Walcott touts Young Men's Initiative as DOE inches forward

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott wanted attendees at the Mayor’s Young Men’s Initiative Summit to know that even programs with the best intentions can be tricky to execute.

This lesson, he said, would be particularly important for city officials as they implement a sweeping new initiative to address the educational and economic disparities between male students of color and their peers.

Walcott stopped by the day-long summit to represent the Department of Education, which is leading up the Expanded Success Initiative, one of several prongs of the Bloomberg administration’s  Young Men’s Initiative. At a cost of $24 million, the project will bring researchers into schools that are succeeding with male students of color. But nearly nine months after it was announced, the department still hasn’t picked which schools to show off.

The city has assembled a shortlist of 81 eligible schools and will by the end of May pick 40 who want to participate — and receive a $250,000 bonus. To be eligible, a school must have a four-year graduation rate above 65 percent, an A or B on its most recent progress report, and a student body where at least 35 percent are black or Latino males and 60 percent are qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. It must also promise to implement even more aggressive strategies to help black and Latino male students.

When he announced the Young Men’s Initiative in August, Mayor Bloomberg promised swift changes to schools serving the highest proportions of black and Latino students. Already, the department has begun giving high schools extra credit when those students make progress. Schools have started to benefit from a literacy program and a middle school mentoring initiative, neither of which the department is administering. But the Expanded Success Initiative has been slow to start.

The summit, which was held at Harlem Hospital and only open to the media in the morning, made good on the city’s promise to bring together leaders of local and national non-profits, foundations, city agencies to brainstorm how to connect students with mentors.

While skirting specifics of the Expanded Success Initiative during his short speech, Walcott got his audience of city employees and community organization leaders laughing this morning as he described his first foray into youth mentorship, the subject of the morning panel. In the 1970s he founded a Queens spin-off of Big Brothers, Big Sisters, a national mentorship program, to pair students ages 5 through 12 with older mentors.

Walcott pushed the program in the local media, and ran a television announcement adjacent to “Soul Train,” an iconic music show. But he said the response from community members who wanted to volunteer was too overwhelming for one person running the program alone.

“I didn’t have any researched strategies in place, I just had good intentions,” he said. “Between the Daily News article, which was a front page article, and the [Public Service Announcement] in front of ‘Soul Train,’ or during ‘Soul Train,’ there’s was a huge volume of information going in.”

Walcott fit this anecdote into a larger message about the importance of cross-agency collaboration to the success of the Young Men’s Initiative, an ambitious set of youth programs with a collective $127 million price tag.

“One size does not fit all. It’s not just having a big brother or a little brother,” he said. “It’s a variety of different ways of being a mentor to people who are out there, especially young men of color.”

Walcott spoke directly following a panel discussion about the value of youth mentorship, featuring Leslie Cornfeld, chair of the Interagency Task Force on Truancy, Chronic Absenteeism and School Engagement, and several community and youth mentoring organization leaders.

Walcott championed the notion of system-wide collaboration during the question-and-answer session, after one attendee raised a question central to the Young Men’s Initiative: How will the city make a long-term impact on the grim college readiness rate for black and Latino students, which hovers around 13 percent?

“It’s really great that we’ve raised this million dollars for this mentoring,” the speaker said, “but who is looking at this as an entire system, so that in ten years we’re not back looking at how we’re going to spend a million dollars to save a generation of kids?”

“Your question is right on. It’s a collective effort of the Department of Education, the people on the stage, and the people here in the audience as far as working together,” Walcott said. “Through the Expanded Success Initiative we are identifying schools that have done the job well, particularly with black and Latino males, and black and Latino students, and replicating that success in other schools.”

The Department of Education’s list of schools that are eligible to apply for the Expanded Success Initiative is below.