This story resonates with me deeply. I grew up in a lower income, single parent household to a family environment plagued with drug addiction and feelings of economic hopelessness. I was on track to drop out by my senior year of high school. My father (who was always in and out of prison) committed suicide my freshman year of high school. I was distraught but blessed. My English teacher at the time noticed what I was going through and got me involved in a program for at-risk kids called AVID [1]. It is because of this organization that I was able to not only graduate from high school but also university and go on to have a successful career in software development.
Our society pays a lot of lip service to youth being the future but we don't actually do much to help them succeed. The person you might call a loser or criminal was once a child who had the opportunity to become a shining example of what our society can produce. These children are being lost at some point along the way. Once they become adults we shame them for their life decisions but what are we actually doing to solve the problem?
When you say, "hey, 90% of these students are outpacing peers in their district based on academic indicators", I say maybe LeBron is onto something. Let's adopt this approach, scale it and study the results.
I grew up similarly. I've seen program after program come into my home town just for the administrators to pack up and leave town 1-2 years in, blaming everyone but themselves. It's very refreshing to see someone who "wants to make the world better" actually doing it rather than paying lip service with the real goal of boosting their ego.
Hope this is legit. Tip my hat to LeBron for being a real hero to the underserved.
This is so great! I hope you went back and thanked that English teacher. They don’t get the thanks they deserve most of the time and they sure as hell don’t get the pay they deserve. Teaching is a noble calling and I’m glad someone saw you and took the time to care.
It seems this small success is indicative of a much larger failure - a failure for the greater educational system to do good to all equally who enter in. The system is rigged.
The system is wired to goad students to fall into debt to sustain a decent living standard. I am transferring school from a fairly low-cost city (Albuquerque, NM) to Atlanta. My own issues are not comparable to these kids, but about 60% of my stipend is potentially going into rent, and more than 20% into fees, so I have started to doubt my decision to continue grad school.
They're pretty public about their "secret sauce", which is to offer a pretty neat ladder up Maslow's pyramid, especially for the parents.
Any family worried about food / clothes can come into the pantry and take whatever they need. Physiological needs, check. Barbershop available. That's really interesting.
Safety needs: see above, with heavy emphasis on dealing with conflict situations. Celebrate coming to school, make sure it's always a safe place, extra hours and days to keep them off the streets.
Belonging and love: everyone in the school are the "chosen ones", they have a tribe, the teachers are on their side, the parents are involved and accountable.
If you handle the first three levels for a person, hitting self esteem, accomplishment (at a personal level, need not be state's best or world's best) can come much easier, even with average quality of teaching. They're also making the parents baseline role models (they clean, clothed, putting food on the table and looking into their own self improvement) and plastering the environment with a topline role model LeBron James (if he can do it you could at least try as hard as he did).
My mother taught at Title 1 schools for years. She said the biggest gap was always family support.
Teachers don't have enough time to make up for a missing home environment, and (said in seriousness) it's a misuse of their time to play social worker (because there's no one else / no funding for anyone else).
We do a lot of dumb things in American public education, but one of the worst is misdeploying resources we do have and focusing on symptoms instead of root causes.
There was a school district (Kansas? Nebraska? Maybe?) that got stellar results just from co-locating county social services for parents at the school (unemployment offices, food stamp distribution, clinics, etc).
If a community needs help, don't send only teachers to fix it.
The inclusion of a barbershop is very much an African-American cultural thing - these are traditional male social gathering places in that society. So this is probably not just providing a haircut, but also some things a bit higher up the Maslow hierarchy like that belonging you mentioned.
Two major and quite distinctive improvements of the school I noticed from the article:
* Improving parental involvement and the parents’ attention to their own education
* Utilizing the hidden power of role models: LeBron James and each kid’s parents
Students spend significantly more time at home than at school. Parents interact with each kid one-on-one or in a small group. Thus, they can have much more influence than teachers on the kid’s attitude, motivation, and habits regarding education.
If we look at a broader picture, most countries that do well in PISA, an international assessment of academic skills for school students, strongly value education at every level of society starting from parents and family. This includes Vietnam, a relatively poor country which, at rank 22, does better than quite a few Western European ones.
The US, at rank 31, should study this school and expand on good lessons learned from the experiment.
Vietnam’s GDP PPP per capita in 2017 is about $6500; the US’ is about $60000.
This implies that the US as a nation should have resources to support better education if they are deployed well, despite some discount from Baumol’s cost disease.
This a good thing! I am 100% in support of James' endeavor here. However, students doing better when put in a better environment should not be surprising. I was a lower income student who was shipped across town to a majority white school as a anti-segregation program that was brokered with a federal oversight committee. The African Americans in that school were treated quite bad. My first day at school I was labeled "<my first name> Brown" by the kindergarten because there was a student who already had my first name in the class. My last name isn't "Brown" that's my skin color. That was my first minute in school and I'm only 36 years old not 66 years old.
If I can ask, how do you feel about the program that bussed you across town, overall? Do you feel you benefited on net despite the exposure to the racism, or would you prefer to have stayed in your neighborhood school if you could do it all again?
I didn’t see anything about this in the article, so I ask here in the hopes that someone more knowledgeable can comment: how are they controlling for selection bias? Is there any way to select into or out of this school, or is it purely the standard districting system? Even if it’s the latter in many other places it’s still possible to move into the area. Do we know to what extent that has been happening?
Edit: Oops, I was tricked by an advert. The article continued to say that the students were admitted by lottery. The only question I’m immediately left with then is whether they had to enter the lottery, or whether it was automatic? And was their admission contingent on their parents’ willingness to participate in these extra classes?
There is selection bias for sure; except it works in the opposite way regarding successful outcomes. IPS takes low-performing individuals and puts them in a lottery system.
This differs from a charter school or other alternative schools that skirt responsibility of special needs kids... but it should bear mention that IPS is not without controversy. The lottery system causes a lot of strife in eligible-but-unpicked individuals and also costs the taxpayers a substantial sum; LeBron does not cover 100% of the costs, or even a majority of them.
"I Promise students were among those identified by the district as performing in the 10th to 25th percentile on their second-grade assessments. They were then admitted through a lottery."
Charter schools use the lottery method, at least the one my two sons are on (success academy) its a great school with great success but a lot of it is obviously engaged parents (such as even entering the lottery)
I devote a lot of my time thinking about how to improve education. I love so much of what this school is doing, much of it being things I hadn't considered, since my education had far far different problems than these kids have.
Out of everything in the article, what impressed me the most was the roleplaying with the intervention counselor. What an incredible way to help kids learn how to behave and assimilate into society. I think that role playing everyday situations should be a part of every students education.
Of course it was going to be a success. Most other approaches that approached intergenerational poverty via the three pronged approach of better child care, housing, and economic opportunity has work to great success.
The school doesn't try to solve all 3 at once, but the approach to child care makes the other much easier to manage for parents.
Also includes some direct economic benefits for parents - e.g. the food/clothes pantry mentioned, where parents can have basic needs taken care of without payment.
> Nataylia Henry, a fourth grader, missed more than 50 days of school last year because she said she would rather sleep than face bullies at school. This year, her overall attendance rate is 80 percent.
Really? You had to switch to percentages instead of saying she missed 36 days a year instead of 50?
As a minority, I hope this isn't another "minority schools do well turned scam". Seems like we have these "amazing successes" turned to "scams" every couple of years.
If it is a success, why turn it into a national story? Doesn't that put more unnecessary pressure on these schools and kids to "succeed"? Wouldn't that put more pressure on these schools to cheat if expectations aren't met?
I don't understand why this is a national news story. Do the kids benefit from the extra national pressure? No. Do the schools benefit? No. Am I wrong in thinking only lebron and the nytimes benefits from this story? Why not let these kids and schools succeed quietly? These underprivileged kids have enough hurdles as is, do they really the added burden of national coverage?
> As a minority, I hope this isn't another "minority schools do well turned scam". Seems like we have these "amazing successes" turned to "scams" every couple of years.
It is a normal public school that is getting additional funding, and funding for specific additional programs (e.g. parental outreach, after school program).
Worst case scenario the funding dries up and it returns to being a completely normal public school with normal levels of public funding.
These results at least aren't wildly successful. The kids came in really below average, and now are still below average but by less after a single year, which is promising but not like unreasonable.
Because if this truly is a success then we want to spread the concept as far as we can as fast as we can. It can receive national attention and not harm those inside if done right.
I like the concept. I’m not sure their stats check out. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in. The article suggests a lot of the kids here were bottom percentile performers on standardized tests (literal 1th percentile).
I do wonder if the test is valid at scores that poor. Could it be that the bottom percentile is just the kids who guessed randomly and had bad luck, as opposed to, say, the ninth percentile who guessed randomly and had good luck? How likely would it be for a bottom percent student to stay bottom percent with no special schooling? I really just don’t have a good sense for what it means to strive for 10th percentile performance on tests like these.
Sure, but it's nice to see the premise borne out by the early data:
The students’ scores reflect their performance on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders moved from the second percentile to the 30th.
The 90 percent of I Promise students who met their goals exceeded the 70 percent of students districtwide, and scored in the 99th growth percentile of the evaluation association’s school norms, which the district said showed that students’ test scores increased at a higher rate than 99 out of 100 schools nationally.
It's a shame that a private citizen has do this. Reflects poorly on our country that the economically disadvantaged really do not have a choice or a voice.
And these are not people who choose to be poor or incapable. They really don't have any other option.
You could also say that it reflects well on our country that a private citizen was able to realize that something needed to be done differently, and then make the change themselves instead of hassling through a decades-long "change the bureaucracy" adventure while competing with seven other equally motivated individuals who also want to change the education system, but in completely different ways...
Um so what about the endless govt programs out there that were supposed to achieve things like this brat have failed?
It's not like our country doesn't do anything - it's a very complex problem. There are efforts and they tend to have mediocre results at best. I've personally worked in some of these programs and the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disadvantaged groups require. I'd wager that if you have ideas about how to fix these issues they'd be similarly flawed.
OTOH this is great that a private citizen can see an opportunity to give kids better education, and actually follow through that plan, making an example to replicate and build upon.
In many countries, this is not a given: either directly forbidden or infeasible due to red tape.
It’s not a shame. At a time in this country it was expected that citizens of means stepped into the gaps that government either couldn’t go into or couldn’t do well, and some of our best institutions come from this philanthropy.
This illustrates that parents are the key component in childhood education. A worse than average teacher who teaches kids with involved parents will outperform the best teacher with uninvolved parents.
In addition, LeBron James has a huge amount of credibility built up with the students. I would guess that many of the students feel some sort of connection to him, and do not want to disappoint him.
I doubt there was ever much debate that parents are the single most important factor for children.
It’s just that, from a policy perspective, it is extremely hard to actually have any impact on that behavior. It’s basically social work, a concept for which there is essentially no money at scale in the US.
Isn’t it obvious that funding public schools with local property taxes is what has created this messed up system where your zip code has a disproportionate impact on the quality of your education?
Just about every single state has state-level funding for schools that acts to even out those disparities.
Worse yet, spending (per pupil) on its own turns out to not be a very good predictor of quality of education. It doesn't even seem to be a great predictor if you control for parents' SES, from what I can see for various school districts in Boston's suburbs.
Put another way, a number of quite distressed school districts spend more than various "good" school districts, with much worse results. DC public schools are a poster child here, but not the only example by any means. So it's not just a matter of funding levels at all.
The stuff that school is doing is really just common sense and the success they are experiencing is both a symptom that what we always known works... still works but also that we do a real shit job at education in this country.
This is not a problem you can fix with technology, the only technology needed is good food every day for the kids and parents (or guardians) that can be involved in their kid's education.
I've often wondered about the effectiveness of donations to supplemental after school/summer time tutoring/coaching in under-performing school districts [1][2] versus donations to full time, private charter schools such as this one.
It seems supplemental after school/summer time solutions would build on the existing public school system and fill in the gap between 3pm-6pm and during summer where they are likely to be less supervised. It'd also be more scale-able to more children. I also imagine it also would produce less angst among public school teacher unions as its more supplemental to them versus replacing them.
It's great to see this. The only issue I have is how replicable this formula is.
I think you can apply a couple of programs and concepts on a large scale to whole communities, but this is a very expensive school with a lot of resources behind it, not to mention a very powerful celebrity endorser who has a lot to lose if this school fails.
There is a small private school that just opened up in my area (about 4 years old). It has a powerful businessman who is the founder. Class sizes are less than 10 kids with two teachers per class. That's about a 5:1 ratio, most public schools would kill for anything better close to 10:1 with most academic classes are 20-30 students for one teacher.
This small private school also has a lot of amenities, like a ton of tech for the students.
While this is a great school, it's just a place for elites to educate their students.
I applaud everyone in this private school and Lebron's school.
I hope we can use some of their ideas and programs to a larger scale.
[+] [-] _qbjt|6 years ago|reply
Our society pays a lot of lip service to youth being the future but we don't actually do much to help them succeed. The person you might call a loser or criminal was once a child who had the opportunity to become a shining example of what our society can produce. These children are being lost at some point along the way. Once they become adults we shame them for their life decisions but what are we actually doing to solve the problem?
When you say, "hey, 90% of these students are outpacing peers in their district based on academic indicators", I say maybe LeBron is onto something. Let's adopt this approach, scale it and study the results.
[1] https://www.avid.org/
[+] [-] thatoneuser|6 years ago|reply
Hope this is legit. Tip my hat to LeBron for being a real hero to the underserved.
[+] [-] gigatexal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vvpan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriselles|6 years ago|reply
This looks pretty cool!
[+] [-] not-a-duck|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esalman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudhirj|6 years ago|reply
Any family worried about food / clothes can come into the pantry and take whatever they need. Physiological needs, check. Barbershop available. That's really interesting.
Safety needs: see above, with heavy emphasis on dealing with conflict situations. Celebrate coming to school, make sure it's always a safe place, extra hours and days to keep them off the streets.
Belonging and love: everyone in the school are the "chosen ones", they have a tribe, the teachers are on their side, the parents are involved and accountable.
If you handle the first three levels for a person, hitting self esteem, accomplishment (at a personal level, need not be state's best or world's best) can come much easier, even with average quality of teaching. They're also making the parents baseline role models (they clean, clothed, putting food on the table and looking into their own self improvement) and plastering the environment with a topline role model LeBron James (if he can do it you could at least try as hard as he did).
[+] [-] ethbro|6 years ago|reply
Teachers don't have enough time to make up for a missing home environment, and (said in seriousness) it's a misuse of their time to play social worker (because there's no one else / no funding for anyone else).
We do a lot of dumb things in American public education, but one of the worst is misdeploying resources we do have and focusing on symptoms instead of root causes.
There was a school district (Kansas? Nebraska? Maybe?) that got stellar results just from co-locating county social services for parents at the school (unemployment offices, food stamp distribution, clinics, etc).
If a community needs help, don't send only teachers to fix it.
[+] [-] azernik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nopinsight|6 years ago|reply
* Improving parental involvement and the parents’ attention to their own education
* Utilizing the hidden power of role models: LeBron James and each kid’s parents
Students spend significantly more time at home than at school. Parents interact with each kid one-on-one or in a small group. Thus, they can have much more influence than teachers on the kid’s attitude, motivation, and habits regarding education.
If we look at a broader picture, most countries that do well in PISA, an international assessment of academic skills for school students, strongly value education at every level of society starting from parents and family. This includes Vietnam, a relatively poor country which, at rank 22, does better than quite a few Western European ones.
The US, at rank 31, should study this school and expand on good lessons learned from the experiment.
[1] PISA results map http://factsmaps.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of...
[+] [-] nopinsight|6 years ago|reply
This implies that the US as a nation should have resources to support better education if they are deployed well, despite some discount from Baumol’s cost disease.
[+] [-] externalreality|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] istjohn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shhehebehdh|6 years ago|reply
Edit: Oops, I was tricked by an advert. The article continued to say that the students were admitted by lottery. The only question I’m immediately left with then is whether they had to enter the lottery, or whether it was automatic? And was their admission contingent on their parents’ willingness to participate in these extra classes?
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-t...
[+] [-] icelancer|6 years ago|reply
This differs from a charter school or other alternative schools that skirt responsibility of special needs kids... but it should bear mention that IPS is not without controversy. The lottery system causes a lot of strife in eligible-but-unpicked individuals and also costs the taxpayers a substantial sum; LeBron does not cover 100% of the costs, or even a majority of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Promise_School
[+] [-] eyeinthepyramid|6 years ago|reply
"I Promise students were among those identified by the district as performing in the 10th to 25th percentile on their second-grade assessments. They were then admitted through a lottery."
[+] [-] ThomPete|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngngngng|6 years ago|reply
Out of everything in the article, what impressed me the most was the roleplaying with the intervention counselor. What an incredible way to help kids learn how to behave and assimilate into society. I think that role playing everyday situations should be a part of every students education.
[+] [-] johnsimer|6 years ago|reply
What are the best things from your thoughts/research someone or society as a whole could do to improve education?
[+] [-] SpaceManNabs|6 years ago|reply
The school doesn't try to solve all 3 at once, but the approach to child care makes the other much easier to manage for parents.
[+] [-] azernik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fillskills|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mac01021|6 years ago|reply
Really? You had to switch to percentages instead of saying she missed 36 days a year instead of 50?
[+] [-] basetop|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep...
If it is a success, why turn it into a national story? Doesn't that put more unnecessary pressure on these schools and kids to "succeed"? Wouldn't that put more pressure on these schools to cheat if expectations aren't met?
I don't understand why this is a national news story. Do the kids benefit from the extra national pressure? No. Do the schools benefit? No. Am I wrong in thinking only lebron and the nytimes benefits from this story? Why not let these kids and schools succeed quietly? These underprivileged kids have enough hurdles as is, do they really the added burden of national coverage?
[+] [-] Someone1234|6 years ago|reply
It is a normal public school that is getting additional funding, and funding for specific additional programs (e.g. parental outreach, after school program).
Worst case scenario the funding dries up and it returns to being a completely normal public school with normal levels of public funding.
[+] [-] sct202|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatoneuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b_tterc_p|6 years ago|reply
I do wonder if the test is valid at scores that poor. Could it be that the bottom percentile is just the kids who guessed randomly and had bad luck, as opposed to, say, the ninth percentile who guessed randomly and had good luck? How likely would it be for a bottom percent student to stay bottom percent with no special schooling? I really just don’t have a good sense for what it means to strive for 10th percentile performance on tests like these.
[+] [-] tracker1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway5752|6 years ago|reply
The students’ scores reflect their performance on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders moved from the second percentile to the 30th.
The 90 percent of I Promise students who met their goals exceeded the 70 percent of students districtwide, and scored in the 99th growth percentile of the evaluation association’s school norms, which the district said showed that students’ test scores increased at a higher rate than 99 out of 100 schools nationally.
[+] [-] mindfulplay|6 years ago|reply
And these are not people who choose to be poor or incapable. They really don't have any other option.
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatoneuser|6 years ago|reply
It's not like our country doesn't do anything - it's a very complex problem. There are efforts and they tend to have mediocre results at best. I've personally worked in some of these programs and the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disadvantaged groups require. I'd wager that if you have ideas about how to fix these issues they'd be similarly flawed.
[+] [-] nine_k|6 years ago|reply
In many countries, this is not a given: either directly forbidden or infeasible due to red tape.
[+] [-] spaginal|6 years ago|reply
I applaud Lebron.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
In addition, LeBron James has a huge amount of credibility built up with the students. I would guess that many of the students feel some sort of connection to him, and do not want to disappoint him.
[+] [-] matt4077|6 years ago|reply
It’s just that, from a policy perspective, it is extremely hard to actually have any impact on that behavior. It’s basically social work, a concept for which there is essentially no money at scale in the US.
[+] [-] dpflan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelgiba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomacct3847|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bzbarsky|6 years ago|reply
Worse yet, spending (per pupil) on its own turns out to not be a very good predictor of quality of education. It doesn't even seem to be a great predictor if you control for parents' SES, from what I can see for various school districts in Boston's suburbs.
Put another way, a number of quite distressed school districts spend more than various "good" school districts, with much worse results. DC public schools are a poster child here, but not the only example by any means. So it's not just a matter of funding levels at all.
[+] [-] luckydata|6 years ago|reply
This is not a problem you can fix with technology, the only technology needed is good food every day for the kids and parents (or guardians) that can be involved in their kid's education.
[+] [-] somethoughts|6 years ago|reply
It seems supplemental after school/summer time solutions would build on the existing public school system and fill in the gap between 3pm-6pm and during summer where they are likely to be less supervised. It'd also be more scale-able to more children. I also imagine it also would produce less angst among public school teacher unions as its more supplemental to them versus replacing them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Education_Found...
[2] https://svefoundation.org/get-involved/events/annual-dinner/
[+] [-] jrumbut|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] socrates1998|6 years ago|reply
I think you can apply a couple of programs and concepts on a large scale to whole communities, but this is a very expensive school with a lot of resources behind it, not to mention a very powerful celebrity endorser who has a lot to lose if this school fails.
There is a small private school that just opened up in my area (about 4 years old). It has a powerful businessman who is the founder. Class sizes are less than 10 kids with two teachers per class. That's about a 5:1 ratio, most public schools would kill for anything better close to 10:1 with most academic classes are 20-30 students for one teacher.
This small private school also has a lot of amenities, like a ton of tech for the students.
While this is a great school, it's just a place for elites to educate their students.
I applaud everyone in this private school and Lebron's school.
I hope we can use some of their ideas and programs to a larger scale.
[+] [-] Chico11Kidlet|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]