Citizen Schools

“Although we, as a country, are working toward bettering our school systems, school reform alone is not enough to lift all students. Citizen Schools is a new paradigm in the way of educating and strengthening students’ education. It enables more time for learning and the presence of more caring adults in children’s lives.” —Eric Schwarz ’79


Eric Schwarz ’79

Co-founder and CEO of Boston-based educational program, Citizen Schools

Citizen Schools began in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1995 with a vision of helping to improve student achievement by blending real-world learning projects and rigorous academics after school. The name comes from the idea that citizens within the community—lawyers, chefs, reporters, architects—would donate their time to working with a group of students in an apprenticeship relationship, sharing their strengths and teaching children some of the skills necessary to succeed in that particular career.

The teaching model of Citizen Schools, co-founded by Eric Schwarz ’79, took its cue from Howard Gardner of Harvard University, who described the power of apprenticeship learning in his book The Unschooled Mind. Gardner—along with John Dewey, described by Eric as “the patron saint of progressive education”—points to learning through doing as the root of great education. Eric notes that “Milton classrooms do that very well, but most students don’t get much exposure to it. At Citizen Schools we set students up with the best architects, for instance, and they have a model of success and someone who wants to share his or her knowledge. The students have the chance to realize that math and geometry are not only important because their teachers say they are, but because they need those skills to, say, create the playground that they are actually planning and building.”

What started small, with Eric and co-founder Ned Rimer teaching journalism and firstaid, respectively, has developed into a national organization reaching over 3,000 middle-school-aged students in 15 cities across five states and engaging 2,400 volunteers. Outreach for volunteers began with Eric and Ned turning to their personal network of friends and co-workers. As the program developed, larger companies became involved as a way to support their employees. “There is a hunger in a lot of people to connect with children,” Eric says, “and many have been involved with Big Brothers, Big Sisters or some other similar organization. What we offer, though, is the chance for mentoring with a purpose and playing to your strengths, and then passing that on to kids who are so eager to learn from you.

“The program gives students the chance to experience the joy of work and the fun in learning; it gives meaning to their academics and gives them a real-world context for learning. It provides them with aspirations, role models and a reason to work hard with an experience of success. The belief from the beginning has been focused on results, on tangible outcome gains.”

Although apprenticeship is a major part of the program, with each student participating in four apprenticeships each year, there is also a more traditional and comprehensive curriculum that provides homework help, study skills, tutoring, and field trips to colleges and museums. As Eric explains, the organization attracts a broad group of students—those who are really motivated, those who fall toward the middle of the pack, and those who are two to four grade levels behind where they should be. Ninety-one percent of participants are low-income.

“Low-income urban children have a 50 percent chance of graduating from high school,” Eric reports. “Yet alumni of Citizen Schools have gone on to Smith, Wesleyan, Boston College, MIT. We have four to five years’ worth of reliable data from a longitudinal study to support the success of our programs. The study compared 1,000 middle-school students involved in Citizen Schools for at least a full year against a matched comparison group of similar students of the same age. Our students outperformed the comparison students on six out of seven academic metrics, including test scores, attendance, and promotion rates, and graduates were more than two times as likely to go on to a top-tier college preparatory high school.”

And what are the challenges of such an innovative and comprehensive program? “Because this is a new paradigm, one of the first things we have to do is change the way people think of learning and education,” Eric says. “The common notion is that [teaching and learning] are limited to the school day and the classroom, yet there is so much room, and desire, for learning outside of the classroom. Students spend up to 80 percent of their waking hours outside of school. Another major and constant challenge of any nonprofit organization is raising funding and cultivating partnerships.”

About 20 percent of Citizen Schools’ funding comes from government grants under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The organization also receives funding from AmeriCorps and from individual and corporate donors. As the program grows, it continues to build up connections with larger corporations and supporters such as Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and Bank of America. With plans to increase the number of students served fourfold over the next five years, the organization also hopes to increase funding from $11 million last year to $35 million by 2011–12.

Citizen Schools has received several prestigious awards since its inception, including the MassINC Commonwealth Medal, three consecutive four-star ratings from Charity Navigator and, most recently, its third Social Capitalist Award from Fast Company Magazine, a partner of Monitor Group, which names organizations for donors “who want the highest possible social return for their charitable gifts.” This winter, the organization was also profiled on the front page of Education Week.

www.citizenschools.org

Erin Hoodlet

 

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