Tony Caine seems like a heck of a guy. He’s 53 but looks 10 years younger. He has made more money than he’ll ever need and could rest on his laurels and live la dolce vida in Aspen.
He may be enjoying the good life, but he’s determined to do more. So he has founded a new non-profit, Summit 54, which aims to help “academically motivated” eighth-graders in Chicago and Denver have successful high school careers and graduate from top colleges. He’ll do this, he says, employing a “360 approach,” providing each kid with intensive tutoring, mentors, a rigorous curriculum requiring 1,600 hours of work from each students over four years, and an eight-week boot camp for incoming freshmen.
Oh, and Summit 54 promises to pay the full college tab for all its graduates.
You may be asking yourself at this point: “Haven’t we hard this all before?” Well, yes, at least in bits and pieces here and there. Caine’s vision may be a bit naive, but spend a little time around him and you begin to understand why he has been such a successful entrepreneur.
He shows not the slightest sign of dogmatism. He asks everyone he comes across to critique his ideas — “lay a 2×4 up against the side of my head” — and appears not to take criticism personally.
Summit 54′s approach is to find motivated eighth-graders languishing on waiting lists for top charter high schools and get them into the program. Caine figures there are thousands of such kids in the two cities, condemned to attend low-performing high schools. Summit 54 can help them rescue themselves, he said.
Caine invited a group of educators and advocates up to the Aspen Institute for a couple of days of brainstorming this week. He got a good turnout, which is no surprise given that the Aspen Meadows resort is one of the world’s beauty spots, we’re in peak leaf season and the weather is postcard-perfect. (Henceforth I will accept all invitations to attend meetings and conferences at the Aspen Institute. I don’t even care what the topic is.)
Attendees include Terrance Carroll, outgoing speaker of the state House of Repesentatives, Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, ex-Manual High School Principal Rob Stein, West Denver Prep honcho Chris Gibbons, representatives of Colorado Youth at Risk, Facing History, Denver Public Schools, Aurora Public Schools, Adams 14, Chicago Public Schools and various foundations.
Perhaps the most important participants have been three members of Project VOYCE, a worthy Denver non-profit perpetually starved for funds. Started by Brian Barhaugh, who also started the excellent Youth Biz non-profit, Project VOYCE aims to “make youth voice real in school renewal.”
Barhaugh brought with him Shelby Gonzalez Parker, a single mom attending Metropolitan State College after graduating from Denver Justice High School, Lorenzo Sanchez, a University of Denver student who graduated from the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts and won a Daniels Fund scholarship and Phillip Douglas, a 2002 Manual grad who oozes charisma. Douglas attended Fort Lewis College came back to Denver before graduating and ended up in prison, and now works as a Project VOYCE youth trainer.
The VOYCE triumvirate led off the conference this morning, and they weren’t shy about letting Caine know where they found his vision deficient. They had two major criticisms, which were echoed by other attendees:
- Seeking only “academically motivated” eighth-graders leaves out a lot of promising kids. Parker, Sanchez and Douglas said they would not have made that cut.
- Starting with eighth grade is too late. Many kids have fallen too far behind and become too disengaged by then. Why not start at sixth grade?
Caine, to his credit, acknowledged the legitimacy of these critiques and vowed to rethink his approach. The program is slated to launch next year, so he still has time.
So Bravo to Caine and major kudos to Project VOYCE and especially to Parker, Sanchez and Douglas.
Here is a video of the three speaking their minds.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Congrats Shelby, Lorenzo and Phil, you guys are a wonderful example of what happens when young people have someone in their lives who sees their potential and believes in them. That is what Brian Barhaugh is the best at. Don’t all of our kids deserve that? What do we need to do as a community to insure that all kids have someone in their school or their community who can play that role (outside their families?) Schools would be much different places if they were designed to nurture relationships instead of test scores and a whole lot of kids would have much better test scores as a result.
Tony: Please check out this Abstract. C.Johnson 303 904 8457
Ambassadors for Literacy (AFL) is a collaborative intervention between the Denver Public Schools (DPS), Head Start and the University of Denver. Earlier empirical studies located all of the Head Start graduates enrolled in DPS with three successive ITBS Reading Proficiency scores in the top quartile by national norms. DPS Superintendent Irv Moskowitz and Norman Watt invited 31 of these exceptional children to serve as role models for literacy by reading to current Head Start preschoolers in their local neighborhoods, playing alphabet and word games with them, teaching them how to spell their own names, and sharing their enthusiasm about reading and attending school. The Ambassadors ranged initially from 4th grade to 12th grade in school, and 29 accepted the invitation. They were offered basic training in emergent literacy by professional experts, and with help from representatives of Charles Schwab, the Ambassadors and their parents learned about investing for a college education and set up their own college-saver accounts. For their service at Head Start centers, the Ambassadors earned generous stipends that were deposited in their college-saver accounts annually. The families of the Ambassadors were also encouraged to save and invest money from their own employment or savings, which was matched by the program dollar-for-dollar. The principal objective of the AFL program has been to empower children in poverty to gather the financial resources to enable them to complete a college education. To date, 84% of the Ambassadors (91% of them ethnic minorities) have completed their high school education and enrolled in colleges or universities of their own choosing; 39% of them have graduated from college in four or five years, including NYU, Morehouse College (2), Colorado College, University of Denver (2), and University of Northern Colorado.
Here are some key features of the AFL program since its inception in 1997:
• Ambassadors’ reading achievement scores throughout their school careers ranged from an average at the 72nd percentile to the 96th percentile by national norms;
• Their reading achievement scores as a group reached an average (both Mean and Median) at the 85th percentile though all Denver Head Start graduates averaged only the 24th percentile;
• Their parents reported annual family income at $25,000 on the average in 1998;
• Ambassadors have logged a total of 79 hours of training in emergent literacy and provided altogether more than 26,000 total hours of community service at Head Start centers;
• $1.4 million was raised for this program from private citizens, business corporations and foundations, and eventually $540,000 was distributed to A.F.L. college-saver accounts;
• $79,000 was contributed by family members to their college-saver accounts, and those deposits were matched by the program;
• On the average, the 29 participants received $18,621 in support from the program;
• 28 of the 31 Ambassadors are ethnic minorities, including 20 Latinos, 7 Blacks and one Native-American;
• Among all graduating seniors in Denver schools, the proportions expressing intentions to attend college (when our Ambassadors were making their decisions) were 37% in 2000 and 36% in 2001;
• Recent visits to elite colleges around the nation have offered convincing evidence that their financial aid would provide 90-98% of all college costs for similarly qualified Ambassadors from “the diversity pool” if they meet the admission requirements for those private institutions.
• The Colorado Department of Education has identified 3,316 children in the state that qualify for federal lunch subsidies and have Reading Proficiency scores above the 84th %ile by state norms in Grades 5 through 10; they are obvious candidates
Professor Norm Watt