by Paul Tough
Turning down the Teach for America job sent Nelson into a crisis of the spirit, a period of deep inner turmoil that lasted almost six months. He had always been a hyper-busy person, a workaholic even in high school, and suddenly he had no official responsibilities, nothing to do but think about his life and where it was going and what it meant. Occasionally that fall, he got calls from some of the parents of the students he had taught the year before at O’Keeffe. The kids were in seventh grade now, and the gains they had made the previous year were slipping away, the parents said. Distraught, they asked Nelson what they could do to get their kids back on track. One even broke down in tears on the phone. Nelson didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to help.
Nelson started praying regularly, looking for answers, for some relief from his growing depression. He began to make a ritual of visiting a different place of worship every day—one day going to a Catholic Mass, the next a Baha’i temple. He went into therapy. He wrote pages and pages of poetry. It was a strange and intense period for Nelson, and when he talks about it now, he sounds like he still isn’t quite sure what to make of it. But what he thinks he was looking for, he says, was vocation. He was trying to find his mission.
4. The Call
In January of 2007, Nelson got a call from Eddie Lou, a young Chicago venture capitalist who a few years earlier had set up a small nonprofit with two friends, one of whom, Matt King, was a teacher at the Dunbar vocational high school, on the South Side. Their fledgling organization, which they’d named the Urban Students Empowered Foundation, managed and supported an afterschool program that King ran for a handful of juniors and seniors at Dunbar. It was a kind of college-prep boot camp: King tutored the students so they could increase their GPAs and improve their ACT scores, helped them figure out which colleges they should apply to, walked them through the financial-aid process, talked to them about how to survive at college. Though the program was small—King’s first class of seven students had graduated and were freshmen in college, and there was a second class of seven who were seniors at Dunbar—it was producing some impressive results. The students had raised their ACT scores, on average, from about 15 to around 18 over the course of their junior year, moving them from about the fifteenth percentile nationally to about the thirty-fifth percentile. Their GPAs improved as well, and all of the students who entered the program made it to college.
Lou, a serial entrepreneur who had been involved in several tech start-ups, wanted to expand the program beyond a single afterschool class—but then King landed a job as a vice principal at a local charter school and decided he couldn’t keep running the program. So Lou and King and their third partner, a doctoral student at Northwestern named Dawn Pankonien, went looking for a new executive director, someone who could not only revive King’s program but also turn it into something more ambitious. They interviewed more than twenty candidates, but none of them seemed like the right fit. They were on the verge of shutting down the organization altogether when, through a mutual acquaintance at Teach for America, they found Jeff Nelson.
That winter, Nelson was finally beginning to feel like he was emerging from his long season in the wilderness, and when Lou called, it seemed like perfect timing. The board of directors—the three founders, plus a couple of finance guys—offered him the job of executive director, and he quickly accepted, he told me, “without doing a lot of due diligence.” If he had, he might have learned before his first day on the job that the organization had no employees, no office space, no business plan, and just six thousand dollars in the bank, enough to cover operating expenses for ten days. At the end of that first day, it dawned on Nelson that he had somehow managed to turn down a job with the biggest and most established education-reform organization in the country in order to take a position with one of the smallest and least established. Oddly, it felt like the right move.
Nelson told the board he needed six weeks to come up with a plan for the future of the organization. He recruited two Teach for America teachers to work for him as unpaid interns during their summer vacation. Pankonien offered to work without pay for a few months as well. She was renting a room from a guy she knew who was a trader at the Mercantile Exchange, and the guy said they could use his apartment during the day when he was on the trading floor. And so that became the unofficial headquarters for the organization that summer—the four of them sitting on couches in a commodity trader’s living room, using their own cell phones and laptops. The one asset the organization owned was a printer. Five years later, Urban Students Empowered has a new name—OneGoal—an administrative staff of fifteen, an annual budget of $1.7 million, and more than twelve hundred students at twenty Chicago high schools enrolled in a three-year course modeled on King’s program but much bigger and more intensive.
Nelson’s belief is that underperforming high-school students can relatively quickly transform themselves into highly successful college students—but that it is almost impossible for them to make that transition without the help of a highly effective teacher. So Nelson and his team scour the city looking for and signing up motivated, ambitious high-school teachers, sometimes at charter schools, but more often at traditional Chicago high schools in low-income neighborhoods. (Fenger is one of those schools.) OneGoal has signed a unique partnership deal with the Chicago public schools that lets the organization work directly with individual teachers to help them run the OneGoal programs. The teachers remain regular full-time employees of the public-school system, though they get stipends on top of their salaries for the extra work they do. Once a teacher is signed up with OneGoal, he or she will recruit and select a class of twenty-five students in their sophomore year—not the highest-scoring kids, not the ones who can already see the path to college, but underperforming students who show at least some spark of ambition. (The average GPA of incoming students is 2.8.) And then the teacher sticks with that same class of students for three years. In junior and senior year, OneGoal is a full-time academic course, with a curriculum designed by Nelson and his team. The class usually meets once a day through the end of senior year. And when the students are freshmen in college, the teacher keeps in close touch with them, by phone and e-mail and Facebook, answering questions, holding regular online conferences, providing support and advice.
There are three main elements to the OneGoal curriculum. The first and most straightforward is an intensive unit of ACT prep in junior year, designed to give students the essential content knowledge and test-taking strategies to raise their scores from terrible to not bad. These days, OneGoal teachers are regularly able to match Matt King’s accomplishment, helping their students improve by about three points on the ACT over the course of their junior year, moving them from about the fifteenth percentile to the thirty-fifth percentile.
The second element is what Jeff Nelson calls a “road map to college.” When Nelson was planning the curriculum that first summer, he often found himself thinking of the process at New Trier: the school’s college-counseling office employs eight full-time counselors, who begin working on college planning with students and their parents early in the sophomore year. “It’s a machine,” Nelson told me with a laugh. “They give you an incredibly clear and structured path from the middle of high school through the day you step onto a college campus.” He recognized that he couldn’t afford to transplant New Trier’s entire college-prep machine to the South Side. “But there were pieces of what was happening at New Trier,” he said, “that I thought could be translated to low-income schools and could make a massive difference.” So OneGoal students get help not just with applications but also with their entire college-admission strategy: choosing match schools rather than undermatch schools; deciding whether to apply to schools close to home or far away; writing appealing application essays; finding scholarships. (One morning in a OneGoal class at a Chicago high school I watched as the school’s college counselor ran through a list of increasingly obscure scholarships. “Is anyone here Greek?” she asked. Twenty-five b
lack and Latino faces looked back at her skeptically. “Do we have any multiracial students?” she asked hopefully. “Yeah,” replied one impeccably dressed African American boy, deadpan. “South Side black and West Side black.”)
But still, Nelson said, “it was obvious to us that the road map was not going to be enough. We could give our students a very clear idea of how to get to college, but we also needed to train them to succeed once they got there. We needed to teach students to be highly effective people.”
For this third part of the equation, Nelson was influenced by the high-school research done by the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, and particularly the work of an analyst there named Melissa Roderick. In a 2006 paper, Roderick identified as a critical component of college success “noncognitive academic skills,” including “study skills, work habits, time management, help-seeking behavior, and social/academic problem-solving skills.” Roderick, who borrowed the term noncognitive from James Heckman’s work, wrote that these skills were at the center of an increasingly dire mismatch between American high schools and American colleges and universities. When the current high-school system was developed, she wrote, the primary goal was to train students not for college but for the workplace, where at the time “critical thinking and problem-solving abilities were not highly valued.” (This was the era that Bowles and Gintis, the anti-conscientiousness Marxist economists, were writing about.) And so the traditional American high school was never intended to be a place where students would learn how to think deeply or develop internal motivation or persevere when faced with difficulty—all the skills needed to persist in college. Instead, it was a place where, for the most part, students were rewarded for just showing up and staying awake.
For a while, Roderick wrote, this formula worked well. “High school teachers could have very high workloads and manage them effectively because they expected most of their students to do little work,” she recounted. “Most students could get what they and their parents wanted, the high school credential, with little effort.” There was, she wrote, “an unwritten contract between students and teachers that said, ‘Put up with high school, do your seat time, and behave properly, and you will be rewarded.’”
But then the world changed, and the American high school didn’t. As the wage premium paid to college graduates increased, high-school students voiced an increasing desire to graduate from college—between 1980 and 2002, the percentage of American tenth-graders who said they wanted to obtain at least a BA doubled, from 40 percent to 80 percent. But most of those students didn’t have the nonacademic skills—the character strengths, as Martin Seligman would put it—they needed to survive in college, and the traditional American high school didn’t have a mechanism to help them acquire those skills. This is what Nelson is trying to change, and he believes this third element of the OneGoal strategy is at the heart of the program’s nascent success.
Nelson knew when he started that he couldn’t remake the entire high-school experience for his students. But he thought that perhaps he didn’t need to. By helping students develop the specific nonacademic skills that would lead most directly to college success, he believed he could compensate, relatively quickly, for the serious gap in academic ability that separated the average senior at a Chicago public high school from the average American college freshman. Nelson, using instinct more than research, identified five skills, which he called leadership principles, that he wanted OneGoal teachers to emphasize: resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity. Those words now permeate the program—they’re even more ubiquitous than Seligman and Peterson’s seven character strengths are at KIPP Infinity.
“We know that most of our kids are going to arrive in college academically behind their peers,” Nelson explained to me one morning. “We can help them improve their ACT scores significantly, but it is unlikely that we’ll be able to close the gap on those tests entirely, simply because of the K-through-twelve system that our students grew up in. But what we also know, and what we tell our students, is that there is a way for them to offset that disparity. And the key is those five leadership abilities.”
5. ACE Tech
For four decades, the Robert Taylor Homes loomed over the South Side, the largest of Chicago’s postwar housing projects: twenty-eight high-rise concrete monoliths extending for almost two miles down a narrow strip of land between State Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Almost as soon as construction on the projects was completed, in the early 1960s, the buildings began to descend into disrepair, violence, and chaos, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the Robert Taylor Homes were considered, according to the Chicago Housing Authority, “the worst slum area in the United States” ; in 1980, one in nine murders in Chicago took place in those ninety-two acres. At the projects’ high point, which is to say their low point, more than twenty-five thousand people lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, at least two-thirds of them children, the large majority of whom were living with single mothers on welfare. The projects are gone now, torn down in Chicago’s latest attempt at urban renewal, but nothing has been built in their place. And when you drive down State Street today, there is just an eerie emptiness where the towers once stood, a weird inner-city pastoral of grass, weeds, and concrete punctuated by a few old, lonely churches that managed to escape the wrecking ball.
At the south end of that long stretch of nothingness, down by Fifty-Fourth Street, there is a small outcropping of intact structures—a few houses, mostly boarded up; a liquor store; a pizza place; a pawnshop; and a storefront Baptist church, now closed. And then, in a two-story blue-brick building just north of the old church, there is, of all things, a school: ACE Tech Charter High School. Given the pervasive bleakness of the surroundings, it is hard to imagine anything very positive coming out of that building, and in fact, ACE Tech is not at all a high-achieving school: in 2009, just 12 percent of the school’s juniors met or exceeded the standards on the statewide achievement test, and since its founding in 2004, the school has never made “adequate yearly progress,” the benchmark set by the federal No Child Left Behind law. But it was at ACE Tech, soon after Jeff Nelson took over in 2007, that OneGoal introduced its new methods. First, there was an afterschool program much like Matt King’s, held two hours a week for a class of juniors and seniors; then, in 2009, Nelson brought in the full-time, in-class, three-year, teacher-led model that is now the OneGoal standard. (It is a coincidence, but perhaps an apt one, that ACE Tech is only a few blocks away from Du Sable High, the school that Jonathan Kozol presented in Savage Inequalities as the tragic counterpoint to Nelson’s alma mater of New Trier.)
The person who pioneered both iterations of the OneGoal program at ACE Tech was Michele Stefl, an English teacher now in her early thirties who grew up in Chicago’s southwestern suburbs and started teaching at ACE Tech in 2005. Nelson hired her as one of OneGoal’s first contract teachers soon after he took the position as executive director. I followed a class of Stefl’s OneGoal students throughout their senior year, observing as she guided them through the college-admissions process. There were, inevitably, plenty of low moments for her students—suspensions, unplanned pregnancies, college rejections—but in the Sahara of failure that surrounded ACE Tech, Stefl’s classroom felt, on most days, like an oasis of hope and possibility.
Stefl was not an educational romantic; she was plainspoken and pragmatic, blunt about the school’s inadequacies and the reality of how far behind her students were. One morning toward the end of her students’ junior year, she talked to them about their personal essays, which, she said, were going to be essential parts of successful college applications. “Remember who you are competing against,” she said. “You are competing against people who have ACT scores of thirty-plus. You are competing with kids who, in all honesty, have received a better education than many of you. We’re trying to make up for that now, but the level still isn’t where it should be. And that’s unfair, unfortunately, okay?” She held up a sample essay. “So this is w
here it has to come from. What life experiences have you had to get where you are today?”
When selecting this class of students for the OneGoal program, back in the spring of 2009, when they were sophomores, Stefl had taken pains not to pick the highest-scoring students or the ones from the most competent families; in fact, she did the opposite of creaming: during the process, if a student revealed that there was a college graduate anywhere in her immediate family, Stefl would gently tell the student that the program was meant not for her but for her peers with fewer resources and greater need. As a result, one of Stefl’s biggest challenges was simply to convince her OneGoal students that they each had the potential for a successful life, despite all the evidence to the contrary they saw in their neighborhood and, often, in their families.
When I sat in Stefl’s class, I frequently found myself thinking about the research that the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck had done on the growth mindset. To recap briefly: Dweck found that students who believed intelligence was malleable did much better than students who believed intelligence was fixed. David Levin’s project at KIPP in New York City essentially expanded Dweck’s mindset idea into the message that character is malleable too. It seemed that what Stefl was attempting to do was convince her students that not just their intelligence and their character but their very destinies were malleable; that their past performance was not an indication of their future results. She was not preaching a gospel of empty self-esteem or wishful thinking. Her message to her students was that they could grow and improve and achieve at a much higher level than they had before but that it would take a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance, and a lot of character—or, as they put it in class, leadership skills.