How One Education Leader's Newark Nonprofit Became One of the Few

Home , One of the Few

DeVos Takes Tough Stance as Storytime, Livestreamed: Congressional Democrats How One Texas Principal Is Hammer Her on Budget Using Facebook to Read Her Cuts, School Choice Students — and Thousands of Fans Around the World — Bedtime Stories Every

News The 74 Interview How One Education Leader’s Newark Nonproﬁt Became One of the Few Minority-Led Groups to Win a $30 Million Federal Grant to Fight Poverty

February 11, 2019

By MIMI WOLDEYOHANNES Updated Feb. 12 Mimi Woldeyohannes is a special projects & community manager at The See previous 74 interviews: Sen. Cory Booker talks 74 about the success of Newark’s school reforms, civil rights activist Dr. Howard Fuller talks equity in  education, Harvard professor Karen Mapp talks [email protected] family engagement, former U.S. Department of

Education secretary John King talks the Trump TALKING POINTS administration, and more. The full archive is right here.  Founder and CEO of @BrickAcademy Dominique Lee talks ominique Lee made headlines as a 25- about winning $30M D year-old when he and four other fed grant, “breaking Teach for America alumni took over a failing down walls and Newark elementary school and turned it into building up kids” in #Newark’s South BRICK Avon Academy, the acronym standing Ward. for Building Responsible Intelligent Creative Kids. As was widely reported, a fustrated  South Ward Lee decided to launch his own school with Children’s Alliance fellow teachers afer seeing ninth-graders at plans to use $30M @usedgov grant to the city’s Malcolm X. Shabazz High School expand health care, unable to name the seven continents or the housing, early state’s governor. childhood and other services to Newark's most distressed Now 33, Lee, and the nonproﬁt network that residents. began with BRICK Avon and later came to include two other schools and the South  Former Ward Children’s Alliance, are poised to @TeachForAmerica increase their impact and reach. The alliance educator and current founder and CEO of was one of the few minority-led @BrickAcademy organizations to receive a competitive $30 Dominique Lee runs million Promise Neighborhood grant fom N.J.’s 3rd-largest the U.S. Department of Education in 2017. CMO, only one led by person of color.

Newark’s South Ward is the city’s most distressed neighborhood, where “children and families [are] exposed to significant adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress,” according to the BRICK Education SIGN UP FOR Network. Its approach to alleviating that THE T74 generational disadvantage is to offer a NEWSLETTER continuum of high-quality schools and wraparound services for children and Enter Email Address families fom birth through college and career. The $30 million will allow the SUBMIT alliance and its partners to offer greater services in several key areas, including housing, health and early childhood.

The school network includes BRICK Peshine MOST READ Academy, a pre-K-8 school run in partnership with Newark Public Schools 6 Reasons Why Singapore Math Might Just Be the (Avon Academy returned to traditional Beter Way district oversight) and Achieve Community Charter School, which launched in 2017 with Chavous: For Kids in students in the early grades and will Traditional Schools, Testing eventually extend to eighth grade. With a Can Be a Challenge. For Some Kids, Parents & soon-to-be-announced partnership with Teachers in Online Schools, another school network, BRICK aims to It’s a Nightmare educate 3,000 students in Newark over the next few years, making it the state’s third- Janus v. AFSCME: 5 Things largest CMO and the only one led by a to Know About the Latest person of color. BRICK is also looking to Union Dues Case Headed to the High Court open schools in the South Bronx and Buffalo, hoping to reach some 6,000 students and Sex Ed, America, 2016: their families in New York and New Jersey. Where the Information Is Ofen Absent — or BRICK recently celebrated its first year of Medically Inaccurate impact as one of the partners of the South What You Never Realized Ward Promise Neighborhood at a Jan. 24 You Were Teaching Your event noted by U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, who Child About Grit & recently announced his bid for president. Resilience: MIT Study Captures Techniques That Work for Babies as Young as “Every child deserves access to a quality, 13 Months affordable education in order to help prepare them for future success, both in and out of 74 Interview: Former North the classroom,” Booker said in a statement. Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue “As the former mayor of Newark, I know that on Educating a 21st Century Workforce & the ‘Most it’s strategic partnerships like this that lif up Horrific Public Discussion’ our children and help them reach their full She Ever Heard potential. Through this federal funding, South Ward Promise Neighborhood will be able to take steps toward this goal by closing the achievement gap while restoring hope of a brighter future for Newark children.”

Exclusive: Presidential Candidate Cory Booker Reﬂects on the School Reforms He Brought to Newark as Mayor and the Education Legacy He’s Lef Behind

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: Prior to leading The BRICK Education Network, you were one of six teachers who helped drive school turnaround eﬀorts at Avon Academy. Can you tell me more about your experience as one of the teacher-leaders involved in these turnaround eﬀorts? How did this experience ultimately help inform your leadership as the founder and CEO of The BRICK Education Network?

Lee: The beauty behind the turnaround efforts at Avon Academy was that I was a part of a group of teachers spread throughout the district that came together and wanted a shot at transforming one of the chronically underperforming schools in the heart of the South Ward. Thankfully, the superintendent at the time was gracious enough to give us a shot at leading this initiative, and restarting Avon Academy definitely propelled us to where we are now on several different fonts. It really gave us a true diversity of student need that has really transformed our model to what it is now in addressing the holistic needs of every single child in the building, instead of simply using a school model that pushes or coaches children out or a model that isn’t conducive to accommodate the needs of different children. When you have 600 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kids fom the neighborhood, they’re all going to have different types of experiences, so you have to design the holistic model to support all of them.

Can you discuss why you formed The BRICK Education Network?

I’ve always had a tenacity to ensure that black and brown children can be successful. Growing up, I was exposed to the power of education through the lens of my parents. I’m actually third-generation college educated through my dad’s side and ﬁrst- generation college educated through my mom’s side. My mom is a part of the working-poor class and my dad is a part of the upper-middle class, and fom an early age, I saw my mom working multiple jobs, while my father’s life was so much easier, and it was solely because of the education my father was able to attain. As a person of color, I always knew that education was at the core of our march toward equity, which is what essentially directed me to the classroom to pursue education law. I eventually deferred my law program to enter the Teach for America corps and then I ended up stayed in the teaching profession.

The moment that sparked the creation of BRICK was a graduation ceremony I attended while I was teaching. At that point in time, I was working with an aferschool tutoring program for struggling seniors to help them on their alternative assessments they needed to take in order to graduate. I quickly realized that many of these children were not able to read, and I also noticed that many of them ended up graduating because we had passed them along, and that was not something that I was willing to continue to endorse. Ultimately, I didn’t want to be involved with schools where kids, especially black and brown children, weren’t leaving the way we wanted them to. This was essentially one of the sparks that motivated me to do something diﬀerent and to start as early as possible.

How does your network’s charter school model stand apart fom others in New Jersey and elsewhere?

When you look at our model, you can look at it in four buckets: one, strong academic programs; two, character development; three, wraparound services; and four, changing public policy. What really makes us diﬀerent is how we think about school culture. We don’t look at it through a lens of control, but rather, we look at it through a lens of how we’re working to empower children to own and know their identity and essentially use their identity as an asset to society. We can achieve this by providing a safe place for our children to actually explore their identity. What we mean by this is that every child needs to have a caring adult or some relationship in the school. There also needs to be a warm, nurturing environment where children walk in and feel like they’re able to be who they are. Of course, routines and structures will be in place because kids and adults like order and we need order to ensure that things are functioning well. Once this is accomplished, then we proceed to examine how we get our kids to explore their identity by ensuring they see themselves throughout the texts that they’re reading and the conversations that we may have about leaders that reﬂect them.

Cultural Identity Is Crucial. How to Spot It in Your Child’s Classroom and What to Do About It If It’s Not There

We seek to build an environment that they see on so many fonts and exposes them to as many successful people that look like them, which ofen contradicts mainstream media’s narrative about their identity. Last, but not least, we want to ensure that when they leave us, they’ll use their identity to be change agents in society. What truly separates us fom other organizations is that we genuinely believe that in order to serve our children, you have to be able to partner with other organizations and create an ecosystem for children to be successful. We accomplish this by having a robust pipeline of partnerships to support our families and children around housing, health, and economic mobility services. This is not to say we’re accomplishing this all by ourselves or that we’re taking our focus away fom academics. This means that we’re not blind to the situations around us and that we’re being proactive in seeking partnerships and creating systems in place to best support our families and our children.

We’re a CMO that focuses on neighborhood transformation, and not just school transformation, speciﬁcally in terms of transforming ourselves in the school. We focus on becoming good stewards and partners in the communities we serve, and we continue to use an institution, like a school, as a beacon of hope for a community that has historically been underinvested, redlined, and everything under the sun.

Your organization seeks to “break down walls and build up kids.” What exactly does this look like in practice?

Breaking down a wall is breaking down silos between our schools and a housing partner, for example. As for building up kids, we recently had a case where a student’s family was about to get evicted about a month and a half ago, and our family coach intervened and helped place them in one of our partner houses to prevent the family fom having to enter a homeless shelter and essentially provided the family with a more sustainable housing opportunity. We broke down the wall of silos between the schools and the housing partner, we broke down the wall of a kid going to a homeless shelter, and then we broke down this wall that we’re not just educators, we’re a movement working to holistically support children. We’re building up kids by ensuring that they have a stable home to live in to be successful.

Another example is recognizing that schools are not here just because they got here. We’re talking about many years of segregation, racism, trauma, etc. that haven’t been addressed in our communities and ofen manifested themselves in ways that might not look or feel comfortable. So, we’re breaking down a wall by ensuring that teachers are aware of how we got here, and we’re building up kids by ensuring that we’re ﬁnding proper teachers that believe that this is a movement that goes beyond teaching the fundamental concepts of 2+2.

What does it mean to be the one of the only minority-led organizations to win the competitive $30 million Promise Neighborhood grant fom the Department of Education? What are you planning to do with the grant money?

It’s a blessing and we’re extremely humbled to receive this grant, yet it’s also a little troubling to recognize that we’re one of the few minority-led organizations to receive this grant that’s designed to help minority neighborhoods. While it’s troubling to acknowledge this fact, it empowers us to understand that we’re doing this work to ensure that we’re breaking down these cycles in hopes that the kids we’re educating will continue to grow and build their own organizations that do this type of work.

We’re planning on beeﬁng up our strategy of creating a pipeline that moves children fom birth through college and career. This will require us to take a closer look at what our strategies around early childhood, school, housing, etc. look like to basically provide us with an infusion of resources to helps us implement our overall vision.

Tell me more about the organization’s plans — what are your top priorities over the next few years? Why are you seeking to expand speciﬁcally in Buﬀalo and the South Bronx region?

One of our top priorities is to develop at least three proof points to holistically support children in a model like ours. Newark, Buffalo, South Bronx are all proof points, with similar demographics but different conditions on the ground. In Newark, we’re doing a lot of the work ourselves, which means we’re creating a lot of the external support systems, linking with partners, creating the schools, etc. It’s a very intensive project here. The South Bronx and Buffalo actually have a pretty robust external support system for children and families, but what they’re missing is quality education. So, we’re looking at taking our model and being a more partner-centric model, in which we run the schools and the partners outside are ingrained in our school model with a common thread among our values.

We believe in this type of a sustainable model because there’s already public dollars ﬂowing to communities through these organizations and it’s our job to work with each other and build the technology infastructure to share information. We also believe that building this proof point, or case, is so necessary because if we’re able to serve children who’ve gone through adverse childhood experiences, I think we’d all be better oﬀ in terms of the statistics, such as kids being labeled in terms of behavior disorders, not having productive adult lives, etc. We’re ultimately a part of the strategy of ensuring that black and brown children are leaving with a sense of who they are and are fully comfortable with their identity.

What are some strengths and challenges associated with BRICK’s two-generation model (one that combines parent and child interventions to interrupt the cycle of poverty)?

One of the strengths is that we see the positive results on an individual level. On the contrary, one of the challenges is that doing this at scale and measuring it at scale continues to remain a daunting task. Another challenge is being able to truly support our families with the resources they need. As a society, the more we continue to cut back on safety-net programs [low-income housing, food stamps, health care], it’s only going to exacerbate these cycles of poverty.

What do you want people to know about the signiﬁcance of a CMO led by a person of color?

It is a reﬂection point for us to ask ourselves if we’ve replicated the same racist structures in the school space that we’ve seen in any other spaces, such as business communities. To be one of the few CMOs led by a person of color is certainly something we should ponder about. However, knowing this does allow us to continue to build on the legacies of our ancestors, who were working to create schools in the South during the Reconstruction era.

Correction: The $30 million Promise Neighborhood grant is earmarked for community services, not school expansion, and Avon Academy is no longer part of the BRICK Education Network. An earlier version of the story included incorrect information about how the grant could be spent and the schools that are currently part of the network.