Michael Bitz,Youth Music Exchange. Michael Bitz was awarded The Mind Trust Fellowship to develop and launch Youth Music Exchange (YME), an initiative that aims to tackle the “engagement gap” by linking learning with student interests, thereby increasing student motivation to achieve. YME provides students in schools and after-school programs with the opportunity to create and manage their own record labels. Students learn to establish self-sustaining businesses by writing and recording music, developing marketing plans, designing CD artwork, creating business plans and selling their music in the community. The YME curriculum is aligned with state learning standards to ensure students become better readers, writers and mathematicians as they engage in the multi-faceted record label creation process. Bitz’s initiative offers an innovative, break-through approach to engaging students in their learning.
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Celine Coggin, Teach Plus. Celine Coggins was awarded a Fellowship by The Mind Trust to develop and launch Teach Plus, an organization that supports the retention of effective teachers in urban schools by working with teachers and policymakers to modernize the profession. The quality of classroom teachers is the single most important factor in student achievement. Yet, Coggins argues, the profession is not organized to reward excellence, promote teacher development, or retain top performers. While there are prominent initiatives bringing new talent into K-12 classrooms (e.g., Teach For America and The New Teacher Project), Teach Plus fills an important gap by targeting early-career teachers who might otherwise leave the profession. To achieve its mission, Teach Plus trains rigorously selected cohorts of early career teachers to become policy advocates, then mobilizes them to drive reform in education policy and teacher contracts. In recommending Coggins for The Mind Trust Fellowship, Massachusetts Secretary of Education, Paul Reville, observed, “Teach Plus speaks to the most significant educational challenge of our time: improving the quality of teaching by building the quality and capacity of our teaching force.”
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Abigail Falik, Global Citizen Year. Abigail Falik was awarded The Mind Trust Fellowship to launch Global Citizen Year (GCY), a non-profit organization that is preparing a generation of Americans to provide innovative and effective leadership to address the challenges of the 21st century. In response to America’s urgent need to prepare students for leadership in an increasingly globalized world, GCY recruits, trains and supports a diverse corps of emerging leaders as they work as apprentices in NGOs in developing nations during a “bridge year” between high school and college. By sustaining their Fellows’ engagement over time, GCY ensures that participants develop empathy, an ethic of service, the ability to communicate across languages and cultures, and a commitment to become lifelong agents of social change, both at home and abroad. While abroad, GCY Fellows share their experiences virtually with K-12 classrooms in the U.S. and, in their final month, lead activities about their experience in their home high schools and communities. While the GCY experience prepares Fellows to succeed in college, the program also creates incentives for students to graduate from high school, prepares K-12 teachers to more effectively teach about global issues and ultimately transforms the global education landscape in the United States.
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Earl Martin Phalen, Summer Advantage USA. Earl Martin Phalen was awarded The Mind Trust Fellowship to create Summer Advantage USA, a national organization that provides elementary and middle school students living in low-income communities with research-based summer learning programs designed to produce substantial academic gains and help close the achievement gap. Studies have shown that two-thirds of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. In fact, low-income students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in math and reading skills over the summer. Phalen’s model for Summer Advantage USA will use company-owned branches and franchises granted to school districts, charter schools, and nonprofits to dramatically bring to scale scientifically tested summer programs. Franchisees will receive teacher training and curricula from Summer Advantage USA and will be held accountable through the organization’s comprehensive quality assurance program. This will be an important test of franchising as a strategy to bring successful education initiatives to scale.
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Stephanie Saroki, Seton Education Partners. Stephanie Saroki was awarded a Fellowship from The Mind Trust to launch Seton Education Partners, a new non-profit working to help struggling urban Catholic schools find alternatives to school closure. Nationwide, large numbers of Catholic schools serving disadvantaged students in our inner cities are closing because of financial challenges. Seton Education Partners will help ensure that students in Catholic schools that close – as well as other local students – continue to have access to high-quality educational options. Seton Education Partners will focus initially on two strategies. First, it will provide guidance and technical assistance to Catholic parishes, dioceses, and independent religious orders considering leasing space to secular public charter schools and/or converting existing Catholic schools into public charter schools. Second, it will design and launch new secular public charter school models that provide underserved children with an academically excellent and character-building education.
Jesse Hahnel, Foster Youth Education Initiative. Jesse Hahnel was awarded The Mind Trust Fellowship to develop and grow the Foster Youth Education Initiative, a project to ensure foster youth receive the educational advocacy and opportunities they need for academic success. Foster youth have some of the poorest educational outcomes of any group of students nationwide: they are more likely to perform below grade level, to have been held back, to drop out of high school and to have higher rates of absenteeism and disciplinary referrals than their peers. Approximately 25% of former foster children experience homelessness and/or incarceration at some point in their lives; 33% receive public assistance; and unemployment rates top 50%. Communities across the U.S. desperately need improved strategies to better serve these vulnerable young people. The Foster Youth Education Initiative leverages existing resources and facilitates cooperation among local agencies and public interest organizations to develop education advocacy systems. These systems identify foster youth showing early signs of academic setbacks (e.g. absences, poor grades) and ensure these children have strong educational advocates: adults monitoring their educational progress and speaking up on their behalf should they fail to receive the opportunities they need to succeed in school.