, Biddle has always prized service, but as an aspiring management consultant at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, he figured giving back was something he’d do as a brief detour on the road to business school. Thinking that TFA sounded like an impactful way to give younger students the same educational opportunities he’d been afforded, Biddle joined the corps in 1993 and stayed in the classroom for a decade.
After, Biddle “wanted to share the things [he] had learned” and transitioned to policymaking as a school board representative and city council appointee in his hometown, Washington, D.C. He says his TFA experience informed his votes and taught him empathy for teachers, who throw themselves into a “180-day marathon grind,” and parents, whom schools too often failed. He keeps in mind one phone call on which a dad told him, “This is the first time someone has ever called to say something good about my child,” Biddle recalls. “I was struck by the power of a relatively simple thing. Just a call certainly had an impact on this parent’s perception on what the relationship with a school and teacher could be.”
In his current role as UNCF’s vice president of advocacy, Biddle engages local leaders and school administrators with the same personal touch. Explaining the achievement gap, he lobbies for more academic and financial support for minority students, ultimately to increase the number of black college graduates. “I thought I was going to do [TFA] for a few years and feel I had done some good in the world, put enough in the bank and be ready to move on,” Biddle says. “I committed to doing two years, and 22 years later, I’m still at it.”
Mike Feinberg, KIPP Schools
While working in the classroom, Mike Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP, America’s largest network of charter schools (with 183 and counting), with fellow TFA alum Dave Levin, became “acutely aware that our students were not receiving an education that would set them up for success in college and life,” so late one night he and Levin laid out plans for a new educational model that refused to let children’s “demographics define their destiny.”
As a teacher, Feinberg saw firsthand student accomplishments that were a result of the belief that kids could and would learn. “If we believe there are solutions to problems, we can create a learning environment where we set high expectations for our students and they not only meet them, but surpass them.” Feinberg readily admits that growing up in poverty creates enormous challenges, but he reaffirms the principle that, if given a chance, education can level the playing field for those students. TFA “shaped my understanding of what education and social justice could accomplish,” he says.
Andrew Greenhill, City of Tucson
Now chief of staff for the mayor of Tucson, Ariz., Greenhill entered a career in government after TFA, inspired to take a broader look at how the delivery of public services can be improved. During his time as a teacher, in addition to the regular curriculum, he seemed to be teaching an impromptu course on how to make it in America. “Students looked to me for all kinds of assistance and information. Most were new arrivals in the country,” he recalls of his middle school class. Greenhill took families to free healthcare clinics, to the library to check out books, to Western Union to send money home and even to the supermarket to show them how to ring up groceries. That non-traditional teaching translated well to local government, where Greenhill has “played a role in helping to understand and support and in some cases even streamline the different programs provided by the city and local nonprofits.”
“I think the more people know about how the education system works, the better informed they will be in helping community-wide efforts, whether they’re inside the classroom, an administrator or a citizen participating in the debates that we have at the local and national level about education,” he says. As a city official, Greenhill doesn’t believe he’s given up on his old students; in fact, he’s still trying to take care of their day-to-day needs, so that classroom teachers can stick to teaching.
Tim Morehouse, Olympic fencer
A silver medal-winning fencer at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Tim Morehouse has a stellar pedigree to match the perceived elitism of his sport. He attended a rigorous prep school in the Bronx (where tuition today costs $40,660) and Brandeis University, a top-ranked liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until Morehouse signed up for TFA in 2000 that he saw how different his path could have been. Assigned to teach seventh grade at a public school six blocks from where he grew up in upper Manhattan, Morehouse realized how privileged his education had been, compared to the schooling that most children receive.
Because of his TFA experience, Morehouse returned to public schools in Washington Heights and Harlem before the 2012 London Olympic Games to coach fencing, with the hope of giving students an extracurricular to bolster their college applications and a chance at athletic scholarships. His foundation, Fencing in the Schools, last year served 15,000 students in 11 states. Like TFA, Morehouse recruited other Olympic fencers to teach kids the sport and mentor the youngsters in life skills. He says he hopes the foundation will help kids not only get to college, but also succeed there. And who knows? “Maybe they can even go to the Olympics,” he says.
Jessica Stewart, Great Oakland Public Schools
A onetime political junkie and head of the College Democrats at Auburn University in Alabama, Stewart moved to Oakland, Calif., to teach sixth-grade math in 2005 and fell head over heels for the Bay Area City. Politics took a backseat to her work in the classroom, but Stewart’s activist streak resurfaced in 2008 when the city’s superintendent threatened to close 17 schools and a budget crisis post-financial crash generated a multi-million dollar budget shortfall.
Great Oakland Public Schools, where Stewart is senior managing director, was founded in the wake of those disasters and went on to become a major voice in city politics. In 2012, the coalition endorsed three people running for seats on the school board. “To support our candidates, we had 300 volunteers do 60,000 phone calls and 12,000 door knocks,” Stewart recalls. “On any given night in October 2012, walking into the office, you’d see people sitting on the floor (because we only had five staff members at the time) talking to voters. It would be a student next to a principal next to a parent next to a teacher. It was so inspiring to see people coming together to fight for equality.” All three candidates won soundly, but Stewart isn’t resting on her laurels, explaining, “There is still so much work to be done in our education system.”
Editors’ note: This story originally stated that Teach for America was founded in 1989. We apologize for the error.
3 Colleges That Have the Formula for Making Higher Education Affordable
Just about every news story reporting on this country’s college debt climate uses the same word: crisis.
It’s an accurate descriptor — or so the numbers seems to indicate. Public college tuition costs have risen 250 percent over the last 30 years, while median family income grew only 16 percent during the same period. The average student is looking at $26,000 of debt when they graduate. Even President Obama labels the situation as a crisis, as the poorest students are saddled with more and more debt.
In an effort to combat the problem, the Department of Education created the College Scorecard, which provides students and families with a new kind of ranking by taking into account graduation rates, financial aid offerings, post-grad earnings — and most importantly — average debt. On it, these three liberal arts schools stand out as valuable options for low-income students, thanks to their high graduation rates, low student loan debt and the percentage of students eligible for federal Pell grants, which are available to those whose family incomes do not exceed $30,000 a year.
In stark contrast to many other universities, each of these colleges keep their students’ loan debt at least 50 percent lower than the national average. How do they remain academically solvent while not piling debt on their graduates?
Berea College, Berea, Ky.
If you’ve never heard of Berea College in Kentucky, keep reading. It’s the only residential liberal arts school in America offering a completely free education to its nearly 1,600 students.
As President Lyle Roelofs explains, “nearly everything is different.”
Like other colleges with strong financial aid programs, Berea is selective, but it isn’t need-blind. It only accepts students whose family incomes fall beneath an income ceiling, providing a higher education opportunity — as Roelofs puts it — “to students wouldn’t get one otherwise.”
Berea is a very efficient educational experience, says Roelofs. Each student works part-time while on campus, holding jobs in numerous fields, from woodworking to hotel administration, to contribute to the $27,000 to $28,000 annual price of school. “We’re never interested in whether we can send some money to shareholders at the end of the year… We are much more like an entrepreneurial business with the idea that profits and successes get ploughed back into the enterprise,” he notes. To cover costs, 75 percent of tuition is handled by the endowment the college has accrued over its lengthy history. Only 15 percent comes from loan sources, primarily Pell grants (99 percent of students qualify) and similar state grants. A third of students don’t borrow anything at all, with the remainder receiving an average of about $6,700 in loans, almost 4 times less than the national average.
Perhaps more important is Berea’s graduation rate: 64 percent of its students receive a diploma. The average graduation rate for similar-income students nationwide is a dismal 9 percent. Roelofs attributes this jump to the focus that the school puts on each student and their families.
But can every college follow the Berea model? It would take something of a paradigm shift in approach, admits Roelofs. “Institutions are usually quite preoccupied with dealing with immediate challenges; they don’t consider radical changes,” he says. Still, other colleges could consider a more frugal approach. “If you don’t charge tuition, you can make much more sensible decisions on what the students actually need,” Roelofs notes. “People don’t look the gift horse in the mouth.”
“One of my favorite sayings is that just because an education is free doesn’t mean you can cut the corners. It still has to be first rate. Otherwise, our students would finish in four years and have nowhere to go.” Which would defeat the purpose of a place like Berea entirely.
Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.
Williams College, located in western Massachusetts, is tiny and idyllic. It’s also the top-ranked national liberal arts college by U.S. News & Word Report, and it is one of the 50 most expensive colleges in the U.S., with an annual price tag of around $65,000. But it has a need-blind financial aid policy, making the average loan debt just over $13,000 (about half the national average), and many of the students who qualify for financial aid (more than 50 percent are eligible) are free of loans altogether.
How does Williams do it? By maintaining a strong endowment and an individualized approach to financial aid packages, says Paul Boyer, director of financial aid at Williams.
As one of the first schools in the country to make available a net price calculator for prospective students, Williams tries to evaluate each student, case by case, to ensure it’s offering the best plan. The school also makes a concerted effort to recruit students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, seeking out lower-income applicants. About 20 percent of current students receive Pell grants, double the amount at most other liberal arts colleges — and it’s increasing. “It’s been rising maybe 1 percent per year,” says Boyer. That may not sound like much, but it’s a far cry from most other schools (including Harvard, which hasn’t been able to crack a 10 percent ceiling).
Earning an average income of $58,000 a decade after graduation, students that receive financial aid, in general, have little trouble paying back their loans. The U.S. Department of Education even ranked Williams in its top 23 schools with low costs that lead to high incomes.
Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.
There must be something in the water in Massachusetts: Amherst, number two in U.S. News’s liberal arts ranking, also comes with a $65,000 yearly price tag. But just like Williams, its need-blind financial aid opportunities — which 58 percent of students qualify for — minimize its real cost. In fact, what students pay, on average, is actually half of the annual sticker price: $33,000.
Amherst is strictly anti-debt. “The most distinctive thing is our approach of not including loans, as we meet students’ full demonstrated need,” says Gail Holt, Amherst’s dean of financial aid. About 70 percent of students graduate with no debt whatsoever.
That’s an achievement that Amherst should be particularly proud of, considering that college costs and incomes aren’t rising at the same level in this country. As a result, more qualify for financial aid, and resources must be distributed among a wider number of students. At Amherst, Holt and her team try to serve a full spectrum of families and financial capabilities. “The hardest part is meeting the needs of such diverse populations.” With 24 percent of students eligible for Pell grants, it seems to be making headway.
Fortunately, for their students, these three schools earn As in crisis management. Will other universities be able to make the grade?
The American Dream Isn’t Dead. This Is How Immigrant Families Are Achieving It
Every year, more than 20 Americans are named MacArthur Fellows and given a $625,000 stipend for being, well, geniuses. Across the arts and sciences, their personalities and contributions often loom large — this year, think Lin-Manuel Miranda (the playwriting prodigy of Broadway’s “Hamilton” and “In the Heights” fame) or Ta-Nehisi Coates (perhaps the foremost author and voice of the black American experience in the news media today).
Some MacArthur geniuses, however, labor in significantly less lauded roles, doing their work on a much smaller scale. That’s the case for Juan Salgado, who has spent the last 15 years at the helm of southwest Chicago’s Instituto del Progreso Latino. The adult vocational training school appears modest on the surface. Yet dig in, and you’ll find an educational program with a surprisingly high 80 percent graduation rate — better than most high schools and college degree programs across the nation — and a radical approach to community support. What’s the Instituto doing? It’s asking poverty-level working parents to give up their evenings (over the course of three or more years) to improve their potential for employment through language and vocational training. It’s promising to lift families out of poverty and fulfill their American dreams. And it’s working.
Forty to 60 percent of residents of south and west Chicago are living below the poverty line, according to data collected by the New York Times. Those who come to Instituto are usually facing even more dire straits: they are often immigrants, and their average annual income is between $14,000 and $18,000. Having just around a 6th grade level education, they’re underemployed, working menial labor jobs, and supporting an average of 3.1 children.
So how do you help these families move forward and upward? When the Instituto opened in 1977, it focused on basic adult education needs for the local Latino community: how to pass a citizenship test and how to improve English-language skills. In 2001, Salgado became president and CEO of the Instituto and realized that these tools weren’t enough.
“We weren’t really connecting that adult learner with a specific career path where there were going to be jobs — where there was going to be opportunity to build. We weren’t connecting them to post-secondary education in a meaningful way,” he explains. Recognizing that assistance needed to stretch even further, Salgado emphasized that the second generation, the kids, would have to be part of the solution, as well.
It’s this holistic circular vision — a center that caters to the full needs of an entire family, from basic learning to career pipelines to childcare — that has fueled the success of Instituto in recent years. It takes a village, and Salgado has made the Instituto that much-needed community support system.
Mirna Holton, who served as associate director of the Instituto for three years and now sits on its governing board, notes that the increase in focus came at a critical moment. “It was a phenomenal time for big ideas… We challenged ourselves in the way that our families and individuals challenged themselves by shifting perspectives.”
The first step: identifying nearby career opportunities. Salgado sought out industries with robust job markets and gains that Instituto participants could realistically access. Manufacturing and nursing stood out as the most promising options. From there, the Instituto prepares students for the secondary degrees they need to enter those career paths with its Carreras en Salud and Manufacturing Technology Bridge Programs. Each has specialized training to bring adult students up to speed and introduce them to the skills and language they’d need. The important thing was to transform a 6th-grade-level education into a high-school-graduate education, but in fewer than the six years it normally takes to get there.
Participants spend five nights a week in classes for four or more hours at a time‚ the equivalent of attending high school while working a full-time job and managing a family. “We turn that into a 3-year deal,” emphasizes Salgado. “We’re doing accelerated learning. We’re doing contextualized learning. And we’re focusing in on a career occupation that the student is motivated for.”
To help students with the rigorous schedule, the Instituto offers a key service: family support. The nursing preparation track, in particular, draws a crowd of single mothers; Salgado estimates that 60 percent of its students provide for their children independently. Since they need childcare while they’re in class each evening, the Instituto provides it, along with a healthy meal. “The trick is, how do you get [the mothers] to juggle one or two fewer things?” asks Salgado. “It’s all about reducing complexity so they can be successful in the learning process.”
Nursing program participants have found that success. In less than a decade, about 500 students became licensed practical nurses, and more than 200 are currently enrolled. “Once they’re licensed nurses, 100 percent of them get a job,” boasts Salgado. Along with employment comes a significant pay raise. Instead of making less than $10 an hour, they’re now receiving $24 an hour and up. “It’s life changing.”
Finally, seeing that the kids need schooling to match their parents’, Salgado identified a third need: educating children. So the Instituto opened two charter high schools for the next generation.
Full circle support.
It’s “creative leadership,” as the MacArthur Foundation puts it, that defines Instituto’s success. With more than 10,000 people receiving some form of assistance each year, according to ThinkProgress, the organization is an integral part of the Windy City. And because of its “collectivist manner,” as Holton describes it, nothing is embarked upon without taking the queues from the community itself.
But as Instituto has expanded, it has also encountered a common roadblock: funding.
Right now, the organization depends equally on private and public support, accessing funds from the government and from local Chicago philanthropies like the Chicago Community Trust and national organizations such as the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Forbes Foundations and the Aspen Institute. But Salgado and his team are not satisfied. Without a sustainable solution, they’re just another drain on the charitable economy. If the purpose of the adult training program is to provide a pathway for long-term career development, Salgado believes that the Instituto needs its own forward-thinking growth plan.
For that, he’s looking to new models — specifically, a revolving loan fund with the promise that students don’t pay unless their careers are set and their income is stable. “If we don’t get you there, you won’t pay us back,” says Salgado. “That’s risky, but our results have been pretty solid,” he says. A loan fund would keep the capital flowing, removing the Instituto from a nonprofit’s typical Sisyphean struggle of fundraising and spending. Instead, Salgado wants to put in motion a self-sustaining cycle of mobility.
“You know, in the business world, they take a bunch of chances, and there’s a whole culture for taking chances, right? And people get extremely rewarded for taking chances, right?” he muses. “In our work, there are all these disincentives to take chances, so everybody plays it safe, right? And as a result, we don’t often make as much progress as we actually need to.”
Salgado’s ready to take a risk in order to bring Instituto’s best practices out of Chicago and onto the national stage. Already, the Instituto provides technical assistance to groups looking to emulate their techniques in California, Indiana, Minnesota, and Texas. With the MacArthur grant, that list is likely to grow further. Because, as he says, “Almost every one of our cities could qualify for this.”
Why Parents, Policymakers and Philanthropists Need to Look Elsewhere If We Are to Transform America’s Classrooms
School systems around the world spend billions on education “fixes” that, the evidence shows, are unlikely to deliver the impact that American parents are seeking and that students deserve.
One reason these “fixes” persist is that they are seemingly plausible. For example, take the familiar call for smaller class sizes, where many rigorous studies have found little impact. The explanation for such small gains is found in the messy reality of classrooms and the hard graft of changing teacher practice: In smaller classrooms, most teachers continue to teach in the same way that they always have. It’s simple, really — if you don’t change the pedagogy, you won’t change the learning.
Or take the popular “fix” of increasing school choice and inventing new types of schools. The mistake here is to misunderstand the unit that matters, which is much less the school and much more the classroom. Again, it comes down to the teaching skills and practices that the students experience.
What should we do, and how can we find a way through the forest that almost every intervention in education seems to have some supporting evidence (and a plausible narrative) that it makes a positive difference to student learning?
To answer this question, I used a new method (well, it was new in the 1980s) called meta-analysis, which allows researchers to merge many studies into one big study to estimate the average impact of the intervention in question. Then I went one step further and began synthesizing the meta-analyses.
This synthesis now contains more than 1,200 meta-analyses and 60,000 studies, representing about 250 million students. It allows us to move beyond asking, “what works?” and to start asking the more important question: “What works best?”
My claim is that the greatest influence on student progression in learning is having highly expert teachers and school leaders working together to maximize the effect of their teaching on all pupils in their care. I’ve called this Collaborative Expertise and describe it in more detail in a paper published by Pearson in June entitled “What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise.”
At its heart it involves:
- Developing and nurturing inspired and passionate teachers who are experts at working out where students are in their learning, delivering multiple learning interventions each with a high probability of success and then re-starting this cycle in light of the impact achieved.
- Creating a shared understanding of what one year’s worth of student learning should look like, and then getting all adults in the school to work to deliver that for each and every student, irrespective of their different starting points.
- With that shared understanding in place, going on to create ways for all teachers to come together to share defensible evidence of their impact — and impact is what is important, this isn’t about sharing war stories in the teacher’s lounge.
What’s great about this list is that all of these strategies can begin now; they don’t require any permissions, and they cost relatively little. They are all related to the core of learning and teaching, and this is what we should be talking about even though this does lead into a difficult — but vital — acknowledgment that teachers do vary in their impact on students.
Acknowledging this shouldn’t lead us into the trap of proposing things like teacher performance pay — another topic where it is difficult to find a model that has made much, if any, difference to student learning. A much better approach is increasing the effectiveness of all teachers.
In my work, I have seen the transformational impact that this approach can have. Under the Visible Learning banner, my colleagues and I have worked with schools and teachers across the world to put the theory of collaborative expertise into use. One such school is the Wolford Elementary School in McKinney, Texas.
Students at Wolford Elementary were achieving good results. Despite this, teachers couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t as engaged in their learning as they could be. So they asked students what they thought good learning was all about. To the teachers’ surprise, the majority of pupils associated learning with good behavior in class.
In order to help students grow in autonomy and awareness as learners, school leaders developed a team-based program for teachers. In the teams, educators found a safe place in which to talk and share their expertise, which resulted in the co-design of challenging and engaging lessons using proven instructional practices. Further, through their work together, the teachers developed a deepened focus on their role as evaluators responsible for constantly assessing their impact on student learning.
Wolford Elementary is a different place today, with the single biggest change being that language and behavior now focuses on learning, as opposed to teaching. Professional conversations abound, and teachers view themselves not as instructors, but as active facilitators of learning. During walkthroughs and classroom observations, school leaders note higher levels of student engagement in learning, and teachers are seen trying out instructional strategies like classroom discussion, reciprocal teaching, concept mapping and worked examples.
There is every reason to believe that if we leave behind the distractors and embrace Collaborative Expertise that we will see the changes in learning that American students deserve. This isn’t calling for some Utopia. It’s about having the courage to dependably recognize the excellence that is around us and building a coalition of success based on this excellence and inviting others to join.
This is where policymakers, parents and philanthropists should devote their energy (and dollars). If they do, the benefits will be manifest, powerful and exciting.
“What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise” by John Hattie is published as part of Open Ideas at Pearson, a series featuring independent insights on the big unanswered questions in education. Click here to find out more.