Eric Eisner is that teacher you feared, the instructor who set high expectations and believed his students would push themselves to meet them. He praises success, but doesn’t shy away from criticism. Maddening as the workload could be, he was the teacher whose class you appreciated most, since the challenge gave you a better sense of your own capabilities. Tough love, some might call it. “I’m rough, I’m abrasive and blunt,” Eisner says of his teaching style. “The thing in the jungle that bites.”
Eisner has no formal background in education. He came to it, by chance, as a second career. After graduating from New York’s Columbia Law School in 1973, he crossed coasts and entered the glitzy entertainment business in Los Angeles, working his way to the top spot as president of the David Geffen Company. Big paychecks bought a home in the city’s western hills, paid for his kids’ private school tuitions and allowed him to retire in his late forties.
Looking for a way to occupy his time outside of improving his golf game, Eisner was persuaded to get involved in a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a low-income, predominantly Hispanic area. (It took some coaxing: “I had time, but I lacked the inclination to give it,” he confesses.) Eisner recalls not knowing what he could do for the families the nonprofit helped, but he wanted to meet the children to find out what made them tick. Partially, this was self-serving — he wanted to better understand his own children, whom he was losing in “the battle to pop culture” — but he also wanted to know why kids weren’t learning in school.
The roundabout answer to those questions led to the founding of Young Eisner Scholars (YES) in 1998, a group that took the “smart kids” out of regular classes for biweekly lessons on debate and language, helped them transfer to private, high-performing high schools and mentored them through college graduation and their first jobs.
YES has mobilized $50 million in financial aid and scholarships to fund its scholars’ tuition and underwrites college tours, application fees, summer programs and medical bills beyond a family’s budget. All that capital seems to have paid off. The scholars come from neighborhoods where two-thirds of students drop out of high school, but YES’s participants have been accepted to top-tier universities and won prestigious awards like the Fulbright, QuestBridge and Gates Millennium scholarships.
Eisner admits that YES was never founded with a long-term vision in mind. Instead, the group pivoted as they learned more, reacting with the critical thinking Eisner wants to see his kids develop. The program has found success in urban Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, and this school year, it’s testing its worth in four schools in western North Carolina. (The expansion into Appalachia drastically increased the number of white children participating in YES.)
Justin Hicks, YES’s Appalachia program coordinator, says he spends much of his day in the car, driving 45 minutes to each school on one-lane switchbacked roads. A graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Hicks pitched the idea for a rural version of YES during his first phone interview with Eisner. In this role for less than a year (previously, he was an intern with the organization), Hicks sees cultural differences in what these children hope to be — youth saying they want to be carpenters and farmers when they grow up, instead of lawyers or doctors — but he doesn’t see a difference in their ambition, the way they learn or their intellect. For now, the program is waiting to see if children from rural backgrounds will express interest in attending first-rate schools far from home, like their first-generation immigrant, urban counterparts.
An essential part of YES’s strategy and the way Hicks runs his classrooms is with an emphasis on language. Typically in schools, children are judged by how they perform on tests. If they score well, they’re considered to be smarter. But once Eisner started prying into how much his students actually comprehend, he realized that they were often memorizing answers that would later appear on exams, rather than learning concepts.
In hour-long sessions during the school day, YES reverses the “I, We, You” model (the teacher demonstrates, the students practice with her aid, the kids do homework alone) into something closer to the Socratic method. There’s no instruction without student participation. In math lessons, this means that there are no equations, only word problems like “If two trains, 56 miles apart, leave stations at the same time…,” although the instructors often deliberately leave out the question. When learning vocabulary, flash cards are practically banned, because Eisner says, they often define words using other terms the kids barely understand. Instead, YES sessions involve personal discussion and debate over contemporary issues.
While its students are thriving, Eisner’s answer might not be a scalable solution to our nation’s failing public schools. For one, YES requires huge sums of cash, which bars it from assisting more than a few dozen students in any given city. And troubling for some is the fact that YES plucks only the best students — the talented tenth, to use W.E.B. DuBois’s words — out of the public school system, leaving the most troubled students behind.
Eisner, for his part, would agree with DuBois about elevating the most exceptional students from low-income backgrounds is a way to bring along the rest of the class. He updates DuBois’s 1903 essay with a modern spin. “We are an advertising agency for educational aspiration. The fact that a kid goes to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Columbia, there’s a little perfume that goes with them when they come home from school. It might reach a friend or cousin,” he says. “We succeed when these kids become glamorously successful.”
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That
Tag: low-income students
Meet the Doctors Building an Innovative, Holistic Bridge to Healthy Living
What if you were able to cure a disease before someone even caught it? Now imagine doing that on a larger scale — for an entire community of people who lack access to medical resources, including basic supplies like bandages for even the most minor of injuries. What would health care look like if you could eliminate the problem at its source?
Dr. Steve Larson, co-founder of the nonprofit medical clinic Puentes de Salud, or “Bridges of Health,” believes he has the answer. For the past decade, he’s been using a holistic approach that includes medical care, education classes and social services to solve the healthcare woes of Philadelphia’s rapidly growing Latino immigrant population. “The answer is not waiting for the next trauma,” says Larson. “The answer is to keep it from ever happening.”
Watch the video above to see how Puentes de Salud partners with local health organizations, medical schools and private donors to provide its patients comprehensive treatment.
Minorities Only Make Up 13 Percent of Tech Workers. This School Is Changing That
Lyn Muldrow says she’s always been a “computer nerd.” At 14 years old, she started playing with code, building websites, “trying to create things online.” As an adult, she was good enough to freelance her web design skills, setting up home pages for mom-and-pop stores or creating message boards for community groups. Muldrow wanted to be more involved in programming, but she realized the tech sector didn’t look like her, an African-American female from Baltimore raising her kids as a single mom.
“I almost didn’t pursue tech, because I felt, maybe as a black woman, my opinions would not be validated,” she says. Despite her doubts, she enrolled in an intensive training program from General Assembly, a coding and design school, and received financial support from its Opportunity Fund. Thanks to both, Muldrow was able to switch careers and open her own firm about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “I sort of had to start from nothing,” she says.
Tech was — and in some ways, still largely is — a privileged white man’s world. Facebook doubled the number of black workers on staff two years ago, but they still numbered only 81 on a force of 5,470, according to a 2014 filing. It’s a problem that holds true across Silicon Valley. African-American and Hispanic workers together make up more than a quarter of the general labor force, but fill only 13 percent of computer and math jobs. Women are earning only one quarter of the country’s computer science degrees, down from 37 percent in 1983.
With workshops and full-time classes, General Assembly aims to change those numbers to reflect the diversity of those who want to pursue careers in tech. Ultimately, they want to see people doing work they love, says Megan Nesbeth, head of the Opportunity Fund. At its 14 locations on four continents, the school has trained 240,000 students in web development (the course Muldrow enrolled in), user experience design, product management, digital marketing, data science and business — fundamental skills that can be difficult to self-teach but necessary to enter the tech world.
Muldrow recognizes that challenge from experience. “Back then, I didn’t have a frame of reference of what it meant to be a programmer or developer. Especially when I was younger, I thought it was all numbers and math and algorithms, things you had to know and learn and do to create something on the web, to make something functional,” she recalls. Only after years of attempts did she start to realize that web design is fundamentally about languages. She didn’t need to memorize lines of code, only to learn how to speak the right commands to build what she envisioned. Which, she admits, is easier said than done.
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Muldrow’s progress started with signing up for General Assembly’s immersion class. With backing from the Opportunity Fund for tuition (which ranges from about $10,000 to $15,000), she enrolled in a 12-week course. To support her kids, she still had to work nights 40 hours a week. After the 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day ended, she answered customer service questions from Uber riders and drivers at home for an annual salary of just $28,000. “My body was exhausted and I was running out of money,” Muldrow broke down and confessed to a General Assembly counselor three weeks in. She had spent all her savings to come to San Francisco, and because of her past, a loan seemed out of the question. Muldrow didn’t know if she could handle the stress. “I was really at the point where I wanted to go back home.”
The counselor told Muldrow she admired how hard she was working and promised to find a solution. Two weeks later, the Opportunity Fund helped subsidize those extra costs, so she could focus on her coursework. “I literally broke down when she told me, because you know I’m so used to doing things on my own as a single mom,” Muldrow says. “Honestly I’m just so grateful to them for believing in me.”
General Assembly recognized the huge obstacles to a career change — loans for training and tuition, months without work, a cross-country move — when they set up the Opportunity Fund with CapitalOne and AT&T. A college grad might have savings or be able to take out a loan, but the fund backs low-income individuals who don’t have any other options. “If you think about somebody from a lower-income bracket, with no line of credit, taking money out of savings they need to support their families, those odds are very much against them,” says Nesbeth, who previously worked on increasing diversity in higher education. “These are people who face some type of barrier to access to the tech industry. It takes a lot of different forms, but it’s really about socioeconomics.” Helping them overcome various individual circumstances, the fund has supported 125 fellows, usually awarding $10,000 each.
Muldrow’s story adds one more number to tech’s diversity stats, an almost imperceptible change when looking at the country’s entire labor force. But Muldrow sees herself as a trailblazer and wants to do her part to give back. After General Assembly, she worked as an instructor for Hack the Hood, a web design boot camp for kids in Oakland, and she now leads a chapter of Lesbians Who Tech. “I feel like I have a lot of responsibility to help others to understand that tech is for everyone,” she says. “You don’t have to be a white guy to be a web developer. You can look like yourself and build something amazing. It isn’t all ones and zeroes.”
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 Game-Changing Way to Access Social Services
If you’re looking for a restaurant recommendation, you log onto Yelp. Need a ride? Request an Uber or Lyft. Want the highest-rated doctor in your health insurance network? Try Zocdoc.
It’s undeniable that technology has changed the way we identify and select services. But which app connects you with legal aid to fight an eviction notice, helps you locate someone to assist signing up your kid for preschool, or directs you to a food pantry that’s open late?
Founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas, the startup Aunt Bertha is an online database of human services, connecting governments, charities and churches with the 75 million Americans in all 50 states who need their services, says founder Erine Gray. Thus far, his company has helped more than 177,000 people.
“In the United States, we spend a lot of money attempting to fix social problems — poverty, housing, food, health and job training — the effectiveness of which can be argued. When you look at the 1.4 million nonprofits in the U.S., how do you know which ones are good and which ones are not?” asks Gray. “Most people are not professional social workers. For somebody in need, it’s very difficult to find out what’s available to you.”
The software company’s name refers to no one’s relative in particular — the domain name for Aunt Sue was taken, and Aunt Bertha sounded like an eccentric, matronly figure in contrast to Uncle Sam — but the idea for the company did come from Gray’s personal struggles. After his mother suffered from a stroke, he encountered difficulties locating adequate assistance (she had lost brain functionality and required around-the-clock care). Even though she qualified for help, Gray’s mother was rejected by more than 20 nursing homes, often with a baffling, one-sentence letter that said, “We are not able to meet your mother’s needs” and no other explanation.
“There are nonprofits that offer home healthcare visits if you have income that’s low enough, but I didn’t know about those services when I was navigating my mom’s care. People come up to me after talks and say, ‘My son had autism and I didn’t have anybody to talk to about it until I found a support group,’ or ‘I lost my job and didn’t know about worker re-entry programs,’” Gray says. “As a caretaker for someone who was disabled, in my experience, nobody is trained for when life throws you a curveball.”
That trying experience led Gray to ditch his career as a software developer (he says he wasn’t a very good programmer anyway), go back to school for a master’s degree and eventually take a lead role at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Making software and operational fixes, he streamlined the application process for services, saving the agency $5 million annually. Soon after, he took those lessons and founded his own company.
With Aunt Bertha, a person in Gray’s situation should have an easier time determining if their dependent is eligible for a given program. Searches can be narrowed based on multiple categories, such as age group, citizen or immigrant, housed or homeless and how urgent the problem is.
“What we wanted was a simple way for a seeker — the term we use for a person in need or their relative or champion — to essentially raise their hand and let an agency know electronically they need help,” Gray, a GLG fellow, explains. “Part of the vision is being able to find and apply for services in seconds.”
Eventually, as more users enroll in programs, Aunt Bertha will be able to track whether the charity met the person’s needs. As soon as a seeker submits an application for rental assistance or hearing aids, say, through the online portal, the service will clock the nonprofit’s response time and follow up with a satisfaction survey, creating a granular picture that’s more detailed than what can be found on GuideStar or Charity Navigator. The assessment will direct users to sign up for more effective programs.
On a grand scale, the program is already helping governments and nonprofits (like the Robin Hood Foundation) assess needs and measure the results of their funding. “We can tell you what people are searching for, what they’re finding and also what they’re not,” says Gray. For instance, if the number of searches for soup kitchens in Lubbock, Texas, suddenly spikes, it could encourage city lawmakers to look at large-scale solutions.
“If we’re successful, the entire nation will be able to visualize, in real time, where the pain is in the United States and see the suffering in the underbelly that doesn’t really show. Policymakers and data scientists will be able to see hotspots far earlier than any set of economic forecasts,” Gray says. “To be able to unlock that data and get it in the right hands, would be an amazing experience. We’d be able, in real time, to alleviate that suffering.”
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.”
What Does Swimming Have to Do with Stopping the Summer Slide?
“What we believe at Horizons is that all kids are our kids,” says Lorna Smith, executive director of Horizons National. “The gaps of opportunity, technology, education and so on are creating a disparity in the country that’s not healthy for any of us.”
Smith spoke to NationSwell from inside a classroom at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. During the summer months, the school lends space to Horizons, a free summer school program for low-income children (preschool/kindergarten through high school) that combines academics with extracurricular activities. Its first chapter opened in 1964 at Connecticut’s New Canaan Country School, and thanks to private schools and universities donating classrooms, the organization now operates 45 programs across 15 states and is rapidly expanding.
Horizons focuses on one major challenge in American education: the summer slide. Although studies find that low-income children learn at about the same rates as their more affluent peers during the school year, they often fall behind as they progress through school. The issue: During the summers, children in poverty are not exposed to as many enrichment opportunities, such as museum and library trips and computer time. That’s because these activities have costs associated with them; plus, low-income parents often have less flexibility with their working hours than their wealthier counterparts.
As a result, academic skills regress, and the effects are cumulative. By fifth grade, low-income kids may be two to three years behind their classmates. And their graduation rate is much lower as well (60 percent versus more than 90 percent for affluent children), exacerbating the cycle of poverty and depriving these children from living up to their full potentials. Horizons keeps these students on track, boasting a 99 percent graduation rate for its participants; 91 percent go onto higher education.
“I think that the biggest thing the program offers kids are enrichment opportunities that they wouldn’t experience living in the neighborhoods that they lived in,” says Kevin Thompson, a former Horizons student who joined the program after the sixth grade. At the time, Thompson lived in a Stamford, Conn., neighborhood that was dangerous and economically disadvantaged, and his mother was in recovery for drug addiction. He believes that Horizons changed his life, citing the daily swimming lessons as a part of the program that helped him get his life together.
Thompson swam for his high school team and was a state-champion diver, which led to a diving scholarship at the University of Connecticut. After that, he continued his education, receiving a master’s degree in educational leadership. Today, Thompson works at Horizons, running a high school program. His eventual goal? To run a Horizons chapter.
“This program is my heart,” he says. “For me, it’s really about seeing these kids strive for excellence.”
Participants Claim This Program Boosts Them out of Poverty. Should Other Cities Implement It?
LaKesha Griffin wanted to get as far from Memphis as she could. A self-described “hardheaded” teen, she ignored her mother’s pestering about college and found a job post-high school as a flight attendant for United Airlines. But in 2001, United Flight 175 brought down the South Tower of the World Trade Center and United Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The airline industry took a massive hit, and despite six years of seniority, Griffin was one of 20,000 people laid off from United. Unemployed, she returned home to Tennessee.
“It was an awful thing,” is how Griffin describes her experience of looking for work for three or four years. “I needed to start all over. It’s not like you walk into McDonalds and make $20 an hour.” She obtained a practical nursing certificate in 2002, but still struggled to find work. When the country fell into recession after the subprime mortgage crisis, Griffin realized she needed a college degree. But as she neared the 72-month lifetime limit on drawing welfare benefits, she realized that she was in a bind: without a full-time job, she couldn’t support herself and her teenage daughter; with full-time employment, she wouldn’t have time to focus on her schooling. That’s when, seemingly by chance, a savior called her on the phone.
Five years later, Griffin has a daughter in college (who’s preparing to attend law school) and a master’s degree of her own. She’s been employed consistently since May 2012, most recently as a social worker for the Mississippi Department of Family and Children’s Services. How did a family that subsided on food stamps become so successful in such a short period?
Family Rewards is a bold attempt to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, but it’s rooted in a simple premise: pay parents small amounts of money so they don’t have to scramble to make ends meet, but make those funds conditional on bettering the next generation’s chances of escaping poverty. (In other words, pay a hungry person to teach their kids to fish.) Known as a conditional cash transfer, the three-year program (which concluded in 2014) recruited 1,200 families relying on public assistance in the Bronx and Memphis. Many were led by single mothers, and all included at least one child of high school age. Family Rewards offered eight incentives, ranging from $40 to $500, for these families to improve their employment, education and health. A full study is forthcoming next year, but early data that the program’s organizers shared with NationSwell reveals that this new model could redefine our country’s welfare system.
In Memphis, out of the 613 families enrolled, 99 percent earned at least one of the eight rewards, according to data provided to NationSwell by the Children’s Aid Society, which is the lead agency operating Family Rewards. Nine out of every 10 families improved their health by getting an annual physical ($100 per family member) or dental care twice yearly (another $100 per visit). Ninety-six percent of the 1,097 Memphis high school students who participated received at least one cash reward for having a 95 percent attendance rate ($40 a month), taking the SAT or ACT exam (a one-time $50), getting higher grades ($30 per A, $20 per B and $10 per C) and passing their final exams ($200 each for up to seven tests). The most difficult category, by far, was entering the workforce: only half — 53 percent — earned a reward for sustaining full-time employment ($150 a month) or earning a GED certificate (a lump sum of $400).
To some, these achievements might seem laughably easy, but try passing the GED when your car won’t run, public transit is delayed and you need to get from Memphis to a test prep class across the state line. Add to that scenario the stress of doing it while also worrying about making it back in time to go to work. A monthly $150 reward goes far, especially for a family earning $17,000. But it requires an immeasurable amount of grit and determination to earn.
Family Rewards paid Griffin and her daughter to get better grades in school, go to the doctor’s office and boost working hours — all cash deposited directly to her bank account. “I get excited every time I tell people my story because of where I came from, from having no job to starting over, building myself from the ground up. I don’t think I ever have to worry again,” Griffin gushed as she ran out of the library, where she was studying, to speak to NationSwell by phone. “I don’t know how [Family Rewards] ever got my name, but it was the best thing that ever could have happened to me at that time in my life.”
Critics of the program say that its effectiveness at changing behaviors may be overstated. But anecdotally, participants say they aren’t working for the rewards; it’s the rewards that help them work. Echoing Griffin’s story, one participant tells Politico, “Motivate me? I was already motivated,” says Sheena Lyons, a school cafeteria worker. “I did most of this stuff anyway. My problem is money, not work. I always work.”
Tonya Melton, director of education and employment for youth empowerment programs at Children’s Aid Society, recalled another case of a family struggling with homelessness. Case workers could barely keep track of them as they moved from couches and floors to shelters to apartments. But once the family fully participated in the rewards program, the high schooler earned $530 one year and started community college this fall.
“With welfare, food stamps, [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], I think there’s constant exploration of the question, ‘How can we maximize the use of funds to motivate people to move out of poverty?’” Melton says. “Does that create long-term change?”
In its current form, the American social safety net is an all-or-nothing system. Unemployment insurance only covers someone until they’re back to work, even if it’s a dead-end, minimum-wage job; there’s little public aid for someone, like Griffin, who wants to rise to middle-class status but needs a second chance at schooling to attain it. The amount of aid ranges from state to state, from a high of $49,175 for a Hawaiian family participating in more than 90 federal anti-poverty programs to a low of $16,984 for the same family in Mississippi, according to a 2013 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. A family like Griffin’s in Tennessee is eligible for $17,413 in benefits — about $8.37 an hour if you divide the total over 260 work days, which is higher than the $7.25 minimum wage in the Volunteer State. (Tennessee’s legislature has not adopted a minimum wage, so the federal rate applies.)
Why, some ask, would a person get a job when traditional welfare programs offer significant cash benefits? Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, on The View last year, said, ”You rob someone of their incentive to go out there and improve themselves.” Contrast that with a small group on the left, like the Food Research & Action Center, who claim our system doesn’t provide enough financial assistance to propel a family out of poverty.
Across the globe, however, conditional cash transfers are becoming the preferred social safety net. After witnessing the inefficiency of distributing staples like milk and tortillas, Mexico rolled out the world’s first conditional cash transfer program in 1997, offering steady payments to roughly 6 million households on the condition that families meet certain requirements, like keeping their children in school and visiting health clinics for regular checkups. Our southern neighbor’s model has since been replicated in 52 countries, including Colombia, Brazil and the Philippines.
Tying progressives’ concern for the poor with conservatives’ emphasis on rejoining the workforce, the model interested Michael Bloomberg, then-mayor of New York City. His thinking: that conditional cash transfers weren’t so different from the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families, and that $40 in the bank each month might prove a more tangible incentive than a distant $1,250 credit next April. Bloomberg decided to test the idea, and in 2007, the Big Apple launched three demonstration projects in six hard-hit neighborhoods.
“The worst thing that can happen is it won’t work and we’ll have to try something else,” Bloomberg reportedly told advisors, wagering millions of dollars from his own foundation and soliciting private funding from big-name groups like the Rockefeller Foundation, insurance giant AIG, Robin Hood Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute and more to back $40 million in potential conditional cash transfers.
The initial program distributed only $20.6 million to families. While it achieved had modest gains, particularly in healthcare, opponents said they didn’t justify the cost. “A welfare mother in Central Harlem is not poor for the same reasons that a subsistence corn farmer in Mexico is poor,” Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research wrote in a scathing takedown, entitled “Bribery Strikes Out.”
Family Rewards, the most comprehensive of the three pilots, was picked for a second iteration in 2011, in which Griffin was a participant. To focus on achievable results, the number of rewards was pared down from 22. Funded by a Social Innovation Fund grant, the program underwent a rigorous, three-year randomized control trial in which half of the participants received no aid. In Memphis, those receiving rewards had their incomes boosted by $5,442, on average.
Griffin says she’s “furious” the project ended so abruptly last year. She still refers people she meets to Family Rewards, telling them to call any of the caseworkers because she’s sure they would offer some help, like they did when she was at her “breaking point.” While the program may not be a cure-all for poverty’s grip on American cities, it’s a start, especially for motivated mothers like Griffin. “I’m gonna make it. I could make my rent up. I could pay my tuition,” Griffin thought with relief, when she signed up. “I’m going to be okay.”