Thursday morning, 10 a.m. Seventh-grade boys, all young men of color, are hunched over worksheets on subtracting polynomials. (You remember: (x^3 + 4x^2 + 3x – 8) – (5x^3 – 7x^2 – 3x + 2).) Their teacher, a college student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, asks if anyone needs extra time. Hands go up and mentors — older high schoolers in white shirts — help those who are stuck.
Across the hall, a student from Northwestern University in Illinois is instructing sixth-grade boys on personal essays. A chatty buzz fills in the room as mentors read over first drafts and point out errors to small groups of eager learners.
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The multiple “generations” all working in one classroom — a college student delivering a lesson to middle schoolers, coached by a full-time teacher and assisted by high-school-age aides — makes for an unique sight. But it’s even more unusual at I.S. 392, a highly successful middle school that sticks out from the rest of Brownsville, an area that’s long been known as one of Brooklyn’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Stranger still, it’s summer. These kids have voluntarily shown up for school while their buddies watch TV or play outside in the windless, 84-degree heat.
The classes are organized through Practice Makes Perfect, a New York City-based enrichment program now in its fifth year. The nonprofit’s goal: To close the achievement gap that creeps in when school’s not in session, says its founder and CEO Karim Abouelnaga. Known as the “summer slide,” researchers found lower-income students forget up to two months of schooling while their higher-income peers participate in summer reading, camps and other enrichment — exacerbating a divide that’s already wide during the regular school year. In Brownsville, Jamaica and the South Bronx, the program is helping 325 students, between third and seventh grade, get a head start on the next school year.
“As structured, summer school does not work,” Abouelnaga recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times. “The choice should not be between sending children to a broken summer school program or not. There is a third way: It means redesigning summer school, and making it challenging and engaging for children and teachers. Students need summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes that keep them from falling behind. They need summer programs where they feel welcome and where they want to learn. They need to be inspired to achieve.”
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The son of Egyptian immigrants, Abouelnaga grew up in Long Island City, Queens. He went to an underperforming high school, where just half of his classmates graduated with a diploma and less than one-fifth were college-ready. He applied to college almost on a whim, sending applications to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (because he’d liked the movie “Good Will Hunting”) and Baruch College, located across the bridge in Manhattan and where he eventually enrolled. Abouelnaga received a 1770 on his SAT, a score that put him in the top percentile for his class in Queens. But when arrived at Baruch, he found that same number placed him in the 70th percentile of his college classmates.
He eventually transferred to Cornell, where with five friends, he decided to start a nonprofit addressing the achievement gap. Nearly two-thirds of the difference between wealthy students and their less well-off counterparts can be tied to summer learning loss. Few nonprofits were working to solve the problem, so Abouelnaga decided to focus his efforts on those crucial months when school’s not in session. He founded the offices for his 12-person team in the neighborhood where he once grew up.
“So many educational initiatives are sympathetic, instead of empathetic,” he says. “I was that kid who sat here, even though I was blessed with an elite education. I bring a unique perspective.”
On a recent site visit to I.S. 392, Abouelnaga is dressed in a navy blue pinstripe suit, purple tie and matching purple pocket square — business attire that he says sets “an expectation of excellence” for his students. At 23 years old, he projects high ambitions for himself and the growing organization. He wants to completely reform a disciplinary or remedial punishment into an exciting opportunity. He wants kids asking parents to sign them up for summer classes.
“Our brand is relationship-driven. There’s so much emphasis on technology and testing, that we can forget how much relationships matter in education,” he says. “Our mentors are what keeps kids coming back here.”
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The walls of Practice Makes Perfect classrooms are decorated with posters. In bright marker, there’s the expected motivational phrases and standard ground rules (“Respect your classmates,” “If you want to be heard, RAISE YOUR HANDS”) along with some tougher expectations (“Goals: Must have 80% mastery in ELA” — English Language Arts — “and Math”). Beside that are poems written by the young boys. A representative quatrain sounds like this: “I remember the night when I ran from the bullet. / All I heard was clik-clak POW, it was more than five bullets. / I was running non-stop, hoping I didn’t get hit. / I was sprinting so fast that I almost tripped.” Another: “People think that black men won’t / accomplish anything but / that’s not true. / White men beat slaves till they were / black and blue.”
Rather than avoiding current events, Abouelnaga and his team have made them an essential part of the curriculum. Students read recent articles deemed newsworthy, like about the merits of body cameras for police officers. It’s all part of boosting Common Core test scores, which Practice Makes Perfect tries to measure rigorously. Every Thursday, teachers input students’ scores into a system to track progress and identify those that may be in need of more targeted intervention with the help of the mentors.
Through Practice Makes Perfect’s rigorous and engaging curriculum, students so far have made tangible academic gains. Last year, the middle school math scores improved by three percent, on average, and reading by seven percent; the high school mentors, who study the SAT before and after the youngsters show up, improved their scores on the college admission test by an average of 170 points.
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But the program is about more than scores; empowerment is one of its core values. Abouelnaga’s summer school creates a permanently visible institution for the surrounding community, instead of empty hallways and classrooms — in Abouelnaga’s words, “unused real estate.” The children spend at least one day on a community service project, which demonstrates they can “make a difference in their neighborhood.” Some kids in Brownsville picked up trash around their school, one group in Bushwick volunteered at a community center and another class in Jamaica did group activities with younger kids.
Practice Makes Perfect is also creating ties between generations, in the hopes that middle-school students eventually come back as mentors in high school and advise everyone else once they’re off to college. It’s part of the reason why Abouelnaga has his college students do home visits before they start teaching — to break and confirm stereotypes and to create ties with the community.
What’s next for the organization? “There’s 1.1 million schoolchildren in New York City,” Abouelnaga says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface.”
Tag: low-income students
The Father of Head Start Shares His Thoughts on Shaping the Program for the Future
Head Start, the early childhood development program, has lurched from crisis to crisis, but it’s always found a champion in Edward Zigler, who’s guided the program through every presidential administration since Lyndon Johnson.
Approaching its 50th anniversary, Head Start has been praised for lifting students out of poverty through education and wraparound services for health, nutrition, mental well-being and family cohesion. One longitudinal study of siblings, conducted by a Harvard professor in 2009, showed that enrollees benefited from improved test scores, higher high school and college graduation rates, fewer run-ins with the law and better health as an adult, compared with their brothers and sisters. Other studies, however, have found that educational advantages fade over time, as early as second or third grade, in fact.
In the second half of our interview, NationSwell spoke with Zigler about how Head Start can adapt to better serve its students for the next 50 years.
Q. So many ideas from the War on Poverty have been rolled back. Why has Head Start persisted after all this time?
A. First of all, people like the notion of Head Start. There’s no way to blame a preschool child for the poverty that he or she belongs to. Anything you can do to help that child has great appeal to the American public. Studies also show that it does indeed work. These kids are doing better. All of that kept Head Start in place, even after President Johnson left the White House. People forget that his first job was as a teacher down in the border between Mexico and the United States, so he personally loved Head Start.
The other thing that’s worth noting was that Lady Bird Johnson — LBJ’s wife — she was the honorary chair of Head Start, which gave the program visibility. I can still remember the first that anybody ever heard about Head Start, there was a meeting that Mrs. Johnson chaired in the East Room of the White House. People came to that meeting from all over the country, and she told everyone what Head Start was going to look like. These people went back to their homes, and then applications began pouring in. These people wrote to have a Head Start in their communities.
Q. Have we made progress since then?
A. Yes, I think we know more about poverty and its impact on children, and we know what works. A lot of it is common sense. These kids don’t get good healthcare or good nutrition. When Head Start was put in place, it included healthcare for children and improved nutrition component. We took all that was known by the birth of Head Start 50 years ago and incorporated it into the program. Since then, we’ve learned a lot more, and there’s been more independent money to study poor children.
Q. How do we judge if the program’s been a success?
A. One of the things that bothers me after all this time is that the Congress of the United States, in their latest reauthorization, they made the ultimate goal of Head Start school performance, which is like going back to what the pre-Head Start preschool programs were doing. I’ll probably stay alive long enough [for the next reauthorization]. I usually testify at these reauthorizations, and I will argue that they ought to have two goals for Head Start. The first goal is indeed school performance, but the second improvement is in the parents. Any improvements in the parents will boomerang in the child. That hasn’t happened yet, but Head Start spends so much money and time on parents that we ought to. We should see if they get jobs, get better education, all kinds of parent measures — whether they use corporal punishment on the child even. Are they, or do they talk to the child or explain what they’re doing wrong? There’s many measures so we should make parent performance part of Head Start’s success.
Q. How else can this program adapt for today’s students?
A. That first year, Head Start was only a summer program. Anybody that understands poverty or human development will ask you, “What can you get out of a three-month program?” After the first year, there were still some summer programs but not for very long. Most became full-year programs. Many who write about development will also ask you, “What can you get out of one year?” Many of us argue that to have a really good program for preschool children, you’d begin with Head Start as a two-year program. Then there would be a Head Start component from kindergarten to third grade, a continuation of some time and effort to spur their performance. Several of us have argued for much longer programs. It’s hard enough to keep Head Start alive, but really it should be longer.
By the way, just to show how far we’ve gone, I wrote a book called “A Vision of Universal Preschool Education.” President Barack Obama, about a year and a half ago, said that he wants to get universal preschool education in this country, and that’s a very good idea. One of the things I’d change if I could do Head Start again is that I’d put poor and middle class children together in the same classroom. I like the idea of a preschool education that’s mixed. The evidence is clear. It doesn’t do any harm to middle-class preschool children, and poor children benefit when it’s more than just poor children. That’s going to happen in this country. Obama and certain governors are moving in this direction. Thanks to Head Start, preschool is considered a success. They should be doing it with all children.
Q. Has universal preschool been proposed at the federal level before?
A. There wasn’t enough money. The argument is middle-class parents are putting their children into preschool automatically. If they can pay for it themselves, why should the government pay for it? It’s hard to make that argument we should pay for middle-class children. But we use the evidence, like putting them in can actually help poor children do better and doesn’t hurt middle class children anyway. It’s not a bad idea for middle-class children to at least rub elbows sometimes and understand what a poor child goes through.
And by the way, there are certain things that poor children do better than middle-class kids. They seem to be more creative. If you give them colors, they rub that paint all over the page, everywhere. A middle-class child will very carefully push the paint, a little here and there. It looks like the poor children may be more creative. The most valuable thing the middle-class kids have, though, is an appreciation for education, which many poor kids don’t have. We’re going to get to that vision of universal preschool, because as I say, Obama’s talking about it. I don’t know who’s going to follow him, I don’t know if he’s got time enough to do it now. We’ll see. I’ve heard a lot of promises in my time.
I’ve had an interesting life. I’m an old man now. I started when I was 35 and now I’m 85 years old. That’s my life, and that’s been Head Start.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
READ MORE: The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
Dr. Edward Zigler is often referred to as the “Father of Head Start.” For the last half-century, he’s been the driving force behind the early intervention program that aims to curb the detrimental effects of growing up in poverty. Since its inception in the summer of 1965, Head Start has served more than 30 million at-risk children and their families. The comprehensive model Zigler pioneered — focusing on every aspect of a child’s early development, not just math skills or reading ability — has been replicated by the Harlem Children’s Zone and other forward-thinking nonprofits, and it’s taking hold in school districts across the country, at all grade levels, through President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods.
Zigler’s also contributed a dense volume of research to the field. He founded a child development and social policy center at Yale University that’s now staffed by 40 faculty and 50 fellows. Zigler himself authored or edited more than 40 books and 800 scholarly publications. For his work, he was presented with the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2008, the highest honor given by the American Psychological Association.
At age 85, Zigler is an emeritus professor of psychology at Yale, where he’s taught since 1959. Speaking to NationSwell from his home in New Haven, Conn., he reflected on his experience founding a mainstay of America’s education policy half a century ago.
Q: A White House panel was convened in 1964 to find a way to help low-income kids. How did Head Start develop out of it?
A: The War on Poverty was put in place by President Johnson and Sargent Shriver, and the Office of Economic Opportunity was in charge of that effort. That’s when we had something called Community Action, but it was very much disliked in this country, and it got a lot of critical press and a lot of opposition. People wanted to be aggressive about making things better for poor people, but everybody finds out, if you fight City Hall, City Hall fights back. Sargent Shriver was faced with what to do next, and he decided on Head Start. Nobody can be angry at little children that are three or four years old. As part of Community Action, he created Head Start and people did indeed love it since its inception. But it didn’t mean that they became kind to Community Action.
At that point, though, nobody knew what Head Start was, so we needed a planning committee to establish exactly what it would be. Most of its members were in their 50s and 60s and rather well-established psychiatrists, social workers, pediatricians and child psychologists. As it turned out, I was by far the youngest member of the planning committee, at the age of 34. At the age of 40, I took over Head Start in this country and become responsible for it, so I’ve been intimately involved with Head Start for its 50 years.
Q: What did the original eight-week summer pilot project look like?
A: Actually before Head Start, there were some preschool programs, like Citizen Grace in Nashville and a program in New York, but the problem was that they were only interested in one facet of a child’s development: intelligence or school performance, both of which are highly related. On the planning committee for Head Start, we decided on two things that were different and that are still in place after 50 years. The first is comprehensive services. You wouldn’t just give the child I.Q. raisers and school performances enhancers; instead, you give the kids health services, give the family social work and give them things the child would need to escape poverty.
A second pillar was parent involvement. Head Start doesn’t raise small kids; preschool programs don’t raise children. Parents raise their children. So if you want children to do better, you try to get parents to be better socializers. Head Start is pointed as much as the parents as at the child.
Q: During the Nixon Administration, you developed standards for the program as the first director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth and Families). Why was that early work important?
A: At that time, I was the federal official responsible for Head Start. The first thing I did was stop Community Action. They already had their own plan for Head Start, and they had absolutely no use for the planning committee. We were essentially a group of scholars from a lot of different fields, whereas they saw themselves as poverty warriors. They didn’t know a lot about child development, but they’d fight to get a better life for poor people, like building a playground in a poor neighborhood. Well, that’s fine — I wouldn’t be against that — but that’s not the solution to what children need. And that’s where the planning committee came in.
We didn’t have enough money to serve all the children trying to get into Head Start, so instead of teaching people how to mobilize, I stopped that aspect of the program, and all the money went to optimizing poor children’s development, which was the planning committee’s only goal. That didn’t meet the satisfaction of a lot of people — self-proclaimed “poverty warriors,” who were getting paid through the program. They wanted to meet with me to see if they could change my mind. As a public official, I was glad to meet with them. As the meeting went on, the guy who was really the leader of the group at the opposite end of this long conferences table from me, stood up and said, “Dr. Zigler, you just don’t understand us. We are willing to give up a generation of our children in order to do our work.” And I remember at the time, I stood up at my end of the table and said, “Well you might be willing to, but I’m trying to help this generation of your children and to help coming generations of children. And this meeting is over.” And that was that.
Q: In the late 1980s you criticized some centers for not living up to their promise, telling The New York Times in a front-page article that one-third of the centers should be shuttered. Why was that rigorous emphasis on results important for Head Start’s success?
A: Head Start probably started too big. Instead of getting the 35,000 kids that Shriver and Johnson wanted, we put 266,000 into Head Start that first summer. The way it was being funded, we were running a lot of very poor, mediocre programs and hadn’t close any that were poorly functioning. When I came in, I emphasized only two things that would determine the effectiveness of Head Start. One is the quality of the program — are there good teachers in the classroom teaching these children? — and second was its length. The longer the program, the more impact it’s going to have.
Another good thing happened recently. See, for years and years, you didn’t have to reapply. Every five years, you automatically got a new grant. This practice has ended. What is in place now is a monitoring system in which Head Start is evaluated, and if the program is poor, its funding is taken away and somebody else gets it. The improvement in Head Start has taken way too long, but it’s in progress in a pretty satisfactory way now.
Q: You’ve worked with nearly every administration from Johnson through Clinton. Did you have a favorite one to work with?
A: I worked with all of them. After a new administration would come in, I was asked to be a consultant for Head Start. [long pause] Let me tell you a story about President Johnson and what Head Start meant to him. When he left the White House and went back to his ranch in Texas, he discovered a Head Start center nearby. His daughters worked in Head Start, and every day he would go to the center. Now, Johnson was a great, big tall man, and he would fill his side pockets with jelly beans. All the kids got to know him. They’d reach into his pocket and get the jelly beans. After a while, all the kids in the Head Start program were calling him Mr. Jelly Beans. He was so obviously in love with education.
Q: Have there been disappointments along the way?
A: Head Start has gone from crisis to crisis. The worst one happened about one week after I got to Washington, D.C. If you know Washington, you know the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) really runs the place. So during the first week, I was called to this meeting and a guy from OMB was there and he puts a piece of white paper on the table and said, “Here’s the plan. In the first year of Head Start, you will close one-third of the Head Start centers. The second year, you will close another third of the Head Start centers, and the third year you will close the remaining ones.” I was one of the founders of Head Start, but it was going to be gone in three years.
So the same day, I went to the head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare [now the Department of Health and Human Services], Eliot Richardson’s office, and told his secretary, “I must see the Secretary immediately.” Nobody says that unless they’re pretty damn serious, so she went in and of course he saw me immediately. He and I had hit it off. He was a great boss, a very smart guy. I told him what had just happened at this meeting run by OMB, and he looked at me in amazement. He didn’t know anything about it either — a Cabinet member in the Nixon administration and he didn’t know about it. He told me to go back to my office, do my work and forget that the meeting ever happened. He also said that he’d go to the White House and clear it up, which he did.
One of the things that always helps is that every time the reauthorization comes up, the parents with children in Head Start march in support of it. It’s been a very important factor in keeping the program alive. I don’t know of another children’s program that’s been alive for 50 years. On the adult side, we’ve got Social Security. But a program for kids? Kids don’t vote, but the parental participation helps keep it alive.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Community Colleges Have Abysmal Graduation Rates. Here’s How to Change That
Community college improves students’ lives — for those who make it to graduation, that is.
The sad reality for many, however, is that they’ll drop out along the way. Only one out of every five students will receive their associates degree within three years, one year past the expected time. After five years, graduation rates rise only to a paltry 35 percent.
“With graduation rates that low, community colleges can be dead ends rather than gateways for students,” says Susan Dynarski, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “Graduation rates are low in part because community colleges can’t exclude poorly prepared students. Unlike selective schools, they are required to take anyone who walks in the door, and they have to work harder to get those students to graduation.”
A program at the City University of New York (CUNY) is working directly with low-income students to boost their success. Since 2007, Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, has reached more than 6,400 students, providing them streamlined access to all of CUNY’s resources. They’re hooked up with advisors and tutors, have early access to enroll in popular courses and receive funds for a metro pass, textbooks and any additional costs not covered by financial aid.
The costs of the program are steep — $5,400 a year per student, much higher than the $3,300 tuition — but backers say it’s well worth the expense. A randomized study released this year found ASAP nearly doubled graduation rates.
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How Do Young Men Become Better Fathers? They Attend This Boot Camp
At 17 years of age, Kaeran Reyes-Little became a father.
Growing up in Queens, N.Y. — dad gone, mom working long shifts at the hospital — Reyes-Little found himself hanging with an older crowd, getting in trouble with the law. “I think that was God’s way of saying slow down,” he says of the birth of his son, Darius.
Even though he had just crossed into adulthood, Reyes-Little refused to perpetuate his own dad’s mistakes, to repeat the cycle. He took full custody of his son and tattooed his name across his forearm. Most mornings, Reyes-Little woke up at 4 a.m., wrestling with anxiety. “Why did I have a kid so early?” he’d ask himself. “I didn’t get to build a foundation before having to lay my son’s. What am I going to do?”
Through his older brother, Reyes-Little heard about Fatherhood Academy, a City University of New York program aiming to stop the downward spiral in broken families. Despite being apprehensive at first, he signed up. What he found there was a revelation: “Life’s not over. You’re still somebody,” he recalls hearing. “When you’re a single parent, you’re in a bubble already. It takes another parent to understand what that feels like. And this is not just parents, but fathers.”
Across New York City, 749,000 kids are raised by single parents. With the help of Fatherhood Academy — an initiative that was put on hold this spring due to uncertain funding — dozens of young dads like Reyes-Little are learning how to make a better life for their children.
As a member of the program, Reyes-Little earned his high school diploma at 19. And with some prodding, he enrolled in community college, where he’s now pulling a 3.0 GPA. Pursuing a passion for science that’s been with him since childhood, he’s specializing in marine biology.
“I’m a geek at heart,” he reveals, an admission that doesn’t sound strange through his wide grin, but on second thought, makes you pause. Did this tattooed 24-year-old with a rap sheet just say that? This guy, who was once so angry at his father, so bitter because it seemed anyone would betray him for a price, really just fess up to being a science nerd? And then, in case you didn’t hear him at first, Reyes-Little laughs and says, “My son’s the same way.”
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For generations, New York City has been the destination for those hoping for a brand new start. But for all of Sinatra’s crooning, the city rarely offers those possibilities to its own children — particularly those in impoverished neighborhoods. In the Bronx, 44 percent of kids are raised below the poverty line, and in Brooklyn, one in three won’t graduate from high school.
Unlike traditional parenting services (which are usually aimed at single mothers), Fatherhood Academy is, as its name indicates, just for dads. Through several weeks of high school equivalency (HSE) test-prep classes, workshops and mentoring, New York City’s young men learn to become better parents and start on the path towards a college degree or a stable career.
“Fathers are the mentors for their children. If they’re in a different situation economically and mentally, those improvements are so huge,” says Raheem Brooks, the program’s coordinator. “We want to stop this cycle that’s been going on in their families, because they’re training the future leaders of our city.”
With flyers posted in housing projects, Fatherhood Academy targets young men between the ages of 18 and 24. An open enrollment policy (meaning no application questions inquire about criminal history) results in a mix of dads from all over the city. Several still live with the child’s mom, some share custody and an increasing number are single dads raising newborns alone. But they all share an automatic respect for each other as fathers.
“They all want something better for their children, but they don’t know how to get it,” says David Speal, counselor and case manager for Fatherhood Academy. “They just need that understanding and guidance.”
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The program operates out of the continuing education center at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. There’s a persistent bustle in its bright, second-floor office as students drop off forms and ask the secretaries for help (even after being tsk-tsk’ed for wearing hoods inside). The door is always open, even during meetings when it stays slightly ajar.
Brooks and Speal, the two men behind the program, are an odd couple. Brooks is an imposing figure: He’s tall, African-American and sports dreadlocks that fall below his wide shoulder blades. Born in Detroit, he began his career in East Harlem as a “follow-up specialist,” which essentially meant knocking on doors to find the at-risk guys who’d missed appointments.
Beside him, Speal is white, slender and earnestly enthused, like a grown-up camp counselor. A lifelong resident of Queens, he started volunteering at Rikers Island, NYC’s main correctional facility, while enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and was later hired as a case manager there. During one counseling session, a young inmate told Speal, “I gotta go. I got special permission.” “For what?” Speal asked. “To visit my father. He’s in the dorm down the hall.” Fatherhood Academy wasn’t born that moment, but Speal says witnessing the ensnaring cycle firsthand invigorates his work today.
“They don’t want the same thing that happened to them to be true for their kids,” Speal explains.
“The conversations have already changed,” Brooks chimes in. “Our guys can say, ‘Hey, let’s go do homework.’ Suddenly, it’s ‘Daddy’s going to college,’ rather than ‘Daddy’s not around.’ It’s a different dynamic that they never had.”
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Fatherhood Academy begins with a three-week “boot camp” to test commitment and gauge the group’s educational level, then jumps right into 13 weeks of training for the HSE test. Since classes are held on a college campus, dads become accustomed to the feel of higher education. “Rather than just stop here and get my GED, they can see, ‘I’m among young people that look similar to me. I can do that,’” Brooks says.
Afternoons focus on parenting topics. Nonprofits and motivational speakers give presentations on how to cook on a budget (think: a tasty pineapple chicken recipe), balance a budget or administer CPR. In smaller groups, the dads have wide-ranging discussions that touch on everything from changing diapers to relationships with family. “Men don’t have these conversations, you know, talking about feelings towards their father, how they were raised and the values we are going to have in our children,” Brooks says.
Fathers are the mentors for their children…We want to stop this cycle that’s been going on in their families, because they’re training the future leaders of our city.”
— Raheem Brooks, Fatherhood Academy
Those conversations build a brotherhood that provides support when members face with bigger challenges: “homelessness, not enough to eat, issues with the mother, visitation and custody, drug addiction and alcohol, anger, just different things,” Brooks says. Many of these trials aren’t new, but now the men’s responses have changed. “We’re noticing that the guys are seeing a different version of themselves now,” Brooks says. “They bought into the program and into the possibilities for their own growth.”
It all concludes with a cap-and-gown ceremony, a first for many. With five cohorts now completed, the program has graduated 136 men. Fifty-nine of the dads passed the HSE test, 21 of whom are now in college. More than half — 80 fathers — were placed in jobs, and another 35 landed internships.
By all counts, the program has been successful, but for months, Fatherhood Academy hasn’t held a class. Launched by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2012 as part of the Young Men’s Initiative, the initial seed grants from the Bloomberg Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation ran dry, and the program wasn’t included in the most recent budget issued by Mayor Bill DeBlasio. “Here’s a program that actually works, and now the funding has vanished like a deadbeat dad,” a reporter at the New York Daily News wrote in October, noting that the $550,000 budget is roughly the same as housing 10 inmates at Rikers for a year.
“It was tough. We know these guys individually, so it’s really personal,” Brooks states. “Guys would call you saying, ‘Hey, can I be in your next cohort?’ and you’d have to tell them, ‘We’re not going to be around, but I’ll take your name down.’”
Good news came from City Hall last month, when Brooks and Speal found out that Fatherhood Academy is set to become an official city program funded in the next budget cycle. They’re planning to start the next session this summer. Meaning that soon, 60 young dads will be receiving a call with good news: The academy is back in session.
25 Universities, 100 Free Classes and the One Bold Idea That’s Making College More Affordable for Millions of Americans
Ditch your stuffy seminars and dusty libraries. A slew of big-name colleges are now accepting online courses for credit.
A consortium of 25 schools, including University of Memphis, University of North Carolina and University of Maryland, are allowing all or most transfer credits that students earn from a select number of online programs. The broad list of institutions — both public and private, two-year and four-year, for-profit and non-profit — will focus on roughly 100 intro courses in up to 30 subject areas that are offered either at a low cost or for free. It’s already received the stamp of approval from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with a $1.89 million grant.
This is welcome news to many, primarily the 31 million working adults who took a few college classes but never finished. Now, they’ll have a better shot at obtaining a degree, certificate or credential for the knowledge they’ve already accrued. The program also has major appeal to kids who followed a non-traditional path out of high school, first-generation and low-income students and pretty much any young person who doesn’t like the idea of graduating knee-deep in debt.
More and more students are taking some online courses: the most recent figure by the Department of Education says 5.5 million students took at least one virtual class. A degree earned online doesn’t always have the same heft as one from awarded on a physical campus, but sometimes it’s the only option.
The popular Kaplan University, for example, a school that’s been offering distance courses since 1999 and is a part of this program, draws non-traditional students. Two-thirds are over the age of 30, and nearly 8,800 active military, veterans and spouses are enrolled. On the flip side, at Kaplan (a for-profit), there’s been allegations that teachers felt pressure to pass underperforming students, and the school paid a $1.3 million settlement last month for hiring incompetent teachers without minimum qualifications. That’s not to say online education is inherently flawed, but there’s still a number of problems that must be addressed.
The American Council on Education (ACE), essentially a trade organization for colleges and universities, is working to resolve this. One of the most important aspects of the alternative credit program will be setting standards for online courses and helping the 25 schools verify sources and select criteria for evaluating quality. It’s also hoping this move leads the wider higher education community to have “greater acceptance of alternative forms of credit, in a way that ensures quality and encourages more people to complete their postsecondary education,” says Deborah Seymour, ACE’s assistant vice president for education attainment and innovation. If all goes well this year, ACE plans to recruit additional schools by the start of the fall term.
“The institutions serving in this pilot project will play a valuable role in helping enhance the work we have been doing for many years in developing quality mechanisms for determining the credit worthiness of education, training and life experiences outside of a formal higher education classroom setting,” says ACE’s President Molly Corbett Broad. Referring to the Gates Foundation, she adds, “We very much appreciate this generous investment and the commitment it represents to the effort to provide a more flexible and cost-efficient way to increase the number of Americans able to gain a college degree or credential.”
Wondering if your school is accepting online credits? Here’s the complete list:
- American Public University, Charles Town, W.Va.
- Capella University, Minneapolis
- Central Michigan University, Pleasant, Mich.
- Charter Oak State College, New Britain, Conn.
- Colorado Community College System
- Colorado Technical University, Colorado Springs, Colo.
- East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.
- Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, N.C.
- Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kan.
- Goodwin College, East Hartford, Conn.
- John F. Kennedy University, Pleasant Hill, Calif.
- Kaplan University
- Lakeland College, Plymouth, Wis.
- Metropolitan State University of Denver
- National Louis University, Chicago
- Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Ariz.
- Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, La.
- Notre Dame College, South Euclid, Ohio
- SUNY Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
- Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas
- Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, N.J.
- University of Baltimore
- University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, Md.
- University of Memphis
- University of North Carolina
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3 Ideas That Will Give Every Citizen Access to the American Dream
During last month’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared an end to the nation’s economic downturn. “The shadow of crisis has passed, and the state of the union is strong,” he said. But for many, the president’s announcement felt premature.
Currently, 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. Income inequality, stagnating wages and job market volatility make the prospects of upward mobility bleak. According to research by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Americans raised at the bottom of the income ladder are likely to remain there as adults. Two-thirds will never make it to the middle class, and 96 percent will be barred from the top bracket, where household income exceeds $81,700.
Erin Currier, director of Pew’s projects on financial security and mobility, studies the factors that limit economic opportunity. Recently named one of the most influential women in Washington under 35, she has utilized the research to establish nonpartisan agreement on the facts that guide policy decisions. (It’s already helped establish a bipartisan caucus.) “We hold this up to be the national ethos of being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” she says, “but it doesn’t happen that often.”
During a conversation with NationSwell, she identified three areas lawmakers from both sides of the aisle need to address if they hope to restore every American’s chance at success.
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The Two-Pronged Approach That’s Finding Success in Breaking the Poverty Cycle
How do you end poverty? While there’s a wide array of options and theses, one solution stands out from the crowd: education. And not just kids, either. At the Dunbar Learning Complex in Atlanta, Ga., parents are students, too, thanks to its two-generation approach, which is a theory that combines high-quality, early childhood education and career help for parents to build better families and lives.
Comprised of a preschool and public elementary school, Dunbar accepts students into its pre-K program if their parents sign up with The Center for Working Families, a career development center, to improve their job skills. The pre-K is part of the Educare Network, which is a national network of full-day early education schools. The school also has an on-site art studio and infant classrooms, which accept students starting at six weeks of age, reports National Journal.
While parents can drop their kids off from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., administrators stress that Dunbar isn’t a daycare; students are there to learn — no matter the age — and every classroom has a curriculum.
So far, Dunbar has provided results. In 2010, only six percent of students entering kindergarten were reading at or above grade level, but after Dunbar’s first year, that number increased to 55 percent. Furthermore, those student scoring below the 30th percentile on the Peabody Picture Vocab Test dropped by 33 percentage points, while those above the 50th percentile increased by 12 percent.
Beyond educating children, Dunbar provides adult services, including assistance with finding special teachers for students, choosing healthcare, inspecting homes for health risks and educating parents through monthly meetings concerning child development, literacy and health. It’s also helped 1,800 parents find jobs and access to services that provide assistance with tax refunds, credits, childcare subsidies and other benefits.
MORE: The Three Things That Innovative Thinkers Do As Children
This Kitchen Serves Up More Than Just Meals; It’s Giving Hope
The Town Kitchen in Oakland, Calif., appears to be your average food-delivery business, but it’s far from that. Not only is its menu of sandwiches and salads unique, so are its employees: They’re all underprivileged youth.
Its owner, Sabrina Mutukinsa, came up with the idea after operating a cupcake company and mentoring low-income kids. Combing her two great loves — food and empowering youth — she created The Town Kitchen, where the daily special is opportunity for a better life.
Since The Town Kitchen opened for business in early 2014, Mutukisna and her head chef, Jefferson Sevilla, have been hiring youth on an event-by-event basis. By the summer, however, they plan to have a full-time staff of 43. Mutukisna hopes to offer college credit to participants.
Not only do workers, ages 15 to 24, learn to deliver food efficiently, but they also receive other marketable skills, such as web design and bookkeeping. And while Sevilla handles all of the cooking right now, once the employees achieve their food safety certification, Mutukisna plans to have them do almost all of the prep work, reports the East Bay Express.
“We want them to have transferrable skills, not just start a jam company,” Mutukisna says.
The for-profit business’s success depends upon the quality of the food and the performance of the workers, so Mutukisna has high expectations, but she’s also hoping to garner the support and goodwill of the community because of The Town Kitchen’s mission of helping others.
So the next time you’re looking for lunch, find out what a difference your dollar can make.
MORE: These Students Look Beyond Books and Classrooms for the Future of Education
How Old Computers Can Make a Lifelong Impact on Low-Income Kids
Between personal computers and the machines in computer labs, there are about as many computers on college campuses as students. But when these electronics become obsolete, what happens to them?
If tossed into landfills, they become a big environmental hazard. But the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) has figured out how to turn them into a solution that helps out low-income students.
The school’s program, Computers to Youth, runs camps for inner-city students, teaching them about life in college and how to refurbish old computers. At the conclusion of camp, each student takes home a computer.
Dave Newport, director of CU’s Environmental Center, tells KUSA that there are 10,000 computers on campus — all of which are regularly replaced. “We can’t give away enough of these,” he says. The program “helps protect the environment. It reduces cost. But the best part is, it empowers students.”
Basheer Mohamed, a sophomore engineering major at CU, can vouch for that. The immigrant from Sudan received a computer from Computers to Youth when he was in high school. Prior to that, his family couldn’t afford one. “Between us and more privileged kids, it was really hard to keep up with them,” he says. When he got his computer, he excelled in school, became interested in engineering and even researched and applied for the scholarships that now are funding his education.
What might he be doing if he never received that rehabbed computer? “If anything, I’d probably be going to a community college if not just working,” Mohamed says. “I don’t want to know where I would’ve been without it.”
Thanks to Computers to Youth, that’s one computer kept out of the landfill, and one mind sparked to great achievement by higher education.
MORE: How to Bridge the Digital Divide
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