In New York City, where a neighborhood like Bushwick, in Brooklyn, can
seem like a satellite campus of Wesleyan and a prewar apartment building
on the Upper East Side can feel like an Ivy League dormitory for
46-year-olds, there has been considerable philanthropic attention, of
the kind other cities ought to envy, paid to finding the most gifted
low-income students and putting them on a similar path.
In 1978, Gary Simons, a Bronx teacher, founded Prep for Prep
with the goal of identifying talented students of color in the city and
readying them for attendance at private schools like Dalton and Groton
and so on. Hundreds of the program’s alumni have gone on to law, medical
and business schools, and employment at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase
and Time Warner.
A decade ago, hoping also to advance the best students attending public
high schools, Mr. Simons and others founded another organization,
Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, or LEDA,
which draws exceptional children from around the country, regardless of
race, almost entirely from families who make less than $55,000 a year.
Applicants are required to be in the top 10 percent of their class,
having taken the most difficult courses their schools offer. The 60 who
gain entry to the program each year spend the summer before 12th grade
at Princeton, studying ethics, political theory and public policy, and
preparing for standardized college entrance exams.
In a wondrous righting of the current disequilibrium, however small its
scale, they are tutored for those tests by the same instructors who work
with some of Manhattan’s wealthiest teenagers: the staff of Advantage
Testing, whose services cost parents up to $795 an hour. Arun Alagappan,
the founder and president of Advantage and a major benefactor of LEDA,
provides his employees (whose résumés typically resemble those of the
people at Google or McKinsey) pro bono.
LEDA has been very successful. Of the 500 or so students who have
graduated from the program, three quarters have gone on to top-tier
colleges, 30 percent of them to the Ivy League. Among LEDA’s 2012
graduates alone, 19 gained admission to Princeton, 11 to Georgetown and 6
to the University of Pennsylvania.
Last week I took a walk around Red Hook, Brooklyn, with Joshua El-Bey, a
LEDA graduate who was leaving in a few days for his sophomore year at
Yale. His family struggled as he grew up, moving often and ultimately
landing in the Red Hook Houses, the borough’s largest public housing
development. His first memories of book learning, he told me, were the
readings his mother delivered from Genesis when he was 2. What was
disconcerting about Mr. El-Bey’s otherwise incredibly inspiring
trajectory was how much of his success had depended on opportunities
outside the public education system.
Bullied in middle school for his studiousness, Mr. El-Bey hoped to gain
admission to one of the city’s elite specialized public high schools,
but he did not do well enough on the entrance exam. The free tutoring
provided by the city for the test was insufficient, he said.
He ended up at Edward R. Murrow in Midwood, Brooklyn, a good school
whose academics were nevertheless surpassed by the supplemental training
he received as a scholar at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an
organization begun 50 years ago by Manhattan lawyers and advertising
executives as a mentoring program to get poor minority students into
good colleges. Today it essentially provides a shadow education. In
school, Mr. El-Bey told me, he simply learned to “regurgitate facts.”
Programs like LEDA and S.E.O. are
popular with wealthy, supremely educated donors, precisely because of
outcomes like Mr. El-Bey’s. Just this May, the financier Henry R. Kravis pledged $4 million in matching gifts to S.E.O.
And in a city as dense with talent and money as New York, the effects of
such philanthropy can be effortlessly observed. Walking through his
neighborhood, Mr. El-Bey ran into another alumnus of S.E.O., Luis
Hernandez, who was about to begin his freshman year at the University of
Southern California. In a precocious accomplishment more typical in
other neighborhoods, Mr. Hernandez had won a screenwriting contest for a
film about obesity that had already made its debut on the Showtime
cable channel.
As a society we have begun to pay increasing and essential attention to
gaining access to the top, but the brightest among us might do well to
apply equal focus to how we might enhance the middle.
Most students, rich or poor, will not go to Harvard, while plenty of
working-class and poor students will go to colleges that serve them not
nearly well enough. Not long ago, our son’s caregiver, who is taking
classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, showed me a paper she
had written for a class in English composition taught by a teacher who
was consistently late and twice absent. It was on Ibsen’s “A Doll’s
House” and my husband had helped her. It incisively analyzed the play’s
theme of 19th-century marital oppression and was impeccably written.
When our nanny received her grade, she was shocked not to have done as
well as she had expected. Her formatting had been imprecise, the teacher
told her. And there was a problem with spacing. Content seemed not to
matter much at all.
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