http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/kalamazoo-mich-the-city-that-pays-for-college.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120916&moc.semityn.www
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"When the crunch comes, people cling to those they know they can trust - those who are not detached, but involved." (James Stockdale)
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If you're a baseball fan, you know that Derek Jeter is from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has been the New York Yankee shortstop for 17 years. He is, by all accounts, a class act.
There is a (true) story about the Yankees scouting Jeter when he was at Kalamazoo Central High: the Yankee general manager asked the the head scout evaluating Jeter if the rumors were true that Jeter would be headed for the University of Michigan in the fall (after graduation). The head scout's response: the only place Jeter is headed is Cooperstown (The Baseball Hall of Fame).
Now Kalamazoo has come up with a Hall of Fame - level program for their kids: "The Kalamazoo Promise." The program stipulates that unnamed donors were pledging to pay the tuition at Michigan's public colleges, universities and community colleges for every student that graduated from the district's high schools. The program is blind to family income levels, to pupil's grades and even to disciplinary and criminal records.
Every one of those kids gets to have a life!
According to the census data, 39% of Kalamazoo's students are white and 44% are African-American. One of every three students in the Kalamazoo district falls below the national poverty level. One in 12 is homeless. Many of them are the first in their families to finish high school; many come from single parent homes.
From the very beginning of this program (November, 2005), Janice Brown, who was at that time the superintendent of schools, has suggested that the program is supposed to do more than just pay college bills: it is primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo's economy. This wonderful social experiment is, indeed, supposed to boost the "economy" of the town these kids grew up in. To use educational and economic theory, "The program tests how placed-based development might work when education is the first investment."
Janice Brown is now the Promise Executive Director and the grand experiment appears to be working. Janice Brown is the only person that communicates with the unnamed donors and all are satisfied with that arrangement.
Not only are the educational policy makers looking at this but some are adding to the concept by advocating that "...their is an emerging consensus in economics that the biggest bang for the economic-development buck comes from investing in quality pre-school education rather than higher education." This thinking draws heavily on the thoughts of James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago.
Whatever the advanced thought, something wonderful happened in Kalamazoo and it continues to work.
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Come on. This cannot work on a national scale. Nevertheless, seeing different ideas in action is like drinking a cold bottle of coke. Same old same old - yet refreshing.
ReplyDeleteYou should view education as a corporate culture problem. Family and friends often play a more important role than the schools themselves, from my experiences at least.
Alternatively, perhaps diminishing public education outcomes results from jobs requiring less education. Family and friends tell the younger generation that you do not need to finish high school to survive. My biggest fears are the effects of education trends on crime, healthcare, social welfare programs, and the ability to logically assess politics/economics.
Ultimately, the biggest motivator is jobs. Unfortunately, I do not believe a shortage exists anywhere, even in petroleum engineering. There are always experts throwing numbers and alarms up in the air, but there is never a true shortage. We will never see headhunters lining up for candidates. Maybe at Wharton, Stanford, etc... but not at average Joe's.