It’s not the first question visitors ask, but you can see it in the darting eyes as folks walk through the halls teeming with students and staff. “What’s the secret?” they want to know. “How can Harlem Children’s Zone (HZC) get thousands of poor children to succeed academically where hundreds of programs and billions of dollars have failed?”

Visitors want to see “the curriculum,” the lesson plans, the data. They wonder if anyone can replicate HCZ’s work without our charismatic CEO Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75. And, of course, a few folks are just plain suspicious and wait with knife and fork in hand for any morsel of bad news to satisfy their insatiable cynicism.

Well, there is a secret (spoiler alert): it’s hard work over the long haul.

The Harlem Children’s Zone Project targets a 97-blockarea of Central Harlem with an interlocking network of education, social service, and community-building programs for children, from birth through college, and the adults around them. As the communications director of the agency for the past eight years, my favorite description of the agency is from a friend: “They do everything but come and wake you up in the morning.” The truth is, I learned, that the staff would to that, too, if that’s what was necessary.

At HCZ we talk about a “pipeline” of services, but it is actually two parallel pipelines: One for children who go to our K–12 charter schools; the other for children who live in the neighborhood and go to traditional public schools. Both start with our early education programs. We have outreach workers scouring the neighborhood, looking for pregnant women and parents of young children for The Baby College, a nine-week series of workshops that teach a range of parenting skills. It’s a great program, but the outreach workers use all sorts of enticements — free childcare, a weekly raffle, free diapers — to get parents in because we want all of them, the good and particularly the bad. Then we have our hooks in them — and them in our database — hopefully for the next 20 years or so.

Whatever It Takes is the title of Paul Tough’s excellent account of the organization’s work, and it has become the informal motto of the staff, who say it with a smile and a roll of the eyes as they dive into the latest crisis. And the crises come with stunning regularity since we work with more than 11,000 children, many of whom face daily drama that would make grand opera seem drab by comparison.

A Baby College session.

“We’re trying to create a community where children are our permanent interest,” says Canada, “and a child who has struggled is connected to a series of adults who stay with the child over long periods of time. This idea that we’re investing in children as a team over time is central to our work.”

At HCZ, we just shake our heads when people criticize Head Start, for example, by saying it doesn’t make a difference for children ultimately. What do people expect when ontrack four-year-olds are tossed into substandard schools for the rest of their academic career, and with a battery of other disadvantages, including the ever-present threat of violence?

Although HCZ has been fortunate to receive glowing press attention, the coverage has sometimes highlighted our charter schools and obscured our work with children in traditional public schools. In fact, the original business plan of the HCZ Project did not include charter schools. When the opportunity arose, Canada, who had watched public schools fail for decades, jumped at the opportunity to deliver a great school to large numbers of poor children. The result was Promise Academy I, which opened in 2004, and Promise Academy II, which opened in 2005.

“We make the same guarantee to children in traditional public schools,” he says. “If you stick with us, you will get into and through college.”

Today, HCZ works with all seven of the traditional public elementary schools in the Zone, serving more than 2,400 students. We also work with more than 900 middle school students who don’t attend our charter school and 1,080 Harlem high schoolers. More than 700 students from these afterschool programs are now in college.

While some have painted Canada with a broad brush as “anti-union,” he is simply opposed to anyone and anything that does not put children first. That commitment defines him in the fields of politics and policy, but also makes him a relentless, no-excuses manager.

“If my mother worked here and she messed up,” Canada once told a staffer, “I’d fire her.”

This year marks a milestone for the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy I charter school: It graduates its first class of high-school seniors — and all of them will be going to college in the fall.

Recently I sat down with Principal Marquitta Speller in her office, which typically clatters with the daily drama and comedy of teenagers, and we looked through a list of her seniors. I asked what would have happened if these kids had not won the school admission lottery six years ago.

“We have 62 seniors,” she says, ruefully shaking her head. “You would have maybe five that on their own would say, ‘OK, I’m doing this, I’m going to college.’

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” she continues, “but if they didn’t have these services, they would not have made it. A few would have become pregnant. …Some boys would have been locked up.

A student gets free dental care.

Promoting the healthy kitchen and farmers' market

The school runs a longer school day and year, but that is just the beginning of the difference from a traditional school. There is an onsite health center that offers students free medical, dental, and mental-health services. There is a social work team, a comprehensive afterschool program, freshly made healthy breakfasts and lunches, a range of incentives to reward good efforts. But what it took to get some of this first graduating cohort to cap and gown illustrates why HCZ’s “wraparound” services, applied over the long term, were essential.

There’s Tameka, a special education student who was shot in the face while walking home through a playground in seventh grade. She and other students received counseling after the shooting, and staff made sure she stayed in school to get the academic help she needed despite the stigma of being left back due to the weeks she missed. As a senior, Speller says, “she jumped 320 points on her SAT because she had developed this determination.”

When Tyler arrived at the Promise Academy in sixth grade, he was a pudgy class clown who was at the bottom academically of a cohort that was 75 percent below grade level in English and 60 percent below grade level in math. While the staff immediately knew Tyler as a student who was more dedicated to getting attention for bad behavior than applying himself, they soon learned the reason: his “home life,” which in his case was a euphemism. His mother vacillated about keeping him in her home and so he bounced among family members, including his dad, who was struggling with drug addiction.

Tyler had an epiphany during an extended stay with family outside New York City. He said that seeing his family that summer — mired in a desolate world of crime, drugs, and unemployment — made him realize “the type of life that I want isn’t one spent in the basement of my mother’s house with kids I can’t support and an education that would leave me unqualified to even be a manager at McDonald’s.”

The lightbulb that went on was powered by the repeated messages he got from the staff, particularly one teacher who became a father figure to him. Tyler said the teacher joked with him but made clear there was also a time to buckle down and work toward his dreams.

He returned an earnest, hard-working student, looking to change the people and the world around him. As he tries to make up for lost time, he says, “I wish we had more time here. I wish there were a 13th grade.”

The lightbulb moment came even later for Crystal, another senior whose mom has struggled with crack addiction since before Crystal was born.

A Promise Academy Class.

Crystal arrived at the school behind academically, struggled with low self-esteem and hopelessness, and had a penchant for being involved in every “beef ” that erupted among her classmates. But staff stayed with her through every crisis.

A turning point, Speller says, was when Crystal was selected for a trip to Boston in 11th grade.

“She was fantastic,” Speller says. “That may have been one of the first times she heard something positive associated with her name.” On the trip, she visited a college campus for the first time. Suddenly, all the admonitions to get on track coalesced in her mind, and she realized there was an achievable and worthy goal within her reach.

“She’s going to struggle in college. I already know it,” Speller says. “In all honesty, she’s a student who will be in my life for the rest of my life.” Fortunately for Crystal, HCZ has a College Success Office (CSO), which continues our support of students when they go to college. The CSO became part of the pipeline when staff realized that our “successes” were sometimes dropping out in college; it helps students with everything from time management to getting internships.

Speller compares her time in Harlem with her prior school experience in Brooklyn. “Same kids, same issues,” she says. “But different resources make a huge difference, including staff with a genuine interest and love and passion for the kids and community. …If I had this in Bedford-Stuyvesant, I’d have the same results.”

People from outside the community may think that the only difference between a middle-class child and a poor one is money, but life in a devastated community is a minefield of potential setbacks for children. There is a toxic “gangsta wannabe” street — and popular — culture that encourages behavior that is ultimately self-destructive. There are ill-prepared schools, the threat of violence, inadequate health care, lack of resources for out-of-school time. Sometimes there are parents who are the very opposite of nurturing. “I think we are gathering a body of evidence that suggests the impact of really negative parenting is extremely damaging to a child’s learning capacity, emotional stability, and cognitive development,” says Canada. But, he adds, HCZ has the responsibility to educate children, no matter what kind of parents they have.

One of the saddest examples is Javier, currently a seventh grader at Promise Academy II.

Javier started at the school in first grade and was already “really way below” grade level, according to Principal Kathleen Fernald, but each year seemed to reveal a new problem.

At the end of third grade, because his mother could not adequately care for him, he was placed with foster families around the city. But the school officials fought to have him placed with his mother again so that he would have the consistency of the Promise Academy.

“He needed us desperately,” Fernald says.

One teacher took his uniforms home and washed them since his mother was not doing so. At one point, when asked about his weight loss, he said he was often walking to school because no one was waking him up in time to get the bus. At another point, a fire in his building forced his family into a homeless shelter.

Despite it all, Javier began to slowly make progress academically and began to improve his social skills. In sixth grade, he told Fernald that he had just seen his father for the first time in years; He had been released from prison. “He’s a survivor,” Fernald says.

Last August, Fernald recalls, she was looking at the grades for the statewide math exams that had just come in and she stopped when she saw Javier’s. Though it was late at night, she called Javier’s teacher, tears welling in her eyes, to give him the news: Javier had earned a 4, designating him “highly proficient.”

Read: Another Long Hall

“This child will still struggle,” Fernald says, getting teary again. “But if he continues to perform at this level, college will be a reality. …The whole cycle of poverty for this family will change.”

HCZ’s work with traditional public schools does not have the same number of hours each day as our work with our charter school kids, but the dedication is the same. Last year, more than 95 percent of the seniors in HCZ’s four high-school afterschool programs were accepted into college, helped with everything from SAT preparation courses to tutoring to counseling.

We track retention rates to make sure that children move from program to program through college. We have a database with basic information on every participant. And our academic case management system assigns a staffer to every HCZ student from fifth grade up to not just solve problems but prevent them; to make sure they get what they need, whether it’s grief counseling, chess lessons, or a weight-loss regimen — a Zone defense, so to speak.

Denise enrolled in a karate class at an HCZ middle-school program as an overweight fifth-grader who was having trouble at her school socially. “I was an insecure child,” recalls Denise, who is now 17, chatty, and obviously very comfortable in her own skin. “I couldn’t relate to anyone.”

She lost 20 pounds, but, more importantly, learned she had allies to push her to improve academically, socially, and to widen her world view.

Gradually, she says, “I realized that there’s not that much difference between me and the next person, and we just have to help each other out.”

Matriculating to the Zone’s TRUCE Arts program for high school students, Denise learned how to express herself in several creative disciplines. “I see things differently,” she says. “After taking photography here, I see things…” She holds up a small pad of paper and turns it slowly in front of her. “It’s all about light. So I see light in everything. When students don’t have that experience, they don’t see light in everything.”

The longterm relationship and trust that Denise had developed with HCZ staff over the years was key when her family split due, in part, to domestic violence.

“They encouraged me to make a change, not just dwell on it,” she says, noting she went on to make an award-winning public-service announcement on domestic violence.

Although the Harlem Children’s Zone Project is too new to have produced adults who have come through the pipeline, there are young people who grew up within the organization, stretching back to the time it was called Rheedlen.

James Washington, who is now 30, has spent 15 years in the agency. Although he was a “respectful” boy, he was an indifferent student and drifted into an ad-hoc apprenticeship in the neighborhood drug trade.

A neighbor told Washington about a job at the agency. In those days, young go-fers were taken under the wing of the older staff around them. They were employees, but they also were youths who needed to be saved from the street. They were regularly quizzed on school, their plans for life, and were given the loving kick in the metaphorical butt when necessary.

At one point, Washington recalls, he decided to take a year off before going to college. When Canada found out, he delayed a Board of Trustees meeting just to talk to the teen.

“He let me have it,” Washington says. He recalls saying to himself later: “They really care about what I do with my future. Maybe I need to start caring about my future.”

Washington went on to college and worked as a teacher’s assistant through HCZ. Seeing how the children took to him, Washington says, “I found the thing that I wanted to get up in the morning and do every day.” When he didn’t have a computer, a program director let him use hers after hours. When he had a crisis, he had HCZ elders with whom he could talk.

Now an assistant director, Washington has become a mentor to several tough cases himself.

“All I needed was someone extra to care about me,” Washington says. “[Kids are] reaching out to folks to put effort into them — and they may be making it more difficult by being disrespectful or doing all types of crazy things — but they just want someone to make the effort.

“At the end of the day, it’s just about really hard work and making sure every child gets the attention they need,” Washington continues. “I tell my staff all the time: ‘The most dangerous thing in the world is a bored child.’”

“To be very successful in this work you have to be on a mission, and part of that mission is that you have to be deeply concerned and care for young people,” Canada says. “But the care can’t be the evaluative tool that you use to determine whether or not your strategy is successful.

“We are determined to have hard evidence that this care and this love are being translated into significant growth in measurable ways in our children,” Canada says.

As the agency grew, he says, it had to be “fierce in the pursuit of the truth,” which sometimes meant telling staff a shiny new strategy was actually not working. Today, HCZ has a six-person evaluation department that creates, monitors, and evaluates criteria for each program.

“The data feedback loop became a monster,” Canada said recently at a meeting of HCZ’s senior managers. He acknowledged that trying to put order into the chaos of poor children’s lives is difficult at best. But acknowledging the difficulties does not mean accepting them. “The thing about a wake-up call,” he said, “is you have to wake up.”

The unforgiving evaluations, the intolerance for excuses, the talk of saving lives: These are the ever-present reminders that Canada and the staff are a band of rebels fighting against the corrosive culture of poverty laying siege to the families just outside our four walls. It’s as if Canada has lashed together anyone and anything in the neighborhood willing to fight the good fight, pulled in resources from outside to stop the gaps, then began ushering children in to the safety within and the hopes of a brighter future.

Canada reminds his managers that the agency, as it breaks new ground in the field, will always struggle with breakdowns.

“We have to fix the bike while riding it,” he jokes, then adds with a laugh that doesn’t diminish the timbre of determination in his voice, “We’ll get there on a wobbly bike.”

— Marty Lipp has been the communications director at HCZ for eight years. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Star-Ledger, and the Huffington Post.

— Photography by John Loomis

In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Jackson reflects on how we can close the opportunity gap in public schools across the country.

Download audio file (jackson_edcast.mp3)

Download the mp3: Building Movements

About the Harvard EdCast

The Harvard EdCast is a weekly series of podcasts, available on the Harvard University iTunes U page, that features a 15-20 minute conversation with thought leaders in the field of education from across the country and around the world. Hosted by Matt Weber, the Harvard EdCast is a space for educational discourse and openness, focusing on the myriad issues and current events related to the field.

Manuel Rustin accepts the Milken Family Foundation Award at a school assembly. (Photo: Milken Family Foundation)

If it hadn’t been for a few good teachers, there is no certainty where Manuel Rustin, Ed.M.’04, would be today.

“They gave me the extra push to do better,” says the Sacramento native. “Looking back, I wonder what I would have done if it wasn’t for them. Would I have even gone to college? But they believed in what I would do, so that got me interested and led me to start thinking I could make a difference in someone else.”

Rustin has gone on to do just that. As a history and economics teacher at John Muir High School’s Arts, Entertainment and Media Academy in Pasadena, Calif., Rustin recently received the prestigious Milken Educator Award. The award recognizes early- to mid-career educators for their accomplishments and future promise. Unlike many teaching awards, there is no formal application or nomination process. Every participating state’s department of education appoints an independent committee to recommend candidates according to strict criteria, with final selections made by the Milken Family Foundation. Rustin is one of 39 educators across the nation to receive one of the $25,000 awards.

“I was shocked,” Rustin admits. “It was a whirlwind week with all the calls and media.”

Growing up, Rustin had no idea he was headed for a career in education. A self-described underperformer, Rustin says a few teachers pushed him to do better and got him interested in college. Once he reached the University of California, Los Angeles, the lack of diversity caught his attention. “How can the demographics of a public university be so different from the demographics of the city [in which it is located]?” he asks.

He went on to notice many disparities among races in Los Angeles, not only in the classroom, but also in the work opportunities, income, and other areas. This prompted him to take education classes and start mentoring students in a nearby charter school in order to try to help. “This huge gap that existed motivated me to enter the field and do my part,” he says. “A lot of students feel trapped in a system that doesn’t understand them and isn’t working for them. The walls of the classroom might as well be prison walls.”

When choosing a graduate school, Rustin says he chose Harvard to expose himself to different cultural experiences. As a student in the Teacher Education Program, Rustin learned a lot about issues he had never been exposed to. And, he says, it was amazing to be exposed to so many people who were passionate about teaching.

Because he sees so much of himself in his current students, Rustin uses his time at Harvard as an example and a personal motivator. He wants them to dream big. He also makes sure to focus his teaching on the students and their engagement with the subject matter.

Being in Rustin’s class is more than just a history lesson; he always tries to throw in as many life lessons as possible. “Each year I tell the students in my history classes that they will eventually grow up and forget all the details of what I’m telling them,” he says. “It’s not about facts or details because you can look that up in two seconds on the phone. But it’s about connections between what we learn from history and how we apply that to our own lives as individuals and society.”

Rustin has no plans to leave the classroom and his desire to help the kids he teaches remains as vital as ever.

“If I don’t say anything to this kid will anyone? Will he be on the path to something great or totally slip through the cracks,” he says. “I’d feel a little guilty if I stepped out of the classroom because there are so many lives you could impact and anyone can slip through the cracks and that’s an entire life that could have turned positive.”

StreetSquash high school students take a break at the SL Green StreetSquash Community Center. (Photo by Ben Collier.)

Richard Polsky, M.A.T.’56, has long known that keeping the attention of kids isn’t always easy. He first saw it as a middle school teacher in Long Island, just after he graduated from the Ed School, then again as a staff member at the Children’s Television Workshop, where he used a machine called the Distracter to monitor whether preschoolers watching test versions of what would become Sesame Street were focused. These days, he sees it with the students he tutors twice a week at the Harlem-based nonprofit that his son, George, started a dozen years ago.

But this time, Polsky has something on his side: squash. Not the vegetable, but the high-speed racquet game played with a hollow rubber ball. His son’s nonprofit, StreetSquash, not only helps students with schoolwork, but it also teaches them a game that allows them to channel all of their teenage energy. And it’s intense. The students join the program in the sixth grade and commit for the entire academic year, for three days a week after school (academic tutoring and squash practice) and for a few hours every Saturday (more squash or community service and tutoring, if needed). Most of the 160 students stay with the program until they graduate seven years later.

StreetSquash also helps students get into college, starting with paid tutors and volunteers like Polsky, who help students with homework every week. Volunteers are also assigned a 12th-grader to closely mentor for the year.

“I tell him or her, ‘If I’m working with you, we’re going to be successful,’” says Polsky of his mentee. “You have to let them know what excellence is. At StreetSquash, every kid who wants to go to college goes.” So far, every student who has completed the program has graduated from high school and has gone on to college.

Starting in ninth grade, students also get help figuring out which colleges are the best fit, and then learn how to apply, meet deadlines, and write the all-important essay. They practice for the PSAT and SAT. By senior year, in addition to being assigned a mentor, students get targeted college help from the staff.

“We help them go on interviews, prepare for open houses, and fill out financial aid paperwork. Everything from start to finish,” says Sareen Pearl, Ed.M.’07, director of StreetSquash’s College Prep Program. And “finish” doesn’t mean help ends after the students graduate from the program.

“Staff from our Alumni Outreach Program make regular calls to students once they’re in college, visit them on campus, help them find jobs at school, and help them navigate the school’s resources,” says Pearl. “Early on, we found that so many students were underprepared and struggled once they got to college. We asked, ‘Why are we doing all of this — helping them get to college — if they’re not able to complete their education?’” To date, about 85 percent of StreetSquash alumni are still in college or have graduated.

And it’s this education that really matters, says George Polsky, who modeled StreetSquash on SquashBusters, a similar program started a few years earlier in Boston by another Harvard alum, Gregory Zaff, whom he met in 1997 when the two were involved with the U.S. squash team at the Maccabiah Games.

“Whether or not a student can hit a great forehand isn’t important. Whether or not a kid ends up being a great squash player doesn’t really matter,” he says. “What matters is getting a great education.”

Photo by Jill Anderson

Although most teachers would be thrilled to write a recommendation letter for a bright student interested in an Ivy League college like Harvard, the first two nuns William Fitzsimmons, Ed.M.’69, Ed.D.’71, asked at Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree, Mass., flat out said no. At a place like Harvard, full of communists, atheists, and rich kids, the young Fitzsimmons, son of a gas station and convenience store owner, would surely lose his soul. Fitzsimmons kept trying and eventually found a few nuns who agreed to write letters, landing him a spot in the Harvard College class of 1967. Now, as dean of admissions at the college, Fitzsimmons makes Harvard possible for other young people, including thousands from working-class backgrounds similar to his. As former Harvard president Derek Bok once said of Fitz, as he’s known, “Bill is changing people’s perceptions of what it takes to come here. There’s such an impression that Harvard is a really elite school full of nerdy people from wealthy families who went to prep schools. The great triumph is when you find someone in an unlikely place who, against all odds, achieved something.”

How are you changing perceptions?
Since 2007 alone, Harvard’s annual investment in financial aid has climbed more than 70 percent from $96.6 million to $166 million, significantly out-pacing increases in tuition. More than 60 percent of Harvard students now receive financial aid; the average grant is $40,000.

But personally you’ve also changed stereotypes by telling your story. Why has this helped?
People really relate to individual stories. It’s refreshing for them to know that Harvard isn’t something you’re born to. It’s something available to everyone.

Is the family gas station still open?
The gas station is inactive now, but the store is going strong in Weymouth. We had a fantastic experience and met many great people.

Do you remember any of them?
There was Big Sabe from rural Maine, right on the Canadian border. He came down to work on the railroads. We sometimes called him Baltimore Sabe because he liked the Baltimore Colts. We had a guy named Squid who had spent a lot of time as a sailor. We had a deep sea diver and a guy named Pete who drove a highly combustible gas tank. Jerry trained horses at the fairgrounds next door. There were firefighters and police officers, politicians, and a number of people who worked at the local shipyard.

What did you learn from these regulars?
It was an incredible education for a kid — for anyone, really. I was able to get to know a real cross section of the American population. We had lecture night at the store, which was one of those old-fashioned places where you really got to know people in almost any profession you could think of. It was also a way to learn about social class and the fabric of America.

How did this affect you at Harvard?
This experience was incredibly useful going to Harvard, where I got to see more broadly what I saw at the granular level at the store. It also really showed me the importance of education, especially when people gave me advice about missed opportunities. But it also convinced me that in our credential-oriented world, we often miss the fact that there are many people out there who didn’t get to go to college who are educated in so many other ways. It’s still very much alive in my mind.

Did you really decide to apply to Harvard after reading about the college in an encyclopedia when you were in middle school?
My parents’ World Book Encyclopedia had a picture of Harvard and a description of it that made it sound very enticing, mostly for its vast resources and its national and international faculty and students. Although Harvard was only 20 miles away, I never visited until my senior year in high school, in part because Harvard seemed so exclusive. Visiting this parallel universe quickly dispelled my misconceptions — as is the case today for our first-time visitors.

True or false: You discovered the Ed School after finding a catalog in an office you were cleaning when you were an undergraduate.
This is absolutely true. I came across the catalog in the Thayer Hall dorm crew office I cleaned. At that time, I was interested in various possibilities — teaching, research, college guidance counseling, public school administration, and international opportunities. Taking courses at the Ed School while a Harvard undergraduate kept me interested in all of the above.

You’ve been in Harvard’s admissions office since 1972. What one piece of advice would you give to readers thinking of going into the admissions field?
By all means, do it! George Goethals [his undergraduate mentor] encouraged me by his warning: “It’s such a captivating profession. You’ll come to know the world and human nature in a unique way by visiting schools and communities in your recruiting; talking with educators, parents, and policymakers; hearing thousands of life stories each year as you read applications and take part in admission committee deliberations, and then following the students you admitted throughout their college years and beyond. You can make a difference in students’ lives and help ensure that good people have access to the resources of a great university in a way that benefits the world. The only problem is that it’s so captivating that you may blink and wake up 30 years later wondering where the time went so quickly.”

Was he right?
He was wrong — it will be 40 years this coming July.

During the mentorship, Trueheart watched the students’ attitudes and grades improve, and he encouraged them to apply to four-year universities. In the end, the students were each rejected, opening Trueheart’s eyes to the reality of higher education in America.

“I was touched by this experience and inspired by these students, who turned their lives around and [had become] excited about learning, only to experience that deep sense of rejection, especially after they had worked so hard,” Trueheart says. “Unfortunately, more often than not, there are things happening [in] students’ [lives] that institutions don’t fully recognize.”

As a result of that experience, Trueheart has dedicated much of his 45-year career to education in roles ranging from president of Bryant University to associate secretary of Harvard University in its Office of Governing Boards to president and chief executive officer of Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. The latest incarnation is as president and chief executive officer for Achieving the Dream, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that helps community college students, particularly students of color and low-income students, stay in school and earn certificates or degrees.

“What most people don’t realize is nearly 50 percent of students enrolled in post-secondary education are in community colleges,” he says. “A high percentage are low income and students of color.”

Unfortunately, while many of these students earned their high school diplomas, many are not prepared to take on college work.

“There’s a lot of talent being wasted each year because we haven’t invested wisely in helping those students prepare for college well,” he says. “We believe it’s an obligation of community colleges to help students who come into the doors become college ready as efficiently and quickly as possible.”

Achieving the Dream focuses specifically on helping community colleges serving low-income students in urban and rural areas build support resources for students. Trueheart explains that the goal is to determine ways to help low-income students of color succeed in college and earn certificates or degrees of some kind, by directing private dollars to these institutions. For example, by sending out leadership and data coaches to community college campuses, Achieving the Dream helps faculty and administrators build institutional research capacity and data analysis to track what’s happening in the classroom and with student support. Ultimately, this information aids community colleges in making informed decisions about which practices to adopt or abandon.

“Community colleges have been underresourced for a number of years and underappreciated,” he says. “They have been doing extraordinary work, and there are lots of excellent teachers and administrators helping students who are not as prepared as they should be. I believe it is urgent, and if we don’t begin to turn around the rates of completion and success for our students of color, then we are a weak nation.”

Her latest venture, Ezlearn Educacional, is an education technology company based in Rio de Janeiro that helps people who have a high need for English language training but who have not previously had access. Through the company, Pessoa continues to study how technology can be used in learning, particularly through adaptive learning platforms and social networking.

“The main goals,” Pessoa says, “are to democratize access to high-quality content, create a cheap and easy way to learn, and create great usability on the site for people with little or no technology background.” The latter two goals, she hopes, help Ezlearn reach the lower middle class, a segment of the population whose education has been particularly neglected.

Currently, Ezlearn’s main product is Meuinglês, a website that helps Brazilians learn English through video lessons, social networks, and other learning technologies. The site’s team of teachers produces new content daily, personalized to each student, to keep the users engaged. Pessoa is particularly proud that Ezlearn uses a learner-focused model.

“‘Learner-focused’ means the student is in command,” says Pessoa. “We do that by creating an algorithm that personalizes each and every course based on each user’s needs and his own goals. A student can learn alone on the platform, although there is user interaction and interaction with teachers as well.”

Since its inception in 2009, Ezlearn has grown its subscriber list to more than 100,000 and shows no signs of slowing down, she says. Pessoa is working on expanding the site’s services, including adding several more skills-based courses, and hopes that its subscriber list continues to grow, eventually reaching her goal of 1 million users.

Similarly, Pessoa also has no plans to slow down. Despite a busy schedule that, in addition to her CEO duties at Ezlearn, includes being on the board of Ensina (Brazil’s Teach For America equivalent) and starting the organization Women Entrepreneurs in Technology in Brazil, Pessoa plans on developing even more new businesses.

“I’m a serial entrepreneur in education,” she says.

“I had just wrapped up a summer job developing and teaching a personal finance curriculum for high school students and was struck by the influence that financial knowledge had on youth,” she says. “To work at FUEL was a unique chance to develop curriculum to promote further awareness of both financial literacy and higher education access among whole families, including their students.”

Working with low-income families in the Massachusetts cities of Boston, Chelsea, and Lynn who would like to send their children to college, FUEL uses incentivized savings programs — including matching parents’ savings, offering seed money for parents’ accounts, and providing additional access to scholarships opportunities — and college access workshops called Savings Circles. FUEL’s programs actively promote budgeting and saving and encourage family motivation, what the organization sees as “one of the most important factors in educational attainment.” Currently, in order for families to take advantage of the programs, they need to belong to the schools or organizations with which FUEL is partnered. How to reach more families, says LeMoine, is among the organization’s challenges moving forward.

One of LeMoine’s own challenges, though, in her new role as director of education and research, is ensuring that FUEL is best serving the families they are already working with. To that end, LeMoine attends as many of the workshops as she can in order to get to know the families personally and observe how the content she has designed is being received.

“I take a very hands-on approach,” she says. “In my experience, curriculum design only becomes real when I can see how it is both implemented and reacted to by those learning from it. … One of my primary goals is to ensure that the material provided to families is meaningful and truly helps them guide their children down the pathway to higher education.”

And her efforts are paying off, as FUEL is seeing its families send their children on to successful college careers. FUEL even receives letters from former participants expressing their gratitude.

“Learning how the FUEL program empowers families who may have otherwise found the pathway to college education almost impossible,” says LeMoine, “serves as a potent reminder of just how powerful our work is.”

It was about three years into his doctoral studies when he was recruited by Norman Atkins, the founder of Uncommon Schools, and Dave Levin, cofounder of KIPP Schools, to move to New York to help start a new kind of teacher training program. That program is now known as the Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE) — an independent graduate school focused exclusively on teacher preparation and certification in New York City and Newark, N.J.

“It happened so quickly. Suddenly my 25-year plan was materializing overnight,” Maddin says.

RGSE is anything but traditional in its approach to teacher education, which is part of what really attracted Maddin, a former Teach For America (TFA) science teacher, to the school. As provost, Maddin oversees all curricular and instructional aspects of RSGE’s academic program, which includes an emphasis on concrete techniques and the use of video to share the leading practices of exemplary teachers. In addition, RGSE’s master’s program is the first ever to require its graduate students to demonstrate proficiency and student achievement while teaching full-time in their K–12 classrooms to earn a master of arts in teaching (M.A.T.) degree.

“I believe we are able to give teachers specific techniques, strategies, and assignments that demonstrate what we believe great teachers are doing already,” Maddin says, noting that at RGSE students are not asked to write papers on educational historians. Instead RGSE students use Flip-camera videos and record their effectiveness in classroom management or submit actual lesson plans. “We want to see what they just learned playing out in action,” he says.

The unique position of RGSE students – in that they have actual teaching jobs – also makes them accountable for students’ success. As Maddin explains, even reform-minded colleges and universities focused on teacher education have “student teaching” elements to programs, but he says, “It’s rare for a student teacher to be held responsible for a kid’s learning.” This is not the case at RGSE. As a graduate requirement, by the second year of the program RGSE teachers must demonstrate a year’s worth of student achievement growth in a year’s time.

Certification is also a large part of what sets RGSE apart. According to Maddin, among the 240 first-year students about 85 percent are brand new teachers. This is because the state of New York allows teachers to teach full-time without certification if they enroll in an alternative teaching program (ATP) where they earn both a teaching certification and a master’s degree.

Maddin first became interested in teacher preparation and certification during his time working at the TFA training institute. His experiences working in rural Louisiana as part of Teach For America with, at the time, no additional formal training also influenced his work. Following earning his own certification, Maddin left rural teaching and helped start I.D.E.A. College Prep – a public charter school based in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, dedicated to getting students into top colleges. By the second year, Maddin was eager to learn more about new teacher training development and accountability so he applied to the Ed School.

“Harvard was incredibly appealing to me because it allowed me to focus on exactly what I wanted to study. I’ve always been a person who tries to create my own education experiences. HGSE provided the right amount of flexibility,” he says. During his time at HGSE, Maddin learned a lot about research and encountered some of who he calls the “best thinkers.” Much of what he learned, he often uses daily considering his position requires him to review a lot of data and research. At the heart of what he does is trying to make teachers the best they can be.

“I’ve seen a lot of big picture policy and reform and think it’s really helpful, but at the end of the day a teacher walks into a room, closes a door, and teaches,” he says. “If I can make sure, or help to make sure, that what the teacher is doing on other side of that wall is best for kids then that’s where I think change is going to happen.”

Grove Hall Prep teacher, Mara Rodriguez, Ed.M.'08, works with a student. (Photo by Jacob Krupnik, 2011.)

School is starting in two weeks at Grove Hall Preparatory Charter School, a brand-new school in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, and for a half-hour this morning, the teachers have been discussing where students should put their hands. It may seem like an inconsequential detail in the monumental task before them — but it’s indicative of the level of care the 11 staff members have put in to getting everything right.

“We sometimes forget the process of learning how to do school,” says Marisa Segel, Ed.M.’08, who teaches English language arts. “We are teaching students to be students, and what does it look like to pay attention — where are your legs, where are your eyes, where are your hands?”

A school can sometimes seem like an immovable object — a brick-and-blackboard anchor for a community, educating generations of students. But what does it take to actually create one from the ground up? Segel is one of five HGSE alumni (along with one F.A.S. alum) who will answer that question for the new school that opened on Dorchester’s Harvard Street this fall. Thankfully they didn’t have to start from scratch, since the school is an offshoot of one of the first and most successful charter schools in the nation, Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, which was founded in 1999 by Evan Rudall, Ed.M.’97, and Harvard University alum John B. King. Even so, the pioneers see this as an opportunity to put their own stamp on the school.

“What’s exciting is learning how to articulate what we are and why we enforce particular rules or approach teaching and learning in particular ways,” says Debby Previna, Ed.M.’97, Ed.D.’11, codirector and principal of the school. “What do you do with the second generation? What part of your parents do you take on and what part do you make your own?”

Roxbury Prep is known for its strict discipline, including mandatory uniforms of blue shirts and khaki pants; long school days lasting eight hours or more; and a firm code of conduct that forbids things such as speaking in the hallways. Combined with teacher support and family outreach, the rigor has paid off hugely. Last year, 100 percent of eighth graders passed Massachusetts statewide exams in math and English, with 96 and 98 percent respectively scoring “proficient or advanced,” compared to a state average of 78 and 48 percent, and a Boston average of 59 percent and 28 percent.

“It’s been criticized for being too strict, but all of those rules are really about how can we maximize the time for learning,” says Segel, a former Roxbury Prep teacher. “That’s why our kids in sixth grade start off reading three grades behind and then by eighth grade they are reading Animal Farm and Hamlet.” In order to motivate students, classrooms are named after colleges; if they slouch too much in class, the teacher will yell out, ‘Ready to be…’ And the students expected to call back, ‘Scholars!’

Despite the success of their parent school, however, the teachers at Grove Hall Prep are revisiting the process whereby students buy into the philosophy of the school — a process they call “on-boarding.” This morning, they walk through the process by which students come into class, which they distill down into the ‘three S’s”: silent, sit down, and (organize your) stuff.

“I think kids feel more successful when they know what to do,” says Teresa Rodriguez, Ed.M.’96, who teaches ancient history. As a graduate school counselor at Roxbury Prep, Rodriguez saw firsthand the problems experienced by students who had trouble adjusting to the rigor of the school; by being more explicit about the process early, the teachers at Grove Hall Prep hope to cushion the transition.

The space inhabited by Grove Hall Prep is unique in more ways than one. It’s tucked into the basement of a residential home for seniors who are raising their grandchildren. A child’s playground sits right outside the entrance. Inside, the school is a labyrinth of rooms with tiled floors and bright yellow walls. “We didn’t have enough space for a separate teachers lounge,” says Segel, pointing out the adult desks cordoned off only by a couple of pillars from her classroom. “They are going to put up some kind of soundproof material, it won’t be perfect, but it will work.”

Because it lacks space, the school will make use of the facilities in the surrounding community. For physical education, students will use the Boys & Girls Club and the Tennis Sportsmen Club down the street; for weekly school assemblies they will use space at Greater Love Tabernacle. “We have to be more of a community,” says Segel. “We are dependent on Dorchester and Grove Hall as a part of the classroom in a way that Roxbury Prep just didn’t have to be.”

Despite its modest beginnings, however, the new school is part of an ambitious expansion by Roxbury Prep, the first of three middle schools and a new high school recently authorized by the state. This year, 75 students have started at Grove Hall Prep in 5th grade, with the intention of adding another class every year through high school — eventually reaching a total of 900 students in the four schools by the time this entering class graduates in 2019.

As the charter school network expands, it will deal with new challenges for adults as well as students.  Teachers at Roxbury Prep have gotten used to working 60 or 70 hour weeks, meaning by necessity the school has self-selected young teachers unencumbered by family duties. Now adding the pressure of developing a new school with only 11 staff members instead of 40, Grove Hall has to be conscious of avoiding burnout.

“If anything the work increases when you are starting a new school,” says Mara Rodriguez, Ed.M.’08, who teaches math. “The numerator increases, but the denominator is only one-fourth as big. We have to realize we are not going to be able to do everything in year one the same as we did before.”

In part, that means maximizing how they use their extended-day program to incorporate tutoring and minimizing the amount of Saturday programming offered. But it also means putting the question of teacher sustainability under the same microscope they’ve put on on-boarding students.

“We have never had a director who is a mom before,” says Segel. “How do we do the work as well as we do and have families? Now that we are in the second generation of charter schools, that will be a challenge.” As they grapple with that question, they will benefit from the culture of teacher-training from Roxbury Prep. The teachers use words like “dignified” and “professional” to describe the attitude there, which focuses on individual mentoring and guiding each teacher to create her or his own curriculum. Now they will look for that support from Previna, whom they describe as a visionary leader.

“What she has done really well is set the tone and values of the school,” says Mara Rodriguez, citing principles such as educating all students regardless of need and prioritizing links with families.  “A good leader recognizes she can’t be involved every single decision you take, but if she is adamant this is the mission, then everyone in the organization can align their individual actions to that.”

For her part, Previna insists she is a teacher first, getting those same highs and butterflies in talking with teachers as she used to get from the classroom. And in many ways, she is also still a student, putting into practice the lessons from her own training.

“The most beautiful thing about this role is the marriage of theory and practice,” she says. “You have to wrestle with ideas about what it takes to ’do school‘ and be academically successful and then you have to make concrete decisions about what and how to teach students to achieve academically.”

As the teachers at Grove Hall prep ”on-boarded” their first group of students last fall, it was the beginning, not the end of that process.