Closing the Opportunity Gap
By Anea Schaffel
On Monday, February 22nd 2016, around 120 students as well as faculty and staff came out to the Northeastern Alumni Center to meet Steve Rothstein, the former CEO of Citizen Schools. A former Husky himself, Mr. Rothstein has shown a lifelong commitment to the social cause and this evening was dedicated to Citizen Schools, a non-profit organization empowering and educating under-privileged children in urban areas.
“Citizen Schools envisions a day when all students from underserved communities will participate in a school day that builds the skills, access and beliefs required for them to thrive as students and succeed as adult.”
With programs in seven U.S. States, the organization serves the high-need student population, such as English language learners, low-income students, and students with disabilities through its Extended Learning Time (ELT) partnerships. Citizen Schools brings 1,602 hours of extra learning per year to the public schools that it serves, and addresses one of the largest social issues in the United States, the constantly increasing opportunity gap.
By 6th grade, a student from an upper-income family has received over 6,000 hours more of enrichment opportunities through after school programs, tutoring and team sports than their lower-income peers. This gap results in lower academic performance, lack of self-esteem and higher dropout rates by children who grow up in underserved communities.
“Middle School is such a critical time in a child’s life, and it isn’t done well in the US”
Citizen Schools works towards closing this gap through partnerships with middle schools. They offer three main programs, the first being regular tutoring to support normal education, which comes down to an equivalent of 3 months of extra learning per school year.
The second program is the so-called apprenticeships, where college students and working professionals volunteer for 1 ½ hours every week for 10 weeks and teach children about their work. Each student completes four apprenticeships per school year, and they may choose which one to pick at a big apprentice fair at the beginning of the school year. Not only do the students learn valuable hard skills such as coding, or how to measure air quality in these apprenticeships, they also learn about teamwork, advocacy and the academic career opportunities that are available to them.
When talking about apprenticeships, Mr. Rothstein shared the story of the biggest smile he has ever seen. “I was at a school in Chelsea, and a 5th grade who had come to the country just a year ago from Latin America, had just written her first software program. Her smile could only be matched by the engineer from Raytheon, who had taught her how to code.”
The third program run by Citizen Schools is the Eighth Grade Academy (8GA) Writing Program, which is a bi-weekly program to help middle school students prepare their high school application essays and practice for the interviews. Mr. Rothstein emphasized that all these programs would not be possible without the students and working professionals who serve as mentors, and some companies such as Fidelity Investments provide a volunteer network which leads over 60 apprenticeships.
He also talked about the organization’s extensive impact measurement, which shows Citizen Schools’ great success: Citizen schools students perform three months ahead of their peers academically on a yearly basis, their high school graduation rate is 12% higher than their peers’, and 61% of citizen schools student end up enrolling in college, which is 20% more than their peers. The students exposure to mock trials, entrepreneurship, and technical knowledge serve as a strong motivator.
Even though their programs already show great success, Citizen Schools is pushing to scale to reach an even larger student population. Their US2020 program matches STEM professionals with volunteer opportunities in their area, and they offer a National Teaching Fellowship in partnership with Americorps. Upcoming programs include BoSTEM, a program that is aimed to provide every middle school student in Boston with at least one STEM apprenticeship, and many other upcoming programs that Mr. Rothstein touched upon show this organization’s strong commitment to closing the opportunity gap.
Our lecturer’s passion and extensive knowledge was also reflected in the Q&A period that followed his presentation, where students took the opportunity to ask about the organization’s business model and its data measurement systems, its effect on incarceration levels and the impact that technology could have in closing the opportunity gap.
Following a question on why some traditional corporations encourage employees to volunteer during business hours while others do not, Mr. Rothstein told the audience that “when you as young professionals go to your company and say ‘This is important to me’, it will have a large impact on the way companies view volunteering.”
A big thank you to Mr. Rothstein for this great lecture and his encouraging words on how we can make a difference!
SEI volunteer opportunities:
Since 2009, Northeastern University’s Social Enterprise Institute has been one of Citizen Schools volunteer partners. Every semester, students from the Northeastern community organize the BizKids apprenticeship. With a lot of time for ice breakers and personal interaction in between, students learn the basics of social enterprise and the important aspects for founding a business. Rounded off with field trips to Haley House and Northeastern University, they experience college first hand. Click here to find out how you can sign up to become a BizKids mentor.
We also participate in the Eighth Grade Academy (8GA), a bi-weekly volunteer program where over twenty eighth-grade students come to campus to work on their high school applications. If you are interested in becoming a Writing Coach, click here.
