Jessica HendrixWorking With The New York Department of Education as an Education Pioneer Fellow
My position with Education Pioneers began with a two day orientation with the New York City cohort. Education Pioneers is a human capital organization focused on attracting and developing talented leaders capable of transforming K-12 urban education. This year’s Education Pioneers cohort is composed of 49 graduate students from business, law, policy and education schools that range from Stanford to University of Texas to Dartmouth. We spent two days getting to know each other and the various aspects of the educational field in which we will be working.
I am working with the New York City Department of Education- specifically with District 79. District 79 is a unique citywide network of over 300 alternative schools and programs serving the City’s neediest students: 21,000 young people and 50,000 adults who are far off-track from a high school diploma for a range of life circumstances -- from pregnancy to incarceration to immigration to previous school failure.
My project is to complete a toolkit of best practices for supporting pregnant and parenting teens which will be distributed to every elementary, middle and high school in New York City. Just this week, the executive superintendent of District 79 decided that we should present the findings and integrate it with training on discrimination that will be held in the fall in front of all the city’s guidance counselors and principals.
During my first week at the Department of Education, I have had the privilege of meeting the new Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and the Chancellor of New York City. Next week I will be leading my second meeting with a team of Academic Intervention Specialists and beginning meetings with people outside of the DOE. I am so excited about my project and looking forward to developing a product that will be useful and placed in so many schools!
Journal 2:
My internship is already two-thirds through! It is hard to believe how fast this summer is going by and how much I am learning from this experience. While I am learning a great deal within the education arena, I have come to separate my role with Education Pioneers from my role with the Department of Education. So following that train of thought, I want to write my thoughts separately on the topics, beginning with the Education Pioneers trainings.
Education Pioneers has led three workshops so far, each on different topics but all extremely interesting. The first one was focused on “Urban School Districts - Driving Improvement through Local Reform” and included presenters such as Pedro Noguera, Professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and co-Director of the Institute for the study of Globalization and Education in Education Settings; Amy Rosen, Chief Operating Officer at New Visions for Public Schools; Alison Avera, Chief of Staff for the Empowerment Schools Support Organization; Phil Vaccaro, Progress Report Manager in the Office of Accountability, New York City Department of Education; and Mike Mulgrew, Vice President, United Federation of Teachers. The diversity of the panelists kept the talk moving quickly over a lot of ground and the passion the speakers felt toward the topic was quite clear. A key point being debated was the idea of having the school as the center of the students’ lives- not just academically, but emotionally as well and all support for the students (health care, etc) could be accessed through that one point.
The second workshop topic was “Charters and Choice - Expanding High-Quality School Options.” This time, the panelists included such experts as Morty Ballen, Founder and Executive Director, Explore Charter School; James Merriman, CEO The New York City Center for Charter School Excellence; Paul T. O'Neill, Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President, Edison Schools; Miriam Lewis Raccah, Executive Director, Girls Prep Charter School; Evan Rudall, Chief Operating Officer, Uncommon Schools; and Sabrina Skinner, Director of Charter School Development, Office of Portfolio Development, NYC Department of Education. On this date, we not only heard the panelists’ thoughts regarding scalability and quality maintenance, we also covered an interesting case study about the difficulties many charter schools run into regarding their finances and budgets. After speaking with some of the staff members from Uncommon Schools, I am thinking of looking for an internship during the fall that exposes me to an operations and finance role at a charter school. After hearing of the extreme need and interesting challenges, I want to learn more.
The third workshop focused on “Quality Teachers and Leaders - Increasing the Pipeline of Excellence.” For this panel our guests were Dena Blank, Vice President of Alumni Affairs, Teach for America; Naeemah Lamont, Office of General Counsel, Teacher Performance Unit, New York City DOE; David Malbin, Partner --Teaching Fellows Program at The New Teacher Project; Marc Mannella, Executive Director of KIPP Philadelphia and Barbara Williams, Kindergarten Teacher, Moorestown, N.J. This discussion was interesting in that not a single person on the panel could define what made a quality teacher, highlighting how difficult it is to create accountability structures.
All of these Education Pioneers workshops have exposed me to new and challenging ideas which further my interest in all the different aspects of the education field. This journal entry is getting a bit long, so now I will quickly sum up my progress on my Department of Education internship- this has truly been a fascinating role!
First and foremost, I have been researching and interviewing a number of experts and various stakeholders to construct the toolkit. My research has included several meetings with pregnant and parenting students as well as teachers, guidance counselors and principals who work with these students. Managing both primary and secondary research has taken a lot of my time and I believe that the remainder of my summer will be focused on building consensus on the look, feel and contents of the final product. Once the toolkit is in a final draft, it will be sent on to a curricular expert, the legal department of the DOE and most likely the communications department. After that, I will create the presentations that will be used in the trainings for the principals, guidance counselors and social workers. My work appears to be on schedule so I am pretty pleased and tonight will be a fun reward!
Tonight I am going to a barbecue at Gracie Mansion which is the official residence of the Mayor of New York City. All of the city government interns are invited and we will each get to meet and have our photo taken with Mayor Bloomberg. The exposure this internship provides me is so wonderful!
Journal 3:
The end of my internship came so quickly! I finished my toolkit and I hope it will be useful to many people once it is distributed throughout the schools – I’ve created something through this internship that will be distributed to all junior high and high schools under the Department of Education (DOE). As I leave now, it is in final draft form with everything from the acknowledgement page to the additional readings section finished, but it is currently being evaluated by the legal department and the communications people. Once thoroughly reviewed, it will go to the designer and printer who have both been selected already.
The DOE has asked me to stay in touch and help with the trainings which will be offered to guidance counselors, social workers and assistant principals in October. I am thrilled to do so and hope to continue working with them in the future. Many statements have been made about the DOE’s slow bureaucracy by various people, but I truly believe that it has become so much more responsive and that parts of it are really offering cutting edge new ideas.
I am sad about the ending of my time with the Education Pioneers. I met so many fantastic people this summer who I hope to stay in touch with in the future. We had two more workshops- one on “Expanding Student Opportunities beyond the Traditional School Day” and one on “Philanthropy in Education.” Both were quite interesting and somewhat linked in that the expanding of student opportunities beyond the traditional school day is generally funded by philanthropy. This led to heated discussions of measuring the success and trying to institute some forms of accountability on after school programs.
Overall, I am so grateful to all the students of Columbia Business School for helping fund this internship whose result will touch every junior high and high school in New York City. The work was fascinating and I learned so much about the urban education reform movement in New York.
