In the littered landscape of urban school reform, many promising programs haven’t survived their first plantings. And few of the reforms that seem to work so well in individual settings have achieved success on a broader scale.
In their 2003 study for the Learning First Alliance,1 Wendy Togneri and Stephen Anderson found that the “familiar prescriptions for improving achievement in high-poverty schools” – such as heroic principals, inspiring teachers, and creative charter schools – generally produce “isolated islands of excellence” rather than “systems of success.”
By contrast, there is at least one example of a K-12 reform model designed to get more disadvantaged kids to college that seems to be succeeding in multiple communities around the nation. It’s called Project GRAD (Graduation Really Achieves Dreams), and it seeks to change the culture of schools serving low-income populations from passive acceptance of failure to an expectation that every student can succeed with the right preparation.
Project GRAD provides instructional support in reading, math, and classroom management; family support coordinated by on-campus social service organizations; and financial support to expand professional development for teachers. It reduces fragmentation by working within “feeder systems” of elementary, middle, and high schools that serve the same low-performing populations. In addition to guaranteeing college scholarships to students who complete a rigorous high school curriculum, Project GRAD forms partnerships with parents, educators, and business and community leaders, creating a web of support for students who are typically the first in their families to pursue higher education.
“It’s much more comprehensive than I think many of the [reform] models are – it’s process and content,” says Leslie Graitcer, former executive director of the BellSouth Foundation and now an independent consultant in educational philanthropy. “The thing about Project GRAD is that it is much more about a district, that children move from school to school and we have to look at this much more comprehensively.”
One of the major lessons of Project GRAD’s evolution from a single high school in Houston 15 years ago to its current orbit of 142,000 students in 13 U.S. cities is the importance of creating community support for educational change. Indeed, building a constituency for reform seems to be one of the only ways to keep critical interventions on track when the routine impediments to progress – entrenched school district bureaucracies, shifting political alliances, and reform fatigue – threaten to roll back early gains.
Local Buy-In Is the Crucial Ingredient
No matter how strong a program or how much clout it commands, the key to gaining local acceptance is forming strong partnerships between outside reformers and influential insiders.
“It’s naive to assume that you can take” a design born in one community and expect it to grow up easily in another, says Steven Zwerling, a former Ford Foundation executive who took over the reins of Project GRAD-USA in 2002. Expanding education reform is not like franchising fast-food restaurants. “You can’t say: ‘Here are the golden arches, the recipe for special sauces, here’s the clown. , This is really adaptation, not replication.”
That insight wasn’t initially clear to Project GRAD’s backers. In early expansion sites such as Newark and Nashville, for example, they tried to export the reform model without taking into account each school district’s distinctive history and culture, cultivating relationships with people who were intimately connected to the schools, or clearly defining each partner’s obligations. The loose arrangements proved fatal in Nashville when disagreements about some of the curricular components and a new superintendent’s changing priorities prompted the city to sever its ties with Project GRAD after just three years.
“When all the changes happened, there was no [local] group to step in and advocate,” said Zwerling, who acknowledged Project GRAD’s failure to insist that Nashville forman independent nonprofit organizing group from the start.
Newark remains part of Project GRAD, but student achievement and fundraising have progressed more slowly as a result of some early organizational snafus. Through these initial expansion experiences, however, Project GRAD learned the importance of building strong coalitions and adjusting requirements to accommodate community differences. One tool is called the Walk for Success, which Project GRAD uses to introduce the program to students’ families. During the walk, hundreds of trained volunteers typically fan out into the neighborhoods surrounding the Project GRAD schools on a Saturday morning. They meet families in their homes, explain the benefits and requirements of the college scholarship offer, and ask parents and students to sign a pledge of participation. The volunteers also survey parents about how schools can better serve them, such as by employing bilingual office staff or teaching them how to help their children at home with reading.
Although the Walk for Success is one of the most popular features of Project GRAD, the format that originated with immigrant populations in Houston wasn’t suitable for every city. In Newark, for example, African-American families living in embattled urban neighborhoods were suspicious of strangers knocking on their doors. So local organizers persuaded Project GRAD to invite the families to the schools for a unified celebration instead. Project GRAD later used a similar approach in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula because the vast and sparsely populated region was not conducive to a community canvas.
Perhaps the greatest departure from early expansion efforts is the increasing prominence of the local nonprofit organizations that ensure implementation of Project GRAD’s curricular components, coordinate fundraising, and solicit support for change. These local groups include a board of directors that has connections throughout the community and the ability to cut through conflicts.
The Battle for Atlanta
When Project GRAD entered Atlanta in 2000, the local nonprofit organization was able to broker an alliance between the school system and skeptical civic leaders who were “very weary of lots and lots of effort [with the public schools] with no results,” said Dr. George Brumley, at that time a philanthropist and former head of Emory University’s pediatrics department who became Project GRAD-Atlanta’s first chairman.
Brumley strategically crafted a governing group that included corporate leaders who could raise significant funds; college presidents who could provide staff, resources, and classrooms for Project GRAD’s summer enrichment programs; elected school board members who might have undercut the reforms if they had not been involved from the beginning; and parent leaders who had a direct stake in improving the outcomes for students.
To demonstrate her commitment to the partnership, new superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall invited Kweku Forstall, Project GRAD Atlanta’s executive director, to serve in her cabinet while she in turn took a seat on Project GRAD’s board. The relationships and inside knowledge they developed helped solve several problems that could have jeopardized Project GRAD’s implementation.
In one instance, Forstall discovered that the school system had not paid teachers promised stipends for professional development, even though Project GRAD had already provided the funds to the district. It turned out that some antagonistic middle managers had held up the payments for six months, but teachers thought Project GRAD was to blame and threatened to take their complaints to the media. Forstall contacted Hall and explained the urgency of her direct intervention to get the stipends paid promptly, which she did.
“This is an example of the ways in which the relationship with the district, in particular Dr. Hall, allows us to overcome some of the remaining bureaucratic obstacles that are part of the old culture while the organization is transitioning to a new culture,” Forstall said.
Because of that strong foundation, even after Brumley died in 2003, Project GRAD lived on in the Atlanta public schools. Booker T. Washington High School, the first Atlanta school to participate in Project GRAD, subsequently raised graduation rates to their highest levels in 15 years. For the class of 2005, 53 percent of the school’s 257 graduates earned the $4,000 Project GRAD scholarship, which requires them to maintain a 2.5 grade point average and participate in two summer institutes on college campuses. The Project GRAD scholars at Washington High School received a total of $5.6 million in college scholarships this year, gaining admission to Georgetown University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the U.S. Naval Academy, among others.
In addition, reading scores in the elementary and middle schools that feed into Washington High School have risen by an average of 21 percentage points in the past four years, and math scores have increased by an average of 14 percentage points in the two years since the schools began using Project GRAD’s math curriculum. Both the reading and math gains have exceeded statewide results during the same periods.
By doing whatever it takes to get more disadvantaged students to college, Project GRAD has become a model of what works in education reform.
Read more stories by Holly Holland.