Celebrating NSC Impact: NSC Members Mobilize to Close Education Opportunity Gap

When Madeline Kerner, CEO of Matriculate, looked to the NationSwell Council community, she found practical advice, meaningful connections, new board members and financial support for her organization. All of this meant more well-deserving teens could apply to the college that best matched their talent.
We spoke to Kerner over the phone to talk about how we’ve been able to support her in her mission. Here’s what she had to say.
NationSwell: We’re so excited to chat with you, Madeline! Tell us about your work at Matriculate. 
Matriculate’s Madeline Kerner: Our mission is to empower high-achieving, low income high school students to make the leap to our nation’s best colleges. There are many students — up to 35,000 every year across the nation — who have done everything that anyone could ever ask a high school student in spite of incredibly challenging circumstances, all while maintaining high GPAs and standardized test scores.
We know that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.
NS: There are so many students who might benefit from this work. How has your NationSwell Council membership supported you in pursuing this mission? 
MK: There are many ways!

We held a Strategic Advisory Group that brought together smart and knowledgeable Council member who shared their expertise and helped us think through some core challenges. Their advise was so valuable, and the generous investment of their time has really paid off. One member in attendance had expertise on how we can share our message, and he’s really gone to work for us: He made some meaningful introductions to other advisors and funders, persuaded me to attend a conference and offered to pitch a story on us.

Separately, I met a fellow Council member at the NationSwell Summit who has since joined our Board of Directors and been able to support our work. She’s been an incredible advocate. Another Council member joined our Advisory Board after my community manager made an introduction, and has been a real shaper and influencer of the organization as we think about our strategic plan and our future direction. There’s absolutely no way I would have met them without NationSwell.

My membership has also helped build our network, and get to know other folks who have solutions that are driving change so that I can learn from them, network in their communities and get access to different perspectives. Because of my membership, I’ve learned how other organizations have built their brand and spread the word in their own communities.

As a small organization focused on impact, we have kept our heads down to just do the work well — but I’ve valued from watching other Council members tell their stories and having the opportunity to tell mine and get feedback.

“We know that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.” – Madeline Kerner

I also wanted to note that I’m excited about the NationSwell Next initiative. I’m sending one of Matriculate’s head advising fellows to NationSwell’s Summit West. She’s at Berkeley and is a real youth leader and a powerful voice for equity and access in higher education. And she’ll be having the opportunity to meet the community. I appreciate the ways NationSwell is helping young people to plug in and build their communities and networks as they envision the change they want to have.
NS: What’s next for you and Matriculate, and how do you anticipate NationSwell working in service of your future goals?
We are five years into our work and currently have a community of more than one thousand undergraduates supporting nearly 5,000 high school students across the nation. We are launching a three year-plan with three areas of focus:

  1. Refining our model to maximize impact
  2. Deepening our continuous learning practices, including with a focus on social capital transfer and our students’ sense of belonging
  3. Strengthening the organization to sustain long-term impact.

As we embark on this next phase, we plan to draw wisdom from the NationSwell community, and hope to expand our network in service of these goals.
This emphasis on continuous learning with a focus on social capital comes in part from a qualitative study by Dr. Katie Lynk Wartman to better understand our near-peer relationship model. Wartman found that undergraduate Advising Fellows build authentic and trusting relationships with their high school students, making them uniquely positioned to influence high school students’ college application and enrollment decisions. Dr. Wartman found that through this relationship, college students transfer social capital to their high school students.
NationSwell is always trying to learn more about how we’ve supported our Council members in their efforts to make the world a better place. If we helped you, we’d love to hear more about it. Let us know.

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.
 
 

Big Bets: How Tutors in Struggling Schools Are Increasing College-Readiness Rates

Nick Ehrmann founded Blue Engine in 2009 to help better prepare New York City’s low-income high school students for success in college.
According to a study by the Urban Institute, only 10 percent of low-income students get a college diploma, compared with about half of teens from higher-income families. To tackle this achievement gap, Blue Engine is focusing on the academic rigor of high schools in low-income neighborhoods. They deploy recent college grads to assist teachers in these schools (so far, they are partnering with five schools in New York City) and to provide small-group tutoring in the classroom.
According to Ehrmann, who began his career as a grade-school teacher in inner-city Washington, D.C., students attending Blue Engine partner schools are seeing huge performance gains. “We’ve seen college-ready rates anywhere from double to triple year after year,” says Ehrmann. “We’re finding failure rates on high-stakes exams plummet 30 percent or more.”
Since the original publication of this story, Nick Ehrmann, founder of Blue Engine, has become a NationSwell Council member.
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