Among the thousands of students graduating from San Diego State this weekend is one of California’s youngest and most unlikely philanthropists.

I first profiled Fabiola Moreno Ruelas, now 21, three summers ago, after meeting her in Gonzales, her small hometown in the Salinas Valley. Her story was simple—but unforgettable.

Fabiola had very few resources growing up. Her father had been deported, her family was evicted from housing, and she and her mother relied on food stamps to eat and on donations from neighbors and church for clothes and schoolbooks. She did well in school, but she needed both scholarships for tuition and additional money—from Gonzales community members—to cover her living expenses in order to go to college.

As a teen, Fabiola was seriously injured in a car accident—fracturing her skull, wrist, and back. But that accident would improve her fortunes. At age 18, during her freshman year, she received a settlement of $29,000.

Then she made a remarkable choice. Rather than spend the money on herself or her family, she chose to give back to Gonzales, the community that had helped her, and other poor kids. She used the money to start her own scholarship fund, the Ruelas Fulfillment Foundation, managed by the Rotary Club. She created an application—a 2.9 GPA and 80 hours of community service were required for eligibility—and launched with the offer of four $500 grants, to help Gonzales kids with college living expenses.

Not long after I met Fabiola in summer 2019, she headed back to San Diego for her sophomore year. Dropout rates are high for first-generation college students from less-advantaged families. She confessed to me that she found university difficult during her freshman year, and that she had contemplated leaving school.

In the end, her instinct for giving would help see her through.

It wasn’t easy, and it was sometimes scary. In her sophomore fall, the academic demands grew, and, even with scholarships, she juggled two and three jobs to afford to stay in school.

Then, early in 2020, she suffered two personal blows. In January, she got the unexpected and unsettling news that her father, back in Mexico, had died. A few weeks later, in February, her stepfather got hit by a big rig while riding a bicycle and suffered near-fatal head injuries.

As Fabiola was processing those hardships, COVID hit. She was a student resident advisor in a dorm—so when campus shut down, she at once lost her place to live and one of her jobs. She went home, only to confront more death and grief. COVID fatality rates were especially high in the Salinas Valley in spring and summer 2020. She felt unhealthy and isolated.

“At that point, I really did feel like I lost everything,” Fabiola tells me. “I was grieving my father and then my stepfather … I was grieving my [student] residents.”

She says she found purpose, and comfort, in giving away money. She funded three more students through her scholarship fund. And during the George Floyd-inspired protests in summer 2020, she decided to give $1,000 from the fund to the NAACP chapter at San Diego State.

She stayed enrolled in school, which was conducted virtually, and soon found online work, mentoring and tutoring other first-generation, low-income students through their first years in college. She also got a boost from emergency federal payments to college students, though she was outraged that some other students—those without legal immigration status—weren’t eligible for the federal money. So, in January 2021, she made two more grants from her college fund to undocumented students, both at San Diego State. When she was down, one of her grantees—an engineering student—gave her a pep talk, she recalls.

She was always busy, between work (one of her jobs was in the university donor relations office) and studying political science. But she still found time to get more involved in student organizations and government—including as vice president of systemwide affairs for the California State Student Association, and, at San Diego State, as student diversity commissioner for Associated Students and as vice president of the student advisory board of the Educational Opportunity Program.

Graduating, she says, feels more like a beginning than an end. She’s not just the first college graduate in her family. She managed, just barely, to graduate without taking on debt. That will make it easier for her to do what she really wants: give away money to others.

All told, Fabiola has now given scholarships to 12 students from Gonzales High School, along with the NAACP and San Diego State students’ grants. She is raising money for more scholarships, with a particular emphasis on undocumented students, and helping students meet their basic needs.

She may even make a wider impact, too, since the governor put her on his vision council for reimagining post-secondary education. And while she isn’t sure what exactly will be next, she can raise money, and has unusual first-hand experience in increasing access to higher education.

Perhaps she could become the chancellor of the Cal State system, she muses.

After all, the job is open.

The post California’s Most Unlikely Philanthropist Is Starting a New Chapter appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mulvenna was bright and resourceful and full of promise when he enrolled at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta seven years ago, but he jumped into a higher education system stacked against anyone who is a first-generation college student, who does not have money, and who is non-white. Mulvenna had all three strikes against him. He is biracial, and was raised by a single mother in a small town 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. He was the first in his family to go to college and could draw on no resources beyond what he could cobble together from grants, loans, and the jobs he worked on evenings and weekends.

But Mulvenna was fortunate in one way: timing. Just a few years before Mulvenna arrived on campus, Georgia State had an undergraduate drop-out rate of well over 50 percent. Most, like Mulvenna, were capable and eager to learn but hit brick walls because of money, university bureaucracy, or both.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, though, Georgia State administrators decided it was no longer acceptable to wish good luck to promising students and then watch them fail over and over. The university went out on a limb and took responsibility for those it had deemed worthy of admission—and Mulvenna, with this support, was able to blossom into a star student.

Today as the United States grapples with its legacy of racial bias and a yawning gulf between rich and poor, many educational institutions are wondering how they can change and do better. Georgia State offers an inspiring glimpse of how things can be different.

Instead of clinging to the status quo, Georgia State chose to turn its leadership structure upside down, restructuring the jobs performed by professors and administrators around students’ needs, not the other way around. The results have been extraordinary. Georgia State has eliminated all achievement gaps between rich and poor, and between white and nonwhite students. It has also enjoyed a dramatic leap in the number of lower-income students on campus (now well over half the student body) and a parallel leap in graduation numbers.

Tyler Mulvenna could have dropped out of school at any of several critical junctures. The first big crunch came at the end of his freshman year, when a maddening combination of state regulations, university strictures, and financial realities blocked his path to a crucial state grant, without which he could not afford to continue. Mulvenna had come to Georgia State with a high school grade point average just shy of the 3.0 he needed to qualify for Georgia’s merit-based HOPE scholarship, which covers most tuition costs, and he’d staked everything on doing well enough in his freshman year to earn the scholarship thereafter.

Sure enough, Mulvenna sailed through his classes, but at the end of the year he found himself three credit hours short of the 30 required to qualify for HOPE. That was because Georgia State had put him in a special support program for academically promising students from vulnerable backgrounds, and the program had put a cap on the number of credit hours he could take at 27.

Mulvenna had been learning French—which would end up being one of his three majors—and he decided he’d make up the credits with a summer course in France, even winning a scholarship to cover some of the travel expenses. But he was still around $2,000 short of what he needed. The bill for summer tuition was due up front, but the HOPE money wouldn’t come through until fall.

He was a thriving student with a 3.2 GPA, and he’d hit a dead end at exactly the moment he should have been receiving maximum encouragement. It didn’t help that he’d crashed and almost totaled his car the summer after high school and couldn’t work as many hours as he’d planned. Unable to build up any savings, he’d taken out a high-interest commercial loan and was struggling to pay it back.

What came to his aid at this first juncture was a university micro-grant, designed for just this sort of eventuality, when an academically strong student is just a few hundred dollars short of what they need to keep going. Georgia State had introduced these grants just a year before Mulvenna enrolled, calculating—correctly—that the investment would pay for itself. The university would recoup thousands of dollars in continuing tuition fees and grants that would have been lost if the student dropped out.

Then came sophomore year. Thanks to HOPE, Mulvenna could afford his classes, but he was still drowning in debt and needed to work. Since he couldn’t afford a car and he couldn’t get to a job without one, he persuaded an auto mechanic in his family to stretch out the crumpled body of the Ford Fusion he’d smashed up a year earlier so it would be more or less roadworthy. It was a desperate move, because the car couldn’t pass the state tests required to get license plates. Without tags, Mulvenna was at risk of being ticketed every time he drove or parked on the street. But he depended on the car, sleeping in it several nights a week to save himself the gas he’d otherwise need to commute to and from his mother’s house.

Things became a little easier junior year, because Mulvenna was finally able to afford campus housing. But the pressure of studying full-time while logging as many as 30 hours a week at paying jobs was unrelenting. Mulvenna came down with shingles, strep throat, tonsilitis, and mononucleosis, each of which disrupted his studies and his ability to pay for them.

Microgrants from the university helped Tyler Mulvenna graduate with a triple major. Courtesy of Carolyn Richardson/Georgia State.

Any of these setbacks could have ended his studies—and without an additional two micro-grants from Georgia State before graduation, they would have. Instead, Mulvenna graduated on time with a triple major in French, marketing and international business—and a rack of university honors to his name.

Similar problems derail hundreds of thousands of students across the country each year. Students rise to the academic challenge of college but cannot always handle the precariousness of scrimping for every dollar when one slip-up or unforeseen crisis—a family illness, or an overstretched credit card, or a scheduling clash pushing a key course requirement back by a semester—can blow up their finances and make it impossible to continue in higher education.

Guiding Georgia State’s radically different approach was the firm refusal to accept that students from disadvantaged backgrounds were doomed to fail in large numbers. Tim Renick, the university’s student success guru and driver of its most important reforms, knew this received wisdom was wrong because he’d seen students of all kinds thrive during his years as a gifted young religious studies professor.

When Renick began his administrative job devising student success strategies in 2008, the economy was collapsing and the university was beginning to view higher retention and graduation rates as a way of compensating for a sharp drop-off in state funding. But Renick was driven, above all, by a conviction that loading students up with debt and sending them away without a degree was morally abhorrent.

Renick’s approach tracked students based on individual need, not by race or family income. The university then used the data it collected to identify and remove obstacles standing in students’ way, and to sell policy changes to faculty leaders who were resistant to change by temperament, and reluctant to accept that they could be doing a better job.

Renick transformed the university’s academic advising service to ensure that it reached out to every student, not just the ones who elected to seek help on their own. A cutting-edge advising platform processed tens of thousands of data points, including years of past grades and graduation outcomes, to offer students a predictive model showing them what degree path was most likely to be successful. Renick used similar data analysis to show deans and department heads how to change class schedules and move students along more quickly.

To help students negotiate the thicket of financial forms required to set foot on campus, Renick’s team helped develop an artificial intelligence chatbot to answer questions and offer reminders of looming deadlines. To assist the most vulnerable first-generation students, at risk of getting lost on a large urban campus, they set up a summer academy to give them a head start. And they set up the micro-grants and awarded them automatically. Academically deserving students did not have to apply; they simply saw debt wiped clean from their university accounts.

More than 55,000 students now benefit from Georgia State’s brand of individualized, micro-level assistance. Students who struggle with homelessness and food insecurity now graduate at the same rate as the children of wealth and privilege. The four-year graduation rate, which hit a low of 32 percent in 2003, is now close to 60 percent, with the six-year graduation rate pushing 80 percent. Remarkably, the university has done this while greatly expanding its numbers of lower-income and nonwhite students. For each of the last eight years in a row, more African Americans have graduated from Georgia State than from any other institution in the country—an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that, two generations ago, African Americans were locked out as a matter of official policy.

The student success work has continued despite the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a university where students are trained to be conversant with multiple technologies from day one, the move to online classes was relatively seamless, and the spring semester saw a class attendance rate of more than 98 percent. Graduation and grade point average numbers were up too.

Nothing about these achievements has been simple. The university leadership had to win over multiple constituencies, including a ruby-red state legislature suspicious of academia and internal critics who thought Georgia State shouldn’t bother admitting students who, through no fault of their own, arrived less than fully prepared for university-level calculus, or organic chemistry. Many thought a smarter response to the 2008 recession would have been to raise admissions standards and weed out students like Tyler Mulvenna—the ones most in need of what the campus had to offer and just waiting to be given their chance. It’s difficult not to hear echoes of Georgia’s ugly racial history, in the way these arguments were framed.

Georgia State’s successful interventions gives students the sense someone is in fact looking out for them and eager to see them thrive. That feeling of connection is huge—especially for Black and other minority students who just a few years ago, found themselves overlooked as a matter of course. Cary Claiborne, now a senior member of Georgia State’s advising staff, remembers being told as a failing community college student in the early 2000s that “the world is not designed for people like you to do what you want to do. You’re supposed to fail out of school.”

Claiborne found his own path to success, earning a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Georgia State, and now makes sure to communicate a very different message to new students. Everything you do matters, he tells them, and the university’s job is to help you graduate and get out into the world as quickly as possible. The result is a new, vibrant, extraordinarily diverse generation of college graduates who promise to change the face not only of Atlanta—but the country as a whole.

The post A Micro-Loan at a Time, an Atlanta University Is Bridging the Racial Achievement Gap appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, we’re still here—we’re assistant principals (and a little sick of each other, we joke)—in a very different Santee and a very different South L.A. Over the past 11 years, we’ve learned a lot about how to build and improve a school, and a community.

The biggest lesson is that a school doesn’t have to have a special status—as a magnet or a charter—to be academically challenging. Santee is a comprehensive neighborhood high school, and this year, 251 out of our 297 graduating seniors are on their way to two and four-year college. This is in contrast to when we opened, when nearly three-quarters of our students didn’t graduate at all.

Santee’s dedication to the neighborhood is part of what has drawn us to it. Both of us are from South L.A. Terri grew up right near where the school sits now, land that was then a dairy farm. Pablo is from the Florence-Firestone neighborhood and went to Fremont High School.

Before Santee opened, both of us were worried that South L.A. schools weren’t producing enough college-ready kids. Pablo had worked as an admissions recruiter for UCLA, his alma mater, and he saw how few South L.A. kids got in. He wondered if it was because few teachers in South L.A. understood the area. When he worked at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, he was impressed to see that many effective teachers there were also Roosevelt alums.

Pablo took a teaching job at Santee precisely because of the possibility of building a similar cadre of South L.A.-savvy teachers. Terri also was attracted by the possibilities of a new school, including the opportunity to write a new English curriculum. She wanted to keep working with the principal of the middle school where she was teaching, who had been hired by Santee. Pablo saw similar curricular possibilities in economics.

But Santee got off to a slow start. Some of it was just the hiccups of any start-up, but we also had serious student challenges. Many of our students came from a badly overcrowded nearby high school, and Santee was being used as a dumping ground for high-needs students that other schools were struggling to serve. Few of the students we got were on track to graduate—which made our graduation rate just 27 percent.

The biggest challenge in improving Santee was that the school didn’t have a common culture. There were two structural problems that proved to be big barriers. First, Santee was on a three-track, year-round calendar to accommodate all the students sent our way, so everyone was on a different schedule. Secondly, the school was split up into SLCs—“Small Learning Communities”—and each had a different academic focus, from arts to business. So students were taking different classes, and different subjects.

Change came slowly, but it came. In 2008-09, Santee joined the Partnership, a sort of district within the school district. Most of the Partnership schools were in South L.A., and other schools included elementary and middle schools that fed into Santee. That made it easier to create cohesiveness and continuity. After that, we got rid of the multi-track, year-round calendar. We also moved away from the Small Learning Communities, as it became increasingly difficult to maintain them as purely separate and individual entities with the right amount of teachers. We also got a new dynamic principal, Dr. Martin Gomez, who didn’t see any limits to what was possible.

The fact that South L.A. itself was changing made it easier to envision change at Santee. Voters had approved school bonds in the previous decades, and so other new schools and school facilities were opening, taking some of the pressure off Santee. In addition, enrollment was down in district schools as the number of children declined and charter schools opened.

A smaller, more cohesive school was easier to manage. We found we could offer students more access to a variety of courses, since they were no longer limited to their small learning communities. We were able to focus more on college readiness, and we started to offer more and more Advanced Placement classes, which can be used for college credit. This past year, nearly 500 students took at least one AP class at Santee.

We’ve both seen how pushing kids into one rigorous class inspires them in the rest of their classes. Students who are doing college work begin to ask about preparing for college, paying for college, and how they can excel in college. We also think this greater cohesion and rigor help explain improving test scores and graduation rates at the school; the unofficial rate for this just-concluded school year is 87 percent.

Under the newer structure, we’ve also done more for teachers. We’ve invested heavily in what we call Professional Learning Communities, which give teachers the opportunity to collaborate with each other to build instructional plans and common assessments, as well as lessons that meet the needs of individual students.

And with the support of the partnership, we’ve gotten better at attracting nonprofit and corporate partners to support the school, including Fox Sports West (student internships), Ernst & Young (student mentoring), and Cal State Los Angeles (which offers our students one of their math classes right here on our campus).

Like it or not, public schools compete with each other these days for both faculty and students. In L.A. Unified, students and families can rank the schools they want to attend, and Santee wants to make sure that we continue to be the top-ranked school among students in our area. So we’ve become more student-focused, drawing on every resource we can find. We hired two pupil services and attendance (PSA) counselors, who advocate for the students both inside and outside schools. (Too many California schools don’t have any counselors.) We also invested in two psychiatric social workers, and two Diploma Project counselors, who keep students on track to graduate. And we have a dedicated intervention coordinator, who gets involved when students get off track.

These investments have helped us build a more compassionate culture. Since we’re a comprehensive school, that’s essential. We have more than 300 special education students, and more than 75 of them have moderate to severe disabilities. We’re also the only school in South L.A. with an American Sign Language class.

We’re proud that we haven’t had any bullying incidents, and this spring, the culture here allowed us to become the first high school in LAUSD and the first public high school in Southern California, that we know of, to open a gender-neutral bathroom, so students can use the bathroom without fear of judgement.

Even with all of this, we need to keep doing more. Pablo, who oversees the AP program, has made it a priority to increase the number of kids who pass the tests, not just take the class. Next year, Santee will be launching a new School for Advanced Studies. We’ll have to be careful to make sure that it doesn’t become a place apart from the rest of the school, but we have to do it in order to remain competitive.

At the same time, we need to do better by our special education students and our English-language learners. We’re in the process of creating common assessments among all teachers for special education, and adding more rigorous instruction. We’re encouraging our disabled students to take more regular classes. And we’re reevaluating how we work with the Santee students who are new to the country. How do we give them English language support and make sure they graduate at the same age as other students?

The two of us often talk about changing the reality of Santee (we want 100 percent of students ready to go to college) as well as the perception of the school and the community. We want to correct the misconception—still all too common—that students and parents in South L.A. don’t care as much about education as their affluent counterparts. In our experience, South L.A. parents are even more driven about getting their kids to college.

We want people to know that kids in South L.A. can get a great education at the school down the street—and that they will receive a quality education from teachers and administrators who were once South L.A. kids themselves.

The post How South L.A.’s Santee Education Complex’s Graduation Rate Jumped Nearly 60 Percent in 11 Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At Arizona State University’s commencement a few weeks ago, Teach for America Founder Wendy Kopp advised the newly-minted graduates to remember the importance of inclusion and diversity and the need to break down barriers that keep “millions of children from exercising their talents and achieving the quality of life they deserved.” (Zócalo is affiliated with ASU.) She called this generation “smart, savvy, discerning, amazingly connected” and capable of making a profound difference by seeing each other as members of the same team.

Kopp’s vision of the world, and how young people should engage it, stands in stark contrast to the world described by many of the candidates out on the hustings this year. I don’t recognize that picture portrayed by politicians eager to divide us; Like Kopp, I have an abundance of confidence in the future, precisely because the young men and women in their caps and gowns are already fighting to build the kind of world we all want: Fair, just, and creative, with the capability to fix even the most complex problems.

Politics and political rhetoric don’t define the entirety of our civic engagement, and so these graduates are right to believe in both the future and their power to shape it, without being deterred by dire partisan machinations. And these graduates’ sense of empowerment to contribute to society doesn’t stem from naiveté, but from the foundation for lifelong learning and adaptation they’ve acquired with their college education.

But what will it take for these graduates to pursue their goals and succeed in this deeply-polarized America? The answer is a simple and powerful technology: Teamwork. And the good news is that the same hyper-connectivity that at times poisons our political discourse with its unfiltered, raw immediacy can also be leveraged for collaboration and constructive teamwork.

Indeed, Wendy Kopp’s concept for Teach for America is a model of how to leverage networks of well-intentioned and talented people wanting to make a positive difference in their communities. For more than 25 years, the organization has recruited recent graduates from top institutions to sign a two-year contract to teach in K-12 schools located in low-income areas throughout the country. Several studies have concluded that the program consistently provides effective, high-quality instruction to students who can benefit from it most. I am proud that 40 graduating Sun Devils have been selected to teach in TFA classrooms this coming fall.

In a similar spirit, at ASU we are committed to expanding the benefits of a college diploma to a larger swath of people. And we seek creative forms of teamwork that can further this mission. One of our responses is an unlikely partnership with Starbucks to create a path to educate more of our nation’s population, encourage upward mobility, and respond to the challenges of social and economic inequality.

Our resulting College Achievement Plan (CAP) provides a means for more people to complete their college education without being burdened by crushing student debt. A key aspect of this ongoing initiative is an evolving use of technology to enhance our digitally immersive course offerings. We are seeing the results with more than 5,200 Starbucks employees enrolled since 2014 and more than 100 graduates this spring.

The fruits of this effort can be seen in the achievements of people like store manager Michelle Brown, a Sacramento, California, mother of two who had struggled both financially and with demands on her time before dropping out after two years of college. Through the CAP program, she just completed her bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership at ASU, and she will see her own daughter head to college this fall.

Brown’s story is not unusual: There are thousands and thousands of smart, capable, and passionate people who for a variety of reasons had not completed their college degree on a traditional track. It is incumbent upon us as a society, and especially those of us privileged to work in higher education, to find innovative ways to connect with these people who have so much to contribute. The effort is not only about fulfilling their individual potential, but the nation’s as well.

If we leave it up to our politicians to define the narrative around America’s prospects, we may be convinced that failure is at hand—and that teamwork is not a key to success. But that is neither a winning proposition nor true.

Michelle Brown and her fellow graduates are wise to take their cues and inspiration from the Wendy Kopps among us, and to fight together for the future they want. That is the future we all need.

The post If Politics Has You Down, Crash a Graduation Ceremony appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.