Change the culture in inner-city schools to one in which the pursuit of a professional career becomes ‘the given’ for all students.
Low-income, urban schools, are plagued with problems that seem insurmountable: a drop out rate as high as 50 percent, low passing rates on standardized tests, and curriculum requirements that do not prepare all students for college or the workplace. These are just a few of the challenges that distract many school administrators from the “bigger picture” of preparing the students for their life beyond high school.
Given our current education system, the future of America’s economy is in jeopardy. A generation ago there were plenty of good jobs that didn’t require a high school diploma or professional behavior, but today those jobs have largely gone overseas. The United States is not producing the number of graduates that corporations require in science, engineering, accounting and many other disciplines. At the same time, the demographic makeup of our youth has changed dramatically in the last few decades and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The net result is the creation of a “perfect storm” - an economy that has a lot of jobs that we cannot fill and a large and growing number of capable people who are caught in generational poverty because they cannot access jobs that pay living wages. The combination is catastrophic for the American economy. We must fix the education system.
Whereas there is no single “silver bullet” solution to the education problem, there is one significant difference between the schools that send most of their students to college or to meaningful employment, and those that have a high percentage of drop outs or graduates who just go into minimum wage jobs: school culture.
The fact is that most of us are a product of our environment and we tend to follow the norms established in the communities we live in. Quite simply, we do what those around us tend to do. Whereas students attending successful schools are immersed with a sense of purpose, self-empowerment, and healthy competition - students in many other schools, mostly in low-income communities, lack real relevance, discipline and purpose in their education. Often times, the general mode is survival rather than preparation. Perceptions become skewed; students never consider a professional path, and those who show interest in breaking the mold are ostracized as “un-cool” or worse, traitors to their community.
Schools try to increase rigor to better prepare students for the future but the reality is that without relevance and the presence of individual healthy relationships, an increase in rigor only contributes to an increase in drop outs. So schools adopt a low standard where success equates to keeping the child in school. Sadly, in those situations, engaging the student into a professional career is not even contemplated.
Some successful charter schools have proven that by instituting the right culture within their walls, they can affect behavior with their student population as a whole. They can get students to focus on their career and they can get parents involved. As a result, their student performance, drop out rates, test scores, and college attendance is significantly better than other public high schools that serve the same demographics. Unfortunately, these high-performing charter schools serve only a very small percentage of the total student population. In order to prepare the population as a whole for the requirements of the 21st century, we must change the culture within our large urban public schools.
Genesys Works has demonstrated that by enabling students to experience life as a professional, by setting high expectations and offering the support structure to achieve them, by making students accountable for their actions and rewarding them for good behavior, by making their studies relevant to their future, and by introducing healthy adult mentoring relationships, students change their behavior and their perspective in life. Students dress better, perform better, and begin to view themselves as capable professionals with college aspirations. What’s more, students then begin to influence those around them. With an increased self-confidence and sense of purpose, they become the new “cool” students on campus that others want to emulate. And, the circle of poverty in their families is forever broken as parents realize the true potential of their children and establish the new high expectations for the younger siblings.
Now, we must do this, collectively as a society, for the entire education system.
At Genesys Works we envision:
- A public school system where all students go to school every day with a determination to become successful professionals in a spirit of positive competition.
- A system where education is imparted on each student based on his or her areas of skills and interests, following a cohesive sequence of classes that is interesting to the student and brings relevance and real preparation for a demanding internship during their senior year.
- A system that allows committed teachers to reward student performance and enforce real discipline.
- A school accountability system that measures how schools are preparing students for life after K-12 and properly rewards those that excel.
- A business community that embraces the need and urgency to get involved in the education of our youth and also sees the benefit of utilizing high school seniors to perform real jobs in a wide range of disciplines.
We are convinced that when this happens, the academic preparation of students as a whole will rise, the number of drop outs will drastically diminish, and we will be able to meet the workforce needs that our economy depends on. To achieve this, Genesys Works is now playing a larger role in education reform influencing school districts and other community stakeholders, not only in the cities it has a presence in, but also with national audiences.
Genesys Works invites you to join them in their quest to
“Change the culture in inner-city schools to one in which the pursuit of a professional career becomes ‘the given’ for all students”.
