Citizen Schools Skoll Awardee Profile

Organization Overview

Key Info

Social Entrepreneur Eric Schwarz

Year Awarded 2005

Issue Area Addressed Education

Sub Issue Area Addressed Early Childhood to Primary Education, Women's and Girls' Education, Youth Job Skills

Countries Served USA

Website http://www.citizenschools.org

Twitter handle cschools

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/CitizenSchools

Youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/citizenschoolso nline

About the Organization For nearly 25 years, Citizen Schools has been a pioneer in educational equity. Since opportunity, unlike talent, is not equally distributed, the organization has provided hands-on learning experiences that ignite curiosity, build confidence and expand horizons to over 50,000 underrepresented middle school students. Together with partners including 25,000 career mentors, Citizen Schools has exposed students to ideas and connections, helping them access even better opportunities than previous generations.

Today, Citizen Schools engage underserved students in hands-on learning, in school and after school. Students in Citizen Schools programs are treated as creators and problem-solvers, not just consumers. They become scientists, artists, mathematicians, engineers, writers, and programmers. The program also applies best practices from direct service work to systems-level advancement of STEM mentorship and learning by working with communities.

Impact

Over the last 25 years, Citizen Schools has served over 50,000 underserved students and provided 25,000 career mentors through direct service in school and after school. This year Citizen Schools will engage 7,000 students and recruit 450 volunteers in Massachusetts, New York, California, and North Carolina. Makers + Mentors Network, a STEM initiative of Citizen Schools, partners with communities and organizations to uplift STEM mentoring and maker-centered learning as essential tools to build a stronger, more diverse workforce. This network currently supports 200,000 students. Make For All’s commitment process also led to new goals from over 149 communities and 200 organizations aiming to reach over 800,000 underrepresented youth over the next three years.

Path to Scale

By 2024, Citizen Schools will be serving 90 schools, 380 teachers and 65,000 students through its project-based learning program. Citizen Schools’ Makers + Mentors Network will partner with 21 Communities of Practice to reach more than 200,000 students.

Social Entrepreneur

Eric Schwarz’s professional experience as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a manager at City Year focused his attention on the crisis in public education in the US. He recognized that American students spend 80 percent of their waking hours outside of school and yet only 2 percent of public funding supports out-of-school programs. He founded Citizen Schools to transform after-school programs from an afterthought to a powerful element of authentic, large-scale education reform.

Eric stepped down as CEO of CS in December 2014 to launch the College for Social Innovation and now serves as a national board member at CS. In 2016, Emily McCann assumed the CEO role following a 13-year tenure at CS, most recently serving as president.

Equilibrium Overview

Current Equilibrium

The growing achievement gap, as evidenced by the different rate of college completion among students from upper income families (77% college graduation rate) and lower income families (9% college graduation rate), has been fueled by a dramatically increasing divide between the opportunities provided to students from higher income families and those accessible to students from lower income families in the hours outside of the regular school day. Specifically, upper- income families have tripled their investment in their children’s education in a generation - amounting to a gap of 6,000 hours of extra learning by 6th grade. In addition, beyond additional learning hours, upper-income students benefit from ~$8,000 worth of enrichment activities yearly, such as robotics camps, piano lessons, academic tutoring that are not affordable for many low and middle-income households. These opportunity and achievement gaps have a direct effect upon students' career pathways and social mobility; According to Dr. Jal Mehta of Stanford University, "Research on both inequality across schools and tracking within schools has suggested that students in more affluent schools and top tracks are given the kind of problem-solving education that benefits the managerial class, whereas students in lower tracks and high poverty schools are given the kind of rule-following tasks that mirror much of factory and other working class work." Additionally, the “Lost Einsteins” research conducted by Dr. Raj Chetty identified exposure to innovation as a primary determinant of whether a child grows up to become an inventor and concluded that creating equal opportunity for students who have been traditionally underrepresented in STEM could quadruple the rate of innovation nationally.

New Equilibrium

Inspiring after-school programs become a powerful element of education reform, preparing and empowering the 4 million middle students in high-need communities to reach high school and beyond and ultimately close the opportunity gap by becoming the nation’s future leaders, business owners, lawyers, and scientists. Middle schools fully leverage community resources to help low-income students reach their potential, ultimately reducing poverty. Every principal, superintendent, and parent has the option of project-based learning opportunities leveraging resources from their communities.

Innovation

Citizen Schools has spent the last 23 years refining and growing an effective approach for engaging low-income students in STEM-focused project-based learning (PBL) that develops 21st century skills and academic proficiency while cultivating interest and aptitude in STEM. Citizen Schools apprenticeships provide the two research-based ingredients identified as key to developing children into inventors who can find a path out of poverty and accelerate the US economy. First, they provide mentors who can model the invention process; second, they provide environments where invention and innovation are present. Students who complete Citizen Schools apprenticeships make academic gains, increase interest in STEM careers, build 21st century skills, and ultimately enter and complete college at higher rates than their peers. Four years ago, recognizing that their current model, despite its effectiveness, was not on track to reach the millions of students in need, Citizen Schools made an important pivot towards building a national market and providing accessible resources for project-based STEM education. Currently, Citizen Schools is making significant progress towards this goal as they plan to reach more than 100,000 students in the 2018-19 school year - and nearly 170,000 in 2022 - through three signature initiatives. Initiative 1: Citizen Schools Expanded Learning Time (ELT) direct service model Citizen School pioneered the ELT model, in which they partner with traditional public middle schools to expand the learning day by 3 hours for all students, beginning in 2006. The cornerstones of the ELT model are additional academic support, delivered by AmeriCorps Teaching Fellows, and apprenticeships, in which volunteer “Citizen Teachers” (predominantly STEM professionals) from the community partner with their Teaching Fellows to lead hands-on learning projects designed to help students build critical skills and support their exploration of career fields. Apprenticeships are taught 1x/week for 10 weeks and culminate in a WOW!, where students teach back what they’ve learned/created to an authentic audience. While Citizen School does not project the significant scale of the ELT model in future years due to the capacity required including substantial time from volunteers, it will continue to serve as a valuable R&D lab for their model and school partnerships. In 2018-19, the ELT model will reach over 3,000 students in the Bay Area, Greater Boston, and New York City. Initiative 2: Catalyst model to support science teachers during the core school day The goal of Catalyst, launched in 2017-18, is to radically transform middle school learning by bringing the core of their ELT model -- the STEM apprenticeship -- to life during the traditional school day. Catalyst unites four core programmatic elements to support science teachers and expert volunteers in creating engaging, high-quality learning experiences for students in STEM topics including engineering, computer science, and entrepreneurship. The core differentiator of this approach is the presence of a volunteer to bring more relevance, rigor, and relationships in the classroom. Program elements include: High-quality project-based learning STEM curricula aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards;Teacher professional development including personalized coaching;Actionable student assessments; andAccess to a volunteer matching database, services to ensure quality teacher/volunteer matches, and a curricular overlay that supports meaningful integration of volunteers into the classroom. Inspired by the key learnings from year one of the pilot, in which Citizen Schools designed this model alongside middle school teachers, their work in year two will focus on Citizen Schools’ core competencies of volunteer recruitment, matching, training, and support. Citizen Schools is currently exploring strategic partnerships with organizations, like Project Lead the Way, for whom Citizen School's expertise in volunteer integration and management is a critical complement to their approach. Through the Catalyst model, they are able to provide lower cost, more scalable tools and resources for implementation of project-based STEM education in classrooms nationwide -- impacting approximately 3,000 students in the 2018-19 school year and 45,000 students annually by 2022. Initiative 3: US2020 City Network and Make For All Initiative With an anchor investment from Schmidt Futures, the mission of US2020 is to change the trajectory of STEM education by dramatically scaling the number of STEM professionals engaged in high-quality STEM mentoring and Maker initiatives for underrepresented youth nationally by creating communities of practice. US2020 was launched at the White House Science Fair in 2013; in the most recent US2020 STEM Coalition challenge, 92 cities or regions created city-based marketplaces for project-based STEM education and mentorship and eight winning coalitions were selected to join the US2020 city network. Currently, 22 communities across the country will provide STEM mentoring to 100,000 high need students in 2018-19. Most recently, US2020 launched and is testing the creation of a Make For All initiative for interested cities, with three primary components: resources, best practices, and expert organizations that local communities can take advantage of; an annual “commitments event” where communities and their partners can make pledges that are new, specific and measurable; and targeted outreach to key decision- makers (mayors, superintendents, corporate partners) to encourage them to participate. The Make for All initiative will be developed and launched in close collaboration with complementary organizations which have deep expertise in maker centered learning. In 2018-19 the MakeForAll initiative will seek to expand Maker-centered learning in an additional 20-25 cities. Stephanie Santoso joined Citizen Schools in 2018 as the first Director of Maker Initiatives. Previously, Stephanie served as the first Senior Advisor for Making at the White House and helped develop the Obama administration’s Nation of Makers initiative.

Ambition for Change

Citizen Schools aspires to provide support and opportunities for underserved students to gain STEM content proficiency, develop an interest in STEM career pathways through modeling with diverse STEM mentors, and learn valuable social emotional skills, as well as collaborative problem solving. Citizen Schools delivers this through direct service and systems-level advancement.