NationSwell Council member Chris Rush is making the dream of personalized learning a reality. As the co-founder of New Classrooms Innovation Partners, Rush is working with schools in 10 states to customize students’ schedules and tailoring the curriculum to their learning methods. Here, Rush discusses how his efforts are reshaping the future of education.
Why do we need to rethink the way schools work?
The role of a teacher isn’t something that’s set up for success. Maybe the job is just too hard. Maybe it needs to be retooled in another way. You put 30 kids in a room that are all coming from different starting places and have different supports at home. You give every child a textbook, and you’re supposed to meet the student where he or she is. Let’s reimagine classrooms in a way that could help educators to be more successful.
New Classrooms really got its start back in 2009 at School of One. How does its model differ from a regular classroom?
We are rescheduling every kid and assigning teachers and different third-party activities based on what they did the day before. Think of it like the Pandora music service, but for learning: Every day it gets a little bit smarter. If you tend to be working well with this group of five kids and this teacher on rainy days, we realize that. Or if you’re coming from gym, you might be hyper and need some independent time. Or before English class, you might need to work in a group. Picking up on all of those types of patterns makes it smarter and smarter. At the end of the day, you’ll come back to your main teacher and answer five questions to see whether or not you were successful. And if you were, we will record all those things, so you can get more like it. And if you weren’t, we give all the attributes of the day a thumbs down, and you start the whole process all over again.
Even though this is ed tech software, you’re insistent that the platform isn’t a virtual classroom. Why?
A lot of other online learning platforms customize the “what” of student learning, but it doesn’t allow you to personalize the “how,” “when” and “where.” We can create a sequence that fits with students’ learning patterns. Some need to try it themselves until they get stuck, then really get the most out of being with a teacher; other children won’t touch it independently unless there’s a teacher who already showed them. So, for us, you don’t just log in. It’s technology-powered, but it’s not experienced on the computer. It’s sort of like when you go to the airport. Certain planes can only be on certain gates, and certain crews can only be on at certain times because of delays and weather conditions. But what you do is scan your ticket, look up at the big-screen television, head to the gate and go. All the other stuff is done for you behind the scenes.
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Homepage photo by Darris Lee Harris.
Tag: education
It’s Possible to Close the Achievement Gap and Have Fun at the Same Time
If it looks like summer camp, and kids are having fun like they do at summer camp, it must be summer camp, right?
Not if you’re talking about Horizons National’s intensive, six-week-long summer session. Watch the video above to see how the program utilizes project-based learning, extracurriculars like swimming and gardening and a low 5:1 student-to-teacher ratio (compared to 16.1 nationally) to instill a love of learning in students.
At a time when all eyes are on the latest proposed cuts to education and numerous states have already slashed school spending, Horizons has found an innovative, fun way to help close the achievement gap between kids living in poverty and their more affluent peers. Its low-income students are succeeding — both in school and beyond.
MORE: What Does Swimming Have to Do With Stopping the Summer Slide?
Notes From the Field: Miriam Altman on School Absenteeism
One hot afternoon in late August, I spotted a familiar face as I exited the Prospect Avenue subway station in New York City’s South Bronx. It was Tonya, one of my former students. She was holding the hand of a young girl dressed in an orange school uniform.
Bright and focused on earning her high school diploma, Tonya’s plans to go to college changed when she became pregnant during her senior year with Destiny, the girl whose hand she held. After a three month hiatus from school, Tonya graduated, and went on to have two more children — all by the age of 22. As a single mother, she worked odd jobs and collected food stamps to make ends meet.
I know first hand that Tonya’s story is not uncommon where she lives in Community District 3. I am the cofounder of Kinvolved, a company that is working in her community to increase graduation rates by fighting school absenteeism.
Tonya lives in the poorest congressional district in the country, where about 37 percent of residents live in poverty and nearly 50 percent of residents earn less than a high school degree. By targeting the specific challenges facing the area’s youth, there’s hope to dramatically alter their futures.
South Bronx Rising Together is a group of neighborhood stakeholders working to improve the quality of life of neighborhood residents, in part, by ensuring that kids are college and career ready. Focused on elevating literacy rates, the organization discovered that student absenteeism is the main cause of lower-than-average scores. SBRT uses Collective Action Networks (CANs) made up of families, educators, business leaders, service providers and others to combat absenteeism.
Research proves chronic absence patterns can predict students’ graduation as early as sixth grade. New York City schools have one of the highest chronic absence rates in the country; public schools in Community District 3 have some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the city: 36.6 percent of preK-12 students miss a month or more of school each year.
As SBRT analyzed absentee data, my colleagues and I at Kinvolved were working to help schools address absenteeism. We developed an app — KiNVO — that schools use to track attendance and to send text messages to families so they know whether or not their children are in class in real time. More than 100,000 stakeholders at 90 preK-12 schools in New York City benefit from KiNVO. At schools using the app, attendance rates improved 13 times that of an average NYC school.
As a CAN participant, my efforts focus on supporting the 60 schools in Community District 3. My CAN colleagues and I recruit schools in the neighborhood to be “All-In” schools, meaning they have committed to joining the fight against chronic absenteeism. By the end of the school year, there will be 30 “All-In” schools that participate in SBRT-sponsored events, webinars and meetings to exchange best practices to elevate attendance.
In part, as a result of these efforts, “All-In” schools that had regular attendance meetings and staff dedicated to attendance, experienced a drop in absenteeism between 5.7 percent and 10.3 percent from the 2014-2015 school year to the 2015-2016 school year.
According to SBRT co-directors Elizabeth Clay-Roy and Abe Fernandez, the organization wants its model and learnings to be open sourced. That way, improvement in school attendance will extend beyond Community District 3 in the South Bronx to the entire country.
Looking back, I have realized that I learned about SBRT and its focus on chronic absenteeism just before my reunion with Tonya and her daughter Destiny. That day, as we parted ways, I hugged Tonya goodbye and felt Destiny’s small arms hugging my knees. I looked down at her eager smile and bright eyes and wished her a wonderful school year.
I believe that through the work of South Bronx Rising Together and also Kinvolved’s progress in fighting chronic absenteeism, we’re going to help Destiny and her peers achieve a future that hasn’t been as easily attained for her mother.
Miriam Altman is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Kinvolved.
Correction: The original version of this post misidentified Miriam Altman in the second photo. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
The School Where Only Addicts Roam the Hallways
A year ago, Penelope sat alone in her darkened bedroom, numbed out on drugs.
It was her junior year in high school. She’d quit the volleyball club after showing up high too many times. Her grades were mostly Cs and Ds. College seemed out of reach. And rehab? She tried that, for four months, but when she got out, she surrendered to the pressure to use again.
“I was just really unhappy unless I was high,” she recalls.
Today, Penelope (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is a student at a specialized school in New Jersey that teaches teens how to maintain long-term sobriety—viewing addiction not as a moral wrong, but as a health issue. It ditched old ways of thinking about drug abuse as an acute crisis in favor of a model that treats addiction as a chronic disease that necessitates a lifestyle change.
The school, Raymond J. Lesniak Experience, Strength and Hope Recovery High School, only has seven students. It’s one of just 38 so-called “recovery” schools across the country, says Sasha McLean, a Houston educator who sits on the Association of Recovery Schools’s board of directors. After the failure of the War on Drugs and the spread of addiction into whiter suburbs, new ways of treating addiction view recovery as a long-term, cyclical process that includes relapses and requires new peer relationships, experts say.
Compared to 2002, teen usage of marijuana is on the decline nationwide. Yet over roughly the same period, overdoses have risen. Contrary to popular thought, the classic notion of peer pressure isn’t to blame, explains Brian C. Kelly, Purdue University associate professor of sociology. Rather, young people ponder “whether they think substance use will allow them to have more fun with their friends,” he says. In other words, teens pick their friends based on who else will smoke with them.
While empirical evidence on recovery high schools is limited, they could work by “giving kids the opportunity to hit the reset button on their social networks,” Kelly believes. Extracted from their old schools, young addicts won’t hang out with their drug-using friends and can build strong relationships with other sober youth.
Run by the nonprofit Prevention Links, Penelope’s school is New Jersey’s first recovery high school. Founded in 2015, it integrates traditional classwork with specialized drug counseling. Operating out of a basement in Roselle Park, Lesniak High School’s tiny staff has helped 25 families cope with opioid, cannabis and alcohol abuse. “Really what we’re creating is the opportunity to build new strengths to be able to go back into that [prior] environment and deal with those temptations,” says Pamela Capaci, who opened the school after five years of lobbying.
In most respects, Lesniak resembles a regular public school. Students return home at the end of the day, and no one pays tuition. Math and language arts are taught in person; other courses are conducted online, giving Penelope the responsibility to work through the material at her own pace. Small class sizes prevent Penelope from playing hooky or zoning out in class. “That’s useful if you’re someone like me who likes to be rebellious,” she says.
A sizable portion of the day is devoted to talking about recovery. Penelope sets goals for the short and long term each week in eight categories, ranging from academics to sobriety. After lunch, Penelope and her classmates add links to a paper chain of things for which they’re grateful. If she ever feels the temptation to use, she can retreat to a recovery room to recline on beanbags or jump on a mini-trampoline. But hardest of all, Penelope reports, are the regular drug tests.
That’s because, for months after she enrolled, Penelope couldn’t kick her addiction. She knew she should stay clean. It was her senior year, her one chance to get into college. Still, through December, Penelope couldn’t stop smoking pot. “It was part of my life for so long that it made me feel safe to get away from my problems,” she says, adding, “Addiction isn’t something that is a choice. It’s something you have for your whole life.”
Penelope occasionally sneaks a puff of weed, but relapses are rare. She believes she’s far better off at Lesniak than she’d be at her old school, where she once walked in on a girl snorting a line of coke in the bathroom and the pressure to use felt inescapable.
Temptations flared, in particular, on Friday nights when Penelope’s Snapchat features a torturous live stream of drinking and smoking at local house parties. Old classmates texted her, “Want to burn?” or “Should we get wasted tonight?” Like most teenagers, Penelope struggled to say no.
“Some people can choose to get high. I really can’t stop when I do it.”
What finally changed? Penelope credits her relationship with the school’s clinical social worker and two recovery mentors who are recovering addicts. They draw on personal experiences with sobriety to commiserate and to share tips. Because they understand the tough battle against addiction, they know there will be slip-ups. Rather than berating Penelope when she got high over winter break, they stuck with her. “Recovery is not a linear process,” says program coordinator Morgan Thompson.
Given the complexities youth face, the school says it gauges its effectiveness, not in how many days students stay clean, but in how many full-blown relapses it prevents. “The model allows us to catch things very early. We have kids coming to school saying, ‘I smoked pot last night, and I don’t want to do it again,’” explains Capaci. “The story of our success lies in what happens … to get them back and not experience any lost learning time. It sheds the shame and fear around their struggle to learn new behaviors.”
Penelope vouches this approach works. The fact that someone’s checking in on her makes her think twice, she says. “If I were just at home and came up with a plan, the chance of me following through wouldn’t be too realistic,” Penelope adds. “Here, when I come in every day, they check up on me. It’s a backbone. That’s really what this place is: a backbone for me.”
Penelope has clocked two months of sobriety. She’s back at the gym. Her report card is filled with As. She’s applied to six colleges where she hopes to study medicine and has already been admitted to two.
She will always be vulnerable to addiction, but Penelope now has the tools to triumph over it.
Feminist Writers Break the Glass Ceiling, the Push to End the School-to-Prison Pipeline and More
How Feminists Took On the Mainstream Media and Won, Quartz
Women’s magazines have come a long way from publishing the sex and beauty tips of decades past. Likewise, feminist writing has moved from the hidden corners of the blogosphere. What’s given rise to strong female voices in mainstream media? As Quartz notes, “Only in the internet age have feminist voices finally been able to break the stranglehold that straight, white men have historically had on the media.”
The Virginia Democrat Keeping Your Kids Out of Jail, OZY
Recently elected Virginia state senator Jenn McClellan is on a mission to do away with the school-to-prison pipeline. Her unique ability to draw bipartisan support is making her particularly effective in passing legislation, and she’s using her influence to push for limits on student suspension and police presence in schools.
Inside the Schools That Want to Create the Next Mark Zuckerberg — Starting at Age 5, Inc.
Youth entrepreneurship programs are on the rise in schools across the globe, with students pitching, launching and even profiting off of their own businesses. “It’s your neighborhood lemonade stand on steroids,” says Inc. As the nature of work evolves, educators are rethinking the system to prioritize 21st-century skills like innovation, persistence and networking.
MORE: How Digital Tools Are Helping in the Fight for Gender Equality
NationSwell Council Members React to President Trump’s Congressional Address
In his debut before both houses of Congress, President Donald J. Trump used traditional rhetoric to reveal his administration’s legislative goals for the coming year. Promising drastic increases in defense spending and replacement of crumbling infrastructure, Trump also spoke about his bold plans for American manufacturing, public education, the coal industry and tax reform.
Here, NationSwell Council members detail how to move forward on these areas of focus.
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Learning to Code Is Vital for Today’s Students. This Nonprofit Helps Schools Teach It
Acerlia Bennet, a 17-year-old New Yorker from the Bronx, likes to read heady political news, often twice, from top to bottom, to make sure she’s fully comprehending the story. But she knows she’s unique: Her peers spend more time sharing memes. So at a local hackathon sponsored by Code/Interactive last summer, Bennet and three other high schoolers built a preliminary website that could translate hard news into more entertaining teen-speak. The algorithm, written with the programming language Python over a 72-hour weekend, extracts text from newspapers and replaces big, confusing words with simpler terms. “That way, they read it and know what’s going on,” Bennet says.
That type of out-of-the-box thinking — and the deep understanding of code to make it a reality — is the end goal of Code/Interactive (C/I), a nonprofit based in New York City. Since 2010, C/I has helped public schools better teach computer science. The program, which currently counts about 5,000 students in six states, is comprehensive: As early as third grade, kids begin experimenting with simple, block-based coding. By the time they reach high school, C/I is preparing them to excel on the Advance Placement (AP) computer science exam.
Besides equipping students with invaluable coding and web development skills, C/I provides teacher training and curricula for the classroom; hosts hackathons and arranges office tours at tech companies for students; and provides a select number of full-ride college scholarships, attracting those teens who otherwise wouldn’t apply for, or couldn’t afford to earn, a computer science degree.
“These computer skills are as fundamental to this generation of students as carpentry was to my father. Back then, not everyone built a home, but they all knew how to hang a picture and how to assemble a table,” says Mike Denton, C/I’s executive director. “The knowledge about tech you interact with is invaluable, and it’s necessary as these technologies become ubiquitous in every industry.”
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C/I got its start in 2001 as an arts organization in the Bronx. Back then, the nonprofit was providing basic technology like video cameras, color printers and online-accessible computers to at-risk youth. By 2010, though, as more and more people gained internet access through smartphones, the mission felt outdated. Denton, then a board member, left his consulting work to revamp the agency. Under his leadership, C/I began offering an after-school coding class on JavaScript at a local community center. “We recognized pretty quickly that teaching 20 kids would not solve the problems we knew existed,” Denton says. To scale their vision, C/I turned its focus to integrating programming lessons into the school day.
C/I first works with teachers who don’t have a background in computer science or engineering, offering seminars during professional development days. Over the course of anywhere from six days to six weeks throughout the year, educators come together to talk through the coding coursework, asking questions ranging from the simple, like what HTML stands for (that would be HyperText Markup Language), to wondering if there is a way to learn coding without a computer on hand (there is).
They also learn that C/I’s pedagogical method derives from an unexpected source: foreign language classes. After all, says Denton, “Computer science, more than anything else, is a language.” So like in Spanish or German classes, the teachers coach students in “grammar,” showing how individual units must be strung together, line by line. The new coders then, in turn, put those lessons into practice as they work to build a website or design a mobile app. Later on in their instruction, students participate in the equivalent of an all-immersive study-abroad trip, diving in to collaborative projects at weekend hackathons.
As students master the new language, like Bennet has done, C/I organizes office tours to show the multiplicity of careers in tech. In Austin, Texas, for example, students might visit a cloud-storage company’s offices or an architectural firm, all of which can use the language of coding in different ways. In New York, Bennet has dropped in at Google, BuzzFeed, FourSquare and so many small startups that she can’t remember all of the names.
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“A lot of times students say they want to be a lawyer or doctor because they know those are professions where you can make money more easily. But they might not be aware of the other positions that are available to them,” says Julia Barraford-Temel, C/I’s program manager for its Texas program, Coding4TX. “We bring them there so they can visualize their future.”
To be sure, C/I is not a workforce-development program. Students aren’t funneled into entry-level software testing jobs as soon as they complete their coursework. (About 70 percent of graduating seniors from C/I do choose computer science as a major or minor in college.) As a student at an arts high school focused on film, Bennet, for example, likes the idea of pursuing animation at a company like Pixar. But whichever career path she chooses, she credits C/I with strengthening her creative approach to problem-solving. “Computer science is not just a bunch of code,” she says. “It’s more about connecting through software and tech, with everyone building and creating and being more innovative.”
Denton echoes her point. To him, the main goal of C/I is for young people to understand the technology that now dictates so much of our lives. “We’re only at the beginning of the tech revolution,” he says. “By 2025, these kids are genuinely going to make a massive difference in the world.”
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
In a Divided America, What’s the First Step in Erasing Prevalent Stereotypes?
In a recent experiment, elementary-school age girls and boys were told a story featuring a “really, really smart” gender-neutral protagonist. Then, they were handed four pictures — two men and two women — and asked to pick out the character from the story. By age 6, girls were significantly less likely to pick the pictures of their own gender, the study concluded. NationSwell Council member Amanda Mortimer is trying change the narrative. As the director of production at The Representation Project, she’s pointing out the stereotypes in our culture and teaching young people to overcome them.
Has there been a time when you’ve been affected by [stereotype] images from pop culture?
I grew up in the 1980s playing with Barbie dolls and watching Disney movies—experiences that taught me the ideal woman must have unnaturally long legs, a tiny waist and large breasts. It might not have been possible, but that was the ideal. As a teenager, when I leveled out at 5’3”, I had to reconcile cultural notions of beauty with realistic ones and, at the same time, learn to celebrate and embrace all of the other skills and traits that make girls great.
What inspired you to change the narrative?
In addition to limiting the gender narratives I absorbed as a kid, I was also part of the generation of girls who was told they could be anything and do anything they wanted. Together, these two narratives create a lot of tension: You can be President of the United States, but you should look like a swimsuit model. I didn’t realize how much these stories were hurting me and other women until I saw the documentary Miss Representation by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. It wasn’t that the documentary revealed compromising images of women I had never seen before, but it connected the dots for me in a powerful way between the limited ways girls and women are pictured and the limited ways women are represented in positions of power and influence.
Last November, our country bared its divisions by race, class and geography. Do you think there is still time to repair our ideas of one another?
The short answer is yes. Years before working in news and documentaries, I worked on political campaigns. Elections always teach us something, and this past presidential election gave us all a lot to think about. The truth is, we are experiencing one of the most extreme periods of economic and social inequality in our nation’s history; people are experiencing vastly different circumstances and opportunities in America today. Sometimes, the fear of economic insecurity can be manipulated and turned into a fear of others. But I believe we are all a lot more similar than we are different and that we actually all want the same things for our children and our parents. In order to move forward, we’re going to have to focus on our common humanity more and on our differences less. That said, I’m not sweeping centuries of structural racism and inequality under the rug. We still have major work to do to acknowledge, reconcile and make reparations for our history of racism and oppression in America.
In your mind, what’s been the most successful way The Representation Project has done that?
Our work is all about awakening minds and raising consciousness about stereotypes that are so pervasive in our lives we sometimes don’t even recognize them. Once you are aware, you can be educated about the costs and consequences of these messages, and then you can start to change attitudes, behavior and, ultimately, culture. We believe that media is both the message and the messenger, so we do a lot of work through media, especially film. We’re working on a third documentary now that will expand the conversation about how our values shape our culture, with a deeper look at how inequality is experienced in America in terms of race, class and gender.
How do you train the next generation of children not to be swayed by what they’re seeing?
Last summer [The Representation Project] held our first annual Global Youth Leadership Summit and brought together an incredible group of youth from all walks of life. The program of experts and celebrities taught these kids how to recognize limiting stereotypes in their media, explained why they are damaging and then taught them how to have conversations about those limiting narratives in their own communities.
Homepage photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
The Surprising Story Behind One School’s Healthy Lunch Program, The Best Way to Reach Your Reps and More
Revenge of the Lunch Lady, The Huffington Post Highline
In a country where cheap mass-produced food is king and pizza counts as a vegetable, healthy lunches for kids can be hard to come by. But a recent revamp of school fare in Huntington, W.V., previously designated as the nation’s unhealthiest city, provides a hopeful model. There, an enterprising employee managed to implement a healthy lunch program, starring locally grown produce, while maintaining the district’s minuscule $1.50-per-meal budget.
Getting a Busy Signal When You Call Congress? Here’s How to Get Through, The Christian Science Monitor
Since President Trump’s inauguration last month, there’s been a surge in citizens reaching out to Congress, but not all forms of communication are equally effective. If you really want your voice heard, say experts, try meeting with your representative in person, writing a personal letter and focusing on policy rather than cabinet picks.
The Compost King of New York, The New York Times
New York City alone generates 1 million tons of organic waste per year, but a new plant on Long Island will process this waste into both fertilizer and clean energy, generating significant returns. This new large-scale industrial waste processing is both more environmentally friendly and more profitable than traditional composting, and could revolutionize American energy.
Continue reading “The Surprising Story Behind One School’s Healthy Lunch Program, The Best Way to Reach Your Reps and More”
The Latest Upgrade in Workplace Benefits, a Surprising Group Takes on Fake News and More
Employers Are Finally Starting to Deal With Death and Dying, Bloomberg
Now that many businesses have established (or even expanded) childcare leave policies, some are giving their employees the space to cope with life’s sorrows as well. Forward-thinking companies like Facebook now offer extended paid time off for workers caring for relatives with long-term illnesses or grieving the loss of a loved one. As one advocate said, “This expands the concept of what it is whole people need.”
Librarians Take Up Arms Against Fake News, The Seattle Times
As hyper-biased and made-up news proliferates, young people are even more vulnerable than adults to misinformation. To help students sort through the noise, librarians and other educators launched “digital life” courses that train kids to think critically and fact-check the articles they read.
Wall Street Diversifies Itself, The Atlantic
While most executive roles in the financial industry are still held by white men, there’s a subset of investment trading that attracts more diverse leaders. Without the “100-year history of what the people in charge look like,” women and people of color found success in the new frontier of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which emerged in the early ’90s. Insiders anticipate the rest of Wall Street will follow suit, as increased diversity has proven to improve returns.
MORE: How Digital Tools Are Helping in the Fight for Gender Equality