A summer school kids actually want to attend | Karim Abouelnaga

Getting a college education

is a 20-year investment.

When you're growing up poor,

you're not accustomed to thinking that far ahead.

Instead, you're thinking about where you're going to get your next meal

and how your family is going to pay rent that month.

Besides, my parents and my friends' parents

seemed to be doing just fine driving taxis and working as janitors.

It wasn't until I was a teenager

when I realized I didn't want to do those things.

By then, I was two-thirds of the way through my education,

and it was almost too late to turn things around.

When you grow up poor, you want to be rich.

I was no different.

I'm the second-oldest of seven,

and was raised by a single mother on government aid

in Queens, New York.

By virtue of growing up low-income,

my siblings and I went to some of New York City's

most struggling public schools.

I had over 60 absences when I was in seventh grade,

because I didn't feel like going to class.

My high school had a 55 percent graduation rate,

and even worse,

only 20 percent of the kids graduating

were college-ready.

When I actually did make it to college,

I told my friend Brennan

how our teachers would always ask us to raise our hands

if we were going to college.

I was taken aback when Brennan said,

"Karim, I've never been asked that question before."

It was always, "What college are you going to?"

Just the way that question is phrased

made it unacceptable for him not to have gone to college.

Nowadays I get asked a different question.

"How were you able to make it out?"

For years I said I was lucky,

but it's not just luck.

When my older brother and I graduated from high school

at the very same time

and he later dropped out of a two-year college,

I wanted to understand why he dropped out

and I kept studying.

It wasn't until I got to Cornell as a Presidential Research Scholar

that I started to learn about the very real educational consequences

of being raised by a single mother on government aid

and attending the schools that I did.

That's when my older brother's trajectory began to make complete sense to me.

I also learned that our most admirable education reformers,

people like Arne Duncan, the former US Secretary of Education,

or Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America,

had never attended an inner city public school like I had.

So much of our education reform is driven by a sympathetic approach,

where people are saying,

"Let's go and help these poor inner city kids,

or these poor black and Latino kids,"

instead of an empathetic approach,

where someone like me, who had grown up in this environment, could say,

"I know the adversities that you're facing

and I want to help you overcome them."

Today when I get questions about how I made it out,

I share that one of the biggest reasons

is that I wasn't ashamed to ask for help.

In a typical middle class or affluent household,

if a kid is struggling,

there's a good chance that a parent or a teacher will come to their rescue

even if they don't ask for help.

However, if that same kid is growing up poor

and doesn't ask for help,

there's a good chance that no one will help them.

There are virtually no social safety nets available.

So seven years ago,

I started to reform our public education system

shaped by my firsthand perspective.

And I started with summer school.

Research tells us that two-thirds of the achievement gap,

which is the disparity in educational attainment

between rich kids and poor kids

or black kids and white kids,

could be directly attributed to the summer learning loss.

In low-income neighborhoods, kids forget almost three months

of what they learned during the school year

over the summer.

They return to school in the fall,

and their teachers spend another two months

reteaching them old material.

That's five months.

The school year in the United States is only 10 months.

If kids lose five months of learning every single year,

that's half of their education.

Half.

If kids were in school over the summer, then they couldn't regress,

but traditional summer school is poorly designed.

For kids it feels like punishment,

and for teachers it feels like babysitting.

But how can we expect principals to execute an effective summer program

when the school year ends the last week of June

and then summer school starts just one week later?

There just isn't enough time to find the right people,

sort out the logistics,

and design an engaging curriculum that excites kids and teachers.

But what if we created a program over the summer

that empowered teachers as teaching coaches

to develop aspiring educators?

What if we empowered college-educated role models

as teaching fellows

to help kids realize their college ambitions?

What if empowered high-achieving kids

as mentors to tutor their younger peers

and inspire them to invest in their education?

What if we empowered all kids as scholars,

asked them what colleges they were going to,

designed a summer school they want to attend

to completely eliminate the summer learning loss

and close two-thirds of the achievement gap?

By this summer, my team will have served over 4,000 low-income children,

trained over 300 aspiring teachers

and created more than 1,000 seasonal jobs

across some of New York City's most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

(Applause)

And our kids are succeeding.

Two years of independent evaluations

tell us that our kids eliminate the summer learning loss

and make growth of one month in math

and two months in reading.

So instead of returning to school in the fall three months behind,

they now go back four months ahead in math

and five months ahead in reading.

(Applause)

Ten years ago, if you would have told me

that I'd graduate in the top 10 percent of my class from an Ivy League institution

and have an opportunity to make a dent on our public education system

just by tackling two months of the calendar year,

I would have said,

"Nah. No way."

What's even more exciting

is that if we can prevent five months of lost time

just by redesigning two months,

imagine the possibilities that we can unlock

by tackling the rest of the calendar year.

Thank you.

(Applause)