There are two community centers in New York City specifically designed to help at-risk youth (ages 14 to 24) make the transition to adulthood. One is the Next Generation Center (NGC), founded in 2005 by Lynne Echenberg with the Children’s Aid Society, and the other is The Academy, which opened its doors in 2007 under the auspices of FEGS. NGC and the Academy, both in the Bronx, are very alike in their multipronged approach to Read more…
One way of letting my students know that I had high expectations of them was by requiring them to send in two discussion questions based on their reading assignments the day before class. I was a bit hesitant to implement this policy because it forces students to get their reading done almost a day earlier (so that I could review their questions and plan my class around their discussion questions), and of course it adds to their workload. But as both an undergrad and a grad student I found this exercise very worthwhile because it forced me to be an active reader. It required that I not only take notes, but formulate thoughtful questions based on whatever I was reading. (more…)
One of the most important messages conveyed in Betsy Krebs and Paul Pitcoff’s Beyond the Foster Care System is that we can and should alter our expectations (and the policies that reflect those preconceptions) of the intellectual abilities of youth in foster care. This conviction is consonant with my belief that if you expect and demand a lot from your students, more often than not they will work hard to meet those expectations. This is Read more…
Toward the end of my last post I scrambled on top of a soap box on the topic of college readiness and education, but I want to return to Darla Cooper’s report to address the three elements she identifies as boosting the educational success rates of students emerging from foster care. They are:
1) “basic skills” coursework (remedial classes in the three Rs);
2) “student success” courses (classes that build student skills in things like test-taking, note-taking, and time management), and
3) “career pathway” programs that allow students to advance in a specific occupation or industry via a series of connected courses and training opportunities. (6-7)
I am particularly interested in instruction in basic skills and student success. As i mention in my post on teaching students how to write, I think that many of these skills are the sort of things that should not be taught in isolation, but rather in context. (more…)
Darla M. Cooper’s report on how California’s community colleges serve former foster youth repeats a lot of the findings and recommendations that I’ve reviewed in some of my previous posts. But one of the points it brings up that is worth elaborating is the unique role that community colleges play in educating foster youth, for whom four year colleges are often out of reach for a whole host of reasons. Comparatively, community colleges are more easily accessible—especially in terms of affordability—and their focus on technical training and career placement is attractive to students seeking to establish financial stability sooner rather than later.
In the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the the type of advice we should be dispensing to young people regarding their post high school plans. (more…)
As a high school student I remember learning to recognize figurative language in poetry by memorizing a long list of figures of speech—an exercise I repeated years later in graduate school but with all the terms in Spanish. It’s a tedious process that pays off when you finally have all the definitions memorized, not only because it can heighten your experience of literature, but also because you will inevitably realize the great extent to which figurative language permeates our everyday speech. Getting there, however, is not much fun.
I want to take a different approach to teaching figurative language by making students more active in the learning process. The strategy is simple: instead of working off a handout or textbook that lists figures of speech with accompanying definitions and examples, my handout will omit the definitions entirely. Students will be asked to craft their own definitions for various figures of speech by examining the examples given (with the pertinent words/phrases highlighted), hazarding a tentative definition, and then sharing and refining their guesses in class discussion.
Here is what I’ve selected for the term simile: (more…)
One of New York City’s more innovative educational programs benefiting youth in and emerging from foster care is Multiple Pathways to Graduation, an initiative designed to expand the options and resources available to youth between 16 and 21 (this informational packet says 15 to 21) who have already demonstrated difficulty in completing high school. These are the students whom the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation (OMPG) designates as “overage and undercredited”—those who are at least two years off-track relative to their age and credit accumulation toward a high school diploma. This population includes not only truants, but also students with learning disabilities, English language learners, teen mothers, and of course, foster youth. (The CEO has other programs designed specifically for youth who have fallen into the juvenile justice system.)
Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), whose mission it is to reduce poverty in the city (and which also implemented CUNY ASAP), established Multiple Pathways in close partnership with the DOE (then helmed by Joel Klein). The OMPG has discovered that a staggering 48% of incoming freshmen become overage and undercredited during high school. This is alarming, given that even students who come into high school well-prepared, but who run into problems and fall behind, graduate at lower rates. The following statistics are from 2007: “Only 19% of over-age and under-credited students ultimately receive a high school diploma or GED if they stay in high school; 6% of these graduates receive a Regents diploma, while 20% receive a GED.” The OMPG further estimates that there are “nearly 138,000 young adults between the ages of 16 and 21 in New York City who have dropped out of school or are significantly off-track for graduation. […] Of the 138,000 youth that are over-age and under-credited, 70,000 of them are in school, and 68,000 have already dropped out.” (Appendix B, 116)
As the name suggests, Multiple Pathways offers students, in addition to the option of re-enrolling in their high school of origin, a variety of alternative paths toward either a high school diploma or a GED, along with a career preparation component. The path the student ultimately takes depends on his/her age, credits already accumulated, schedule flexibility, and career goals. The options (especially for the GED programs) are a bit confusing, and they also seem to vary depending where you look for information, but I will summarize what I’ve gleaned so far below: (more…)
Supporting Success is the Casey Family Programs‘ framework for colleges, policymakers, and advocates concerned with improving higher education outcomes for students in foster care. In many ways it overlaps with the findings of the Education Advisory Board‘s report on campus support for students emerging from foster care, a research initiative that was also informed by CFP.
According to the second version of Supporting Success (Dec. 2010), there are more than 500,000 children and youth in foster care in the US on any given day. Each year, about 20,000 of the youth who are 16 or older age out of care. Compared to the national average of 24%, only about 7 to 13% of students from foster care enter college, and only about 2% obtain their bachelor’s degrees. (8) The statistics are especially dismal considering that at least 70% of youth in foster care express a desire to go to college. (7)
Many of the sweeping reforms in the education of youth in or emerging from care were put in place only in the last few years. (more…)
In the commencement speech given at Bard College at Simon’s Rock earlier this year, Ronan Farrow expounds on a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Out of a Silent Planet on the topic of experience and memory, and how they are one and the same. Farrow tells the audience that what he has learned from the novel is that every experience we have had accrues significance over the course of our lives, and that it is our Read more…
In my post on “The Shawl” I show how a somewhat bibliotherapeutic approach to the story can be facilitated by following a central image through close reading. We can take a similar approach to Susan Perabo’s “Some Say the World,” which originally appeared in TriQuarterly (sometime between 1994-1996, according to various sources), but which I am reading from Frosch’s Coming of Age in the 21st Century. I’m considering teaching this story in my Critical Approaches to the ‘Family’ Program because it tells the story from the perspective of a teenager living in a broken and dysfunctional family who ends up finding a family bond with a parental figure who is not her blood relation. The protagonist is a young, heavily-medicated pyromaniac stuck at home playing Parcheesi with her stepfather while her irresponsible, self-absorbed mother carries on a regular affair with her ex-husband, the protagonist’s estranged father. Predictably, the central image in the story is fire. (more…)