We Don't Want Nobody that Nobody Sent

Just back from a memorial party held by one of our Far South Side community leaders to commemorate the 16th anniversary of her father's passing.  During a meeting Thursday to touch base about turnaround-school community engagement efforts, Jane invited a few of us from the Network office.  With a look that said, If you don't come, this community will not be engaging with you.

"You free five o'clock Saturday?"

"Absolutely."

***

As a white guy not from Chicago and not from an urban school system, working on community-engagement with an entirely African American turnaround school on the Far South Side ... well, my work is cut out for me.

As it should be.

I've been in this sort of situation before, and my approach to crossing borders is to cross them listening.  While I have my own knowledge and experience with community engagement, it's not my job to write a handbook in 10 weeks, pass it to the school and parents, and pat myself on the back.  Rather, I've tried to be democratic, inclusive, empowering: to take the ideas that the school and community have, and bring together the strands into a coherent whole.

After all, my thinking goes, community engagement will be an ongoing process throughout the school's five-year turnaround (and beyond).  Long after I am gone, parents, teachers, and community members will be holding the reins.  If they've had a hand in building community-engagement strategies, they'll be more likely to own them, and to implement them.

What's my approach been, concretely?

I've used one-on-one meetings--chit-chat over coffee, usually--to get to know the experiences and visions of teachers at Wallace Elementary, visions that can be tapped as the community-engagement work gets underway.  I've talked to all three leadership members of the staff--some of them more than once--as well as nine other staff members.  I've led off meetings with a few words about my background, how I became aware of my race and privilege, and the teaching and counseling that first got me interested in school-family partnerships.  I've listened to the stories of teachers, elicited their thoughts on engagement, and talked about the talents they bring to the process.

Feedback's been positive.  But it's been a harder go to connect to parents or community members.  Harder to get access, to get calls returned.  Harder to know who to contact.

I did, however, finally connected to two community members this week: Jane.  Community broker par excellence, parent to children who passed through Wallace, member of countless councils and boards.  Our meeting revealed one more thing that makes community connections harder than teacher connections: a reservoir of skepticism that may run very deep.

Wallace's teachers are all new, and the ones I've met with unvaryingly eager.  But as I quickly learned from Jane's questions, she's one of probably many community member who's seen attempts to change schools.  Seen people from the outside try to impose a vision.  Seen white people who know what's right.  Seen students extract an experience that becomes the basis for their thesis at a far-off university.

On Thursday, Jane voiced that skepticism to me; but also an optimism, and an invitation to her home tonight.

***

It was a rollicking good time: Jane's sisters and brothers and children and grandchildren, tin foil platters of rib tips and pasta primavera as far as the eye could see, and (I didn't quite expect ever to say this) a stirring a cappella rendition of Barry Manilow's "One Voice," sung by a middle-aged gentleman with a truly impressive range.


I stuck close to my supervisor--who knows Jane well--until I had a handle on the room's genealogy, ventured out to mix a little, had very much very good food.  As darkness came and conversation moved inside, it took a turn I'm becoming increasingly familiar with: clusters of folks separating off to discuss a new charter school opening, developments of a parent council, how a candidate in an old race approached the community.  Talk of redistricting, and how it will affect upcoming elections.

There's politics everywhere in this city.  It runs very local, it's very tied to schools.  Having never worked in another large urban district, perhaps this is par for the course.  But nevertheless, it's striking.  One moment I'd shaken the hand of a tall fellow by the sink--next he was telling me he's running for the board of a local, newly-opening charter school.

Perhaps the most important moment for my work came when Jane used her booming voice to command the stage with a few words.  After she thanked the crowd, she moved on to the three Network staff who were there.  She called me out--talking about how she was skeptical when she first saw me, but was coming around because now she witnessed passion and commitment.  She vowed to put some meat on my bones.

I felt good for a moment; but the listening, the awareness, the work, must go on.

Sharing the Love

I've written before about my fascination with--and questions for--cradle-to-career programs like the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati.  Education Sector just put out a report on Strive, a collaborative effort by countless schools, nonprofits, and businesses to support positive academic achievement for children along a continuum from birth to college completion.

There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive.  To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways.  Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders.  Who convened them?  Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher.  It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work.  Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding.  Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River.  And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.

The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:

• Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
• The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"  
• Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene

The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.

Next Steps for Adult Learners: Collaboration

Helping connect students to next steps, so they can avoid language attrition, is an important consideration for adult ESOL learners.  Especially if they're studying in one of the many small programs cropping up in urban areas, which may be nimble but don't always offer a full continuum of classes.  In my former one-level ESOL program, students undertook a sequence of activities to seek out and get enrolled in their next class.

That's all well and good.  But how can different programs collaborate to help learners at one connect to classes offered at another?

As I discussed in my first piece in this sequence (linked above), mammoth waitlists await many adult ESOL learners in my state (Massachusetts), and others.  Thus, the best way to assure a student moves on to intermediate English after finishing beginning level would be to increase funding--but this isn't the place to discuss that.  Just because most programs are filled to capacity, and have four, five, or six months' worth of names waiting to join, doesn't mean there aren't gaps in enrollment that could be filled by students, if only they knew about them.  For instance, every year there are numerous classes at numerous sites find themselves in August looking for students to fill their remaining spaces for class in September.

"Collaboration" is a watchword in the nonprofit and human-services sectors, but how is it converted from platitude to practice?  It seems worthwhile to point out that collaboration is not a mere parntership, but the actual pooling of labor--co-laboring--or a joint effort to achieve a unified end.  In putting collaboration into authentic practice, a promising model is the Strive Partnership, which is a cradle-to-career educational initiative in the Cincinnati area.

Strive has advanced a model of "collective impact" built on five key principles (as wonderfully detailed here):


(1) a common agenda built on shared understandings of the problem and of actions to solve it; 
(2) shared measurement systems to assess and report effectiveness, arrived at by a consensus that ensures continued alignment, accountability between organizations, and the opportunity for participants to learn from each other;
(3) undertaking of mutually reinforcing activities in which each agency focuses on activities it can do well in coordination with other agencies' actions;
(4) continuous communication in which leaders must meet regularly and over the long term to build trust, develop a common language for their work, and keep open channels for communication; and  
(5) a backbone support organization to provide a range of supports for the initiative, from staff time to help with technology and data. 

There are many challenges to implementing such a system, but Cincinnati educators believe they are seeing some results, five years into Strive.  What could be applied to the adult-education sphere to ensure students successfully move from one program to another without seeing their language gains slide backwards?

Here are a few ideas.  It's a brainstorm: doubtless I'm leaving things out, and doubtless some of these have been tried already:

1) Draft a vision for ESOL students: What does the field hope to impart to students?  What different types of students are there, and how should their needs be met?  What do students themselves want?

2) Define success: In a given urban area, leaders could get together and outline what success might look like for different types of learners.  They could decide when to revisit these goals, how to assess their progress, and how to make corrections if students aren't benefiting from the collaborative work.

3) Communicate through Twitter: 160 characters is enough to say where a program's located, say how many spaces it has for its next classes, and link to its Web site.  Educators who may not have the time to wade through dozens of emails about job postings, professional development, and the like on adult-education listservs could get feeds of tweets targeted to issues of outreach.  This could also be done on modified listservs set up just for outreach coordinators, through Facebook pages, or the like.

4) Make the most of literacy collectives: In many areas of Boston, literacy collectives meet every month or few months.  Representatives at these meetings could bring and share lists of students who are about to leave one program and need a class at another, and actively follow up with them.  Rather than opening doors to whoever walks through, the process would guide those students already in the pipeline.

5) Use funding to incentivize collaboration: Money could reward and follow programs, or collectives of programs, that demonstrate a commitment to helping students connect to continued language support.

Just a few ideas.

What are yours?

Next Steps for Adult Learners: What's the Problem?

This past April, I had the good fortune to spend a week in Montreal, bumming around la belle ville, barely missing the chance to use Bixi bike-sharing, and everywhere I went trying to pull together the bits and scraps of French I'd learned in the U.S. (and was learning there): at my hostel, at the grocery store, on the street.  I had enough grammar to purchase my share of wine, if too little vocabulary to discuss whether it was any good, to say nothing of follow the conversations that pinballed around my hostel's rather cramped and enlivened dining room once that first (second, or third) bottle had been uncorked.

I got by--indeed without having to fall back on English too often.  And I got better.  But eight months later, grad school has intervened and made those bits and scraps suddenly seem all the more infinitesimal.  It's a situation any of us who has labored through the beginnings of a foreign language as an adult can attest to: three steps forward, a few months off, two steps backward.  Language "attrition," as it's known, is only one of a murderer's row of hurdles facing adult language learners.  For adult ESOL learners, whose language acquisition is quite a bit more high-stakes than anything I've experienced, it's a big concern.  And an issue that raises important questions about helping adult ESOL learners access their "next steps"--how to help them keep studying English once they've maxed out the opportunities within a single program.  

Given the demand for ESOL in Massachusetts, it has been heartening to see how many small programs exist in all imaginable corners of the city: in the pocket-sized human-services agency where I used to work, in school-based community centers, housing projects, daycare centers, churches, prisons.  There are still the established, state-funded, multi-level programs, but who's kidding themselves?  The state can't or won't fund all the demand.

The challenge with storefront programs like the one I worked at is that they may not have the multiple levels provided by the state-funded bulwarks.  Students put 6 or 9 months in, then what happens?  In my five-month program, students did a number of things to prepare for graduation and the inevitable search for a next course.  For more on that, stay tuned.  But after a few months, either through the grapevine or formal follow-up, I would tally up the progress of my alumni.  The result was usually this: about half were studying English elsewhere, another quarter were looking or were on a waitlist, and the rest I either couldn't get in touch with or had ceased looking for more English.

I wasn't concerned about the 50 percent still studying.  These students were the obvious successes of our next-steps preparations.  It was the other 50  percent that got me thinking.  I hardly expected every student to keep studying English.  Life happens, especially for the low-income immigrant folks who came through our doors.  In one of many such examples, a student once had to drop my class right after starting because her daughter had a baby.  She was now a rather heavily-involved grandmother; English could wait.

I was curious about those three, four, or five who wanted to continue but didn't have the relatively immediate opportunity to.  Like virtually all my students, they had entered my program with clear goals for learning English: To defend myself in everyday situations.  To help my daughter with her homework.  To get a job (or a better one).  By the same token, I cannot remember a single student who didn't want to keep studying English once she got a taste of a class.  In following up months after graduation, I found that many were waiting for a call back, and many were on a waitlist--often at multiple programs.

That wasn't surprising, given demand in our area.  The main adult-education program in Cambridge has a waitlist of 439, a smaller program, 128.  In Somerville, the waitlist for the program run through the public schools currently stands at 1011.  In Boston, an organization in Chinatown runs to 296, another in South Boston to 211.  It was an accomplishment that my students had the motivation and wherewithal to get on those waitlists in the first place.  That can't be overlooked.  But the waits that inevitably ensued--three, four, five months or more--were a frustration to my old students.  And the likelihood that they were squandering to attrition some of their hardwon language skills ought to be a concern to all of us in the field.

Many a student--current or former--complained to me about this situation.  Nearing the closure of one cycle I taught, my beginner-level crew teamed up with an offer I wish I hadn't had to refuse: Would I make my next class intermediate-level, and keep them all on board for the next six months?  I couldn't, but it only reinforced my efforts to prepare students for what could come next.  Still, the mixed results of future groups suggests new ways to think about next steps.  Indeed, not every program has the bloated waitlists of the ones I mentioned above.  But how do we go about finding out what's available, and where?  And how do we get students into those spaces?