Esi district narrative torrisi 4 28 16

The Expanded Success Initiative

New York City’s Efforts to Implement an Initiative Targeting Young Men of Color

Carmen FariĂąa, Chancellor

Table of Contents LETTER FROM OPSR 1 THE EXPANDED SUCCESS INITIATIVE Designing the Initiative

3

School Selection

4

Key Implementation Decisions

5

Central vs. School-Level Decision Making

6

Implementing a Cohesive CRE Strategy

8

Using Data Wisely

11

Keeping the Focus on Young Men of Color

13

Sharing Lessons Learned

14

RECOMMENDATIONS

17

CONCLUSION

20

Dear John Doe, Letter from OPSR. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce sit amet mauris arcu. Etiam nec aliquam urna. Aliquam condimentum elit ut erat malesuada, vel vulputate nisl elementum. Nullam at sem at augue rhoncus rhoncus at a nunc. Nunc nibh sem, tincidunt a accumsan quis, pharetra a metus.

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Sincerely,

THE EXPANDED SUCCESS INITIATIVE

One District’s Efforts to Implement an Initiative Targeting Young Men of Color

In late 2011, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) set out to reimagine how young men of color experienced high school to better prepare them for postsecondary success. As part of the larger Young Men’s Initiative (YMI), a citywide effort to improve life outcomes for Black and Latino men, the Expanded Success Initiative (ESI) was born out of a desire to address the need to develop seemingly intractable opportunity gap, and raise expectations from simply graduating high school to leaving ready for college and career.

Several years after its launch, ESI is curating lessons learned from its work with 40 high schools and over 10,000 young men to inform a broader conversation underway in communities across the country on how to reimagine the educational experiences of Black and Latino male students. This document is meant to support other school districts as they investigate implementation strategies for race- and gender-based initiatives by describing how ESI was designed, launched and implemented.

Embedded throughout are district-level decisions in working with schools, and their expected and unexpected trade offs. The document offers recommendations informed by the successes, failures and ongoing challenges faced by the ESI team. Whenever possible, artifacts are included.

The overall goal is to ensure other entities working to improve outcomes for young men of color can be informed by work already underway.

2

Designing the Initiative

Designing the Initiative Before the specific parameters of ESI were defined, DOE Central staff conducted a thorough review of existing research to ensure the initiative’s design was informed by current knowledge. They examined research on preparing students for college and career, supporting men of color, and identifying particular needs of first-generation college goers and immigrant students. The literature identified three important areas of work as necessary and interconnected to moving the needle for young men: strong college-preparatory academics, dedicated resources for youth development activities and a school culture that explicitly expects students to go on to college. Additionally, the literature articulated a need to start developing college supports as early as possible, particularly for first-generation students.

Simultaneously, the Central team wanted to design the initiative to harness the existing knowledge and expertise of school staff. Because the team firmly believed in the ability of school leaders to best address the needs of their students, the team created ESI as a research and development (R&D) initiative. Philosophically, this meant designing the initiative to provide some guidance to schools but ultimately placing decision-making authority with school staff rather than the Central team. As schools created their own strategies, the Central team would foster spaces for collaboration across schools and describe lessons learned to share more broadly.

“Research and development is the systematic activity combining both basic and applied research, and aimed at discovering solutions to problems or creating new goods and knowledge.”

- Business Dictionary.com

The Central team merged these principles with lessons from the literature by making the following design decisions: ESI would work with schools that were successfully graduating young men of color, but not at the college and career ready level; These schools would be invited to propose specific activities that they believed could raise expectations from graduating high school to college and career readiness; These schools would be required to address stronger academics, youth development and creating a college-going school culture in their proposals; ESI activities would start with the freshman cohort and spread to later grades over time; and Funding would go directly to schools to spend as they deemed appropriate with minimal oversight from Central.

Importantly, schools were given their funding allocation through the NYC DOE’s nonprofit arm, The Fund for Public Schools. This allowed schools to enjoy greater flexibility with how their funds were spent because the Fund was free of many of the contractual obligations of the Department as a whole. Additionally, because ESI was asking schools to innovate and change practices to raise their standards, the Central Team thought it was important to push schools to engage with new community partners who could provide evidence of success at preparing young men for college. The Central team created an RFP process, reviewed applications, and provided schools with 90+ approved vendors. Schools could work with other partners not on the list, but were required provide justification before doing so.

DECISION POINTS FOR OTHER DISTRICTS

How prescriptive do you want your initiative to be?

How should the money funding your initiative be divided?

3

School Selection

School Selection Based on these design decisions, the Central team worked with colleagues in the Department of Education to establish criteria for schools that would be eligible to apply for ESI. These metrics were important efforts to ensure participating schools had a demonstrated expertise at supporting young men of color, but still had to improve college and career readiness rates. Interestingly, these metrics also limited the pool of eligible schools to those that had been established long enough to have the required data and excluded many large high schools.

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA Greater than 35% Black & Latino Male Enrollment Greater than 60% of Total Enrollment Qualify for Free and/or Reduced Lunch 4-Year Graduation Rate above 65% A or B on the 2011 Progress Report, the NYC School Report Cards

DECISION POINTS FOR OTHER DISTRICTS

What types of schools would be most likely to engage with and benefit from this initiative?

What knowledge do you want to make sure school staff have in order to succeed?

What data do you have to help identify your schools?

4

Eighty-one (81) high schools met these criteria. They were invited to participate in a pioneering application process that placed authority in the hands of schools to define ESI, and gave them tools necessary to innovate practices that support young men of color. Interested schools attended a launch event, where participants were introduced to ESI, oriented to the existing literature, provided data on how their young men of color perform compared with the school overall, and given time and professional development money to create exciting proposals for the initiative. School teams were provided a $3,000 stipend to foster innovation in their proposals; funding was meant to be used to attend conferences, bring in professional learning to the school community, and pay professional development funds to keep school staff after hours. In order to develop buy-in from stakeholders across school communities, each school’s proposal identified a design team that included administrators, teachers, parents and students.

School staff were encouraged to include community partners in their design proposals, particularly partners from the approved vendor list.

Proposals were received from 59 schools in May 2012. Each proposal was reviewed by a team of three individuals, two representing the DOE and one external evaluator.

Proposals were reviewed using a rubric that weighed four categories of the application: focus on the needs of Black and Latino young men, alignment to college and career readiness indicators, commitment to build sustainable practices as part of the school organization, and capacity for implementation. The top 40 schools were selected for participation in ESI.

Key Implementation Decisions

Key Implementation Decisions Once schools were selected for participation in the initiative, the Central team shifted focus to how the Central Office should support the work. Again, since ESI sought to keep decision-making authority on schools, the Central team did not see their job as ensuring compliance with the program, or defining specific actions schools were required to take. Instead, it wanted to serve as a hub for collaboration between schools, and as a technical assistance provider. The focus was on providing professional learning opportunities for schools, establishing platforms to collaborate, and identifying key learnings that could be shared broadly.

From 2012 to 2016, the Central team worked closely with ESI schools to identify existing challenges for their young men of color, design solutions to these challenges, pinpoint professional learning needs for school teams to execute as planned, identify lessons from these experiences, and connect school teams with resources to support their efforts. Deeper descriptions are available in the Research Alliance of New York City’s implementation evaluation reports, ‘Changing How High Schools Serve Black and Latino Young Men: A Report on NYC’s Expanded Success Initiative’ and ‘Promising Opportunities for Black and Latino Young Men: Findings from the Early Implementation of the Expanded Success Initiative,’ as well as on the ESI website.

The focus was on providing professional learning opportunities for schools, establishing platforms to collaborate, and identifying key learnings that could be shared broadly.

Just as school teams piloted innovative practices and improved implementation by addressing their own challenges, the Central team engaged in a similar process.

Throughout its support efforts, the Central team wrestled with several complexities from this groundbreaking initiative, including:

1

How to honor and continue school-level decision making while

2

H ow to maximize opportunities for and impact of lessons from culturally responsive education (CRE) training;

3

W hat monitoring and evaluation support should look like; and

4

H ow to help schools stay focused on young men of color when all of their students needed support.

rolling out such a large effort;

5

should handle be Key Implementation Decisions?

Central vs. School-Level Decision Making

1 Central vs. School-Level Decision Making:

How does a district honor and continue school-level decision making while rolling out such a large initiative?

As described earlier, ESI pushed decision-making authority from the Central office onto schools. The benefits of this approach were multifaceted. First, by giving schools autonomy, it allowed innovation to be driven by those working with young men.

School staff were able to take stock of their own communities and adapt their activities.

For example, many schools decided to support stronger interpersonal relationships between students through mentoring. However, specific strategies varied greatly from school to school. Second, school autonomy conveyed a level of respect for school staff that many appreciated, and demonstrated trust in school staff to address seemingly intractable challenges. As such, it helped establish a community of learners between Central and school staff that was critical to open conversations around race and gender.

But this design orientation did have some tradeoffs, as outlined in [table].

DESIGN DECISION

BENEFIT

TRADE-OFF

Schools were given the freedom to design ESI how they thought would most effectively increase college and career readiness for young men of color.

• The work supported by ESI would be driven by educators who are closest to the students ESI was designed to serve - young men of color.

•W hile many schools appreciated this flexibility, some found it difficult to innovate without more guidance.

• The district learned what schools believed they needed in order to support young men, and advocated on their behalf, and on behalf of the district overall.

• Educators could adapt the initiative to work within their school context, and align activities to existing mission, systems and structures.

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•B ecause school autonomy was so foundational to the initiative, the Central team was limited in how to support schools that were not pushing their thinking far enough.

•E SI looked different at all 40 schools, which made program monitoring and evaluation more challenging.

School teams decided how much to engage with professional learning opportunities offered by the Central Team.

• School teams could prioritize professional learning that was coherent with their overall school mission, and the work already underway at their school.

•R egardless of how important the Central team viewed various program opportunities (liaison meetings, CRE training, Young Men’s Gatherings, annual kick-off meetings), schools were not required to attend.

• The district could learn what elements of professional learning schools themselves indicate they need, and allocate budgets accordingly.

•M onitoring program implementation was challenging for the Central Office when schools consistently skipped events organized by the Central Office.

School teams were free to spend their $250,000 investment how they saw fit, regardless of their engagement with the initiative.

• Schools were able to spend money on the activities they felt were most valuable to their students and schools.

•B ecause schools receive their full funding regardless of participation, it was challenging to push schools to engage in practices that were outside their school buildings. For example, many schools expressed interest in intervisitations with other schools in the initiative. However, when these were organized, few schools were willing to take off time to leave their own buildings.

ESI was born out of a desire to address the need to develop seemingly intractable opportunity gap, and raise expectations from simply graduating high school to leaving ready for college and career.

7

should handle be Key Implementation Decisions?

Implementing a Cohesive CRE Strategy

2 Implementing a Cohesive CRE Strategy:

How does a district maximize opportunities for and impact of lessons from culturally responsive education (CRE) training?

Early in the initiative, the Central team recognized culturally responsive education trainings as central to ESI’s mission. Research consistently described its importance, and school leaders across the 40 ESI schools articulated its need. Trainings evolved over the course of the initiative, in response to school requests and experience implementing these trainings [see table].

TIMELINE

CRE APPROACH

Summer 2012

Introduction to CRE Goal: To introduce schools to the concept Structure: 4-day offsite PD Open to: School teams from all 40 ESI schools # of Participants: Providers: Professor Michelle Knight-Manuel, [Who were the other 3 providers?]

Central team contracted with 4 CRE providers to offer several multi-day professional learning opportunities, each approaching it in a different way.

School Year 2012-13

Creating a Culturally Responsive, College-Going Culture Goal: To create systems at a school that support college going, particularly for young men of color Structure: Series of 4 workshops held onsite for the entire school community Open to: All ESI Schools # of Participants: Providers: Professor Michelle Knight-Manuel School leaders identified participants in a variety of different ways

School Year 2013-14

Creating a Culturally Responsive, College-Going Culture Goal: To create systems at a school that support college going, particularly for young men of color Structure: Series of 4 workshops held onsite for the entire school community Open to: All ESI Schools # of Participants: Providers: Professor Michelle Knight-Manuel School leaders identified participants in a variety of different ways. ESI Central team embedded some elements of these sessions into ESI liaison meetings.

Summer 2014

CRE Immersion Week Goal: To develop expertise in CRE in each core academic subject Structure: 1-week seminar Open to: Pedagogues from all 40 schools were invited # of Participants: Providers: [Who were the providers?]

During the week, 1 day was dedicated to each core academic subject and an additional day was allocated to discussing CRE more broadly

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Implementing a Cohesive CRE Strategy

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TIMELINE

CRE APPROACH

School Year 2014-15

Creating a Culturally Responsive, College-Going Culture Goal: To create systems at a school that support college going, particularly for young men of color Structure: Series of 4 workshops held onsite for the entire school community Open to: All ESI Schools # of Participants: Providers: Professor Michelle Knight-Manuel Curriculum Writing Seminar, Pilot Goal: To build off summer training, educators were pared with Teachers College professors to develop culturally responsive lesson plans in English and Science Structure: [need more info] Open to: English and Science teachers from all 40 schools were invited # of Participants: Providers: [Who were the providers?]

Participants of the summer CRE Immersion Week asked for deeper support in integrating CRE practices into classrooms

Summer 2015

CRE Immersion Week Goal: To deepen CRE strategies in core academic areas Structure: [need more info] Open to: School teams from all 40 schools were invited # of Participants: Providers: [Who were the providers?]

Established a learning community among participants

School Year 2015-16

CRE Institute Goal: To further conversations started through the CRE Immersion Week and deepen the community of learners established during that training Structure: Series of evening workshops Open to: Open to educators from any NYC school # of Participants: Providers: [Who were the providers?]

CRE Fellowship Goal: To both deepen CRE concepts and support participants’ efforts to make change happen back in their school communities Structure: Series of evening workshops Open to: Open to educators from any NYC school # of Participants: Providers: [Who were the providers?]

In addition to providing opportunities for educators to reflect on their own identities, they developed plans to bring change back to their schools.

9

should handle be Key Implementation Decisions?

Implementing a Cohesive CRE Strategy

Critically, as the initiative rolled out, the Central team learned several key lessons about providing CRE training, including: articipants need to be given time to reflect on their own identities. Indeed, P participants were eager to have this opportunity. Participants then need additional time to see how their identities may be influencing their classroom practice.

C onversations about identity, and how race and gender influence it, are sensitive. Participants were more willing to speak openly with an expert facilitator. Because of their sensitive nature, very few participants were comfortable or capable of turnkeying without specific guidance and support.

N ot all teachers will come to the table when talking about race and gender.

Making sessions mandatory, therefore, was not always a successful strategy.

C RE is important for everyone, but particularly critical when school staff and students come from very different backgrounds.

I t was important for the Central office to offer a range of trainings designed for educators at all stages of engagement with CRE. For some, it was helpful to introduce CRE at a school-wide training on creating a college going culture. For others, it was valuable to ground CRE conversations in specific recommendations for pedagogical practices.

T rainings were most successful in influencing practice when they were organized as a series of workshops with coherent learning goals that engaged school teams and pushed practitioners to develop very specific and targeted changes.

B ecause Common Core and teacher evaluations were implemented at the district level at the same time ESI was engaging in these trainings, efforts to connected CRE concepts to these broader initiatives were highly valued by participants.

Importantly, whenever ESI brought educators together, the Central team made sure to provide participants an opportunity to engage in conversations about race and gender. Central staff lead discussions about current events, such protests in Ferguson and Baltimore, the killings of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. These discussions grounded any work related to ESI in its mission, allowed school staff in attendance to discuss race and identity, and modeled how these important conversations could continue back at schools.

Above all, the ESI community recognized that successful and meaningful CRE training is resource intensive. The financial and personnel investment were significant, both for the Central team and the school communities, and the reach was fairly limited. However, ESI felt these investments were critical to the mission of serving young men of color. Because ESI schools came to the table with the goal of improving outcomes for young men of color, and those same schools were largely staffed by white women, the need for CRE was particularly acute.

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Using Data Wisely

3 Using Data Wisely:

What Should Monitoring & Evaluation Support for an R&D Initiative Look Like?

Monitoring and evaluation were priorities for ESI from its inception. Indeed, the Central team devoted significant dollars to an external implementation and impact evaluation, conducted by the Research Alliance of New York City. Additionally, the team included a Research Evaluation Manager, who was tasked with providing regular data reports and professional learning sessions to schools as well as bridging the gap between the external evaluators and schools to maximize lessons learned.

By design, schools participating in the initiative designed a diverse set of interventions. Academic supports offered through ESI varied by school. Even within one school, some activities would address an entire class of students, while others would influence 5-10 kids. As such, identifying universal metrics that were available to the Central team that accurately reflect the work of school communities was nearly impossible. In addition, many of the activities were unlikely to influence metrics actually available to the Central team. For example, if a school designed a mentoring program with the goal of increasing a student’s sense of belonging at the school, the Central team had no measure for that activity. Finally, many of the metrics available at the Central level are only measured annually. The Central team iterated on their supports, and ultimately opted to give all high school metrics to schools, broken out by race and gender, at both an aggregate level and student level so that schools could use the data they valued based on their individual ESI activities.

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should handle be Key Implementation Decisions?

Using Data Wisely

Additionally, facing these challenges, and wanting to acknowledge and align work with the R&D philosophy of the initiative, the design team shifted focus from providing schools with data to monitor and evaluate programs, to supporting ESI liaisons to evaluate their own initiatives. Through monthly professional development sessions, these trainings were designed to develop evaluative skills, including how to conduct focus groups, create surveys and analyze data. These efforts were welcome by many, though some schools struggled to identify the best individuals to engage in these sessions.

Again, because of the diverse nature of the ESI initiative, the Central team placed particular value on the implementation evaluation conducted by the Research Alliance. Once a year, a team of researchers completed interviews and focus groups with teams of educators at each ESI school. Lessons learned from these activities were shared back with schools in an effort to drive informed innovation with teams.

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Research Alliance conducted both an implementation and impact evaluation for ESI with the goal of connecting how well schools engaged with the work of the initiative to outcomes for young men of color. Over the course of the evaluation, Research Alliance iterated on strategies to measure fidelity across the 40 schools, since it could and should look different at all 40 schools. The most recent evaluation included a cohesion measure, which has proved the most successful at placing schools across the spectrum of engagement with ESI. Included in this metric are questions about whether schools were able to articulate the mission of ESI. Ultimately, monitoring and evaluating a program with an R&D orientation is challenging. Implementation evaluations are very important to understanding how work is developing in schools, and identifying themes across. Bringing the R&D mindset to evaluation activities is critical, and takes a shift in school and Central staff orientation.

Keeping the Focus on Young Men of Color

4 Keeping the Focus on Young Men of Color:

How do schools consider subgroups of students while also addressing the needs of all of them?

As the initiative rolled out, many schools struggled to keep young men of color at the center of their activities. This happened for several reasons. First, talking about race and gender, let alone programming specifically for a target audience defined by these characteristics, can be very sensitive, and for many required specific guidance and support. Many teachers were uncomfortable with offering supports to young men and not young women. Schools with a more diverse student body asked how to reach out to a subset of students defined exclusively by race. Schools often addressed this challenge by structuring supports created through ESI in such a way that there were single-gender opportunities. For example, when schools used ESI as an opportunity to explore mentoring strategies, they required these relationships be single gender.

Second, as young women in these schools saw what their male counterparts received (i.e. specific mentoring or academic supports, college trips), the women began to advocate for themselves, asking to be included. School staff struggled with how best to respond, agreeing that all students would benefit from many of the activities funded through ESI. Finally, some teachers in ESI schools advocated a color-blind approach to education, and therefore resisted efforts to program or target young men of color in particular. School leaders involved in ESI did what they could to explain why focusing on this population was important, but overcoming this challenge was difficult.

Importantly, because the initiative took special efforts in its design to include schools with large populations of men of color, any improvements to the school were by nature supporting Black and Latino males. Additionally, the Central team decided to provide special programming for young men of color across all 40 schools. These activities, called Young Men’s Gatherings, were designed to develop a positive and supportive culture for young men that encouraged college and career readiness. Activities were varied, and included conversations with Black and Latino male authors, writers, lawyers, elected officials, and community leaders across New York City.

DECISION POINTS FOR OTHER DISTRICTS

How do you plan to keep schools focused on young men of color?

How do you want to think about culturally responsive education?

What role will it play in your initiative?

When thinking about regular monitoring of implementation and impact, where will the burden lie? What expectations will you have for schools, as compared with central support staff?

How would an external evaluation support your program goals? What information do you need to know from that effort?

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Sharing Lessons Learned

Sharing Lessons Learned As an R&D initiative, the Central team was very focused on how best to share both successful and unsuccessful practices, both among ESI schools and across the district.

The Central team designed several strategies to support this type of collaborative and honest learning across ESI schools: When the Central team learned about a program or initiative that was being implemented at an ESI school that seemed particularly innovative or exciting, the school team was asked to present at monthly liaison meetings. Schools were prompted to share both what worked and what didn’t during these presentations, with varying degrees of success.

During professional development sessions, schools would be grouped and asked to share how they are each wrestling with common challenges (for example, teacher evaluation and culturally responsive education).

In the third year of the initiative, after several schools asked for opportunities to see programming in action, the Central team organized a series of intervisitations around key programs.

DECISION POINTS FOR OTHER DISTRICTS

What do you want to know at the end of your initiative?

With whom do you want to share these ideas?

How will you identify the information you want to share?

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School staff were very vocal about these opportunities, and always wanted more time to collaborate with one another. One very significant challenge to this type of learning was bringing the right people together to share lessons. For example, much of these school-to-school discussions were held during monthly liaison meetings. Liaisons, however, were not always implementing all of the ESI-related programming back at their school, so when sharing their strategies around mentoring, for example, the liaison may not have the most up-to-date descriptions of how their school implemented these activities. Additionally, it was difficult to support schools in sharing lessons from failures. While the ESI community was a strong one, where a great deal of sensitive discussions were held, it was difficult to push school staff to be honest about where efforts were not yet succeeding.

Ultimately this is a very difficult task and requires specific attention and purposeful program designs.

Sharing Lessons Learned

In addition to supporting a collaborative learning environment among ESI schools, the team was looking for lessons that would be of value to New York City and beyond. While this effort is still in development and underway, the Central team has taken several steps already to share lessons learned with a broader audience, including: egularly attending a variety of conferences across the country, and presenting R when appropriate; osting the 2016 Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color (COSEBOC) H conference in NYC; haring lessons learned with other offices within the NYC Department of S Education, so efforts from Central will be informed by ESI activities; and reating a website that hosts a range of practices implemented by ESI schools C with videos and lessons learned embedded in the presentation.

Throughout these efforts, the Central team’s goal is to continue a conversation on what we are learning about supporting young men of color.

15

ESI is curating lessons learned from its work with 40 high schools and over 10,000 young men to inform a broader conversation underway in communities across the country on how to reimagine the educational experiences of Black and Latino male students.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

After five years of working collaboratively with schools to identify key strategies that prepare young men of color for postsecondary success, the ESI Central team would make the following recommendations about designing similar initiatives in the future:

Work with schools that have large populations of Black and Latino Young Men. During implementation, school stff struggled with how best to serve young men of color as different from the student body at large. Obviously, districts need to pay particular attention to this challenge, but in design it may be beneficial to target schools for participation where large populations of black and Latino young men attend. This design feature makes more likely the chance that men of color will be the recipients of changes implemented through your initiative.

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Align program goals and district policies to help school leaders prioritize the initiative.

In this era of school accountability, district policies are key levers that influence how schools prioritize their often competing demands. Similar race- and gender-based initiatives would do well to establish firm connections to these policies. In the case of ESI, schools were not accountable for narrowing the opportunity gap, in part because its architects wanted schools to feel free to innovate even if it risked failure.

One tradeoff of this decision, however, was that some schools found it difficult to prioritize this issue when competing demands had policy ramifications behind them.

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Recommendations

CRE is important, multidimensional and challenging to implement successfully. Approach this challenging topic in a variety of ways to maximize exposure to the topic and impact of the work. orking with educators to change school culture and classroom practices to be W more culturally responsive is resource intense. Just as our high school students need a range of educational approaches to learn complex skills, educators need a range of CRE strategies to change practice. The ESI team offered a host of different opportunities for educators to engage with CRE, including multi-day sessions over the summer where school teams came together to learn CRE concepts, to on-site multi-session trainings on creating a culturally responsive college going culture, to fellowships for teachers to reflect on their classroom activities. The ESI team would recommend CRE efforts target classroom practices as well as school culture, include opportunities for teachers to reflect on their own identities and how their experiences influence their approach to education, and offer specific examples of what CRE looks like in practice.

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Invest in efforts to establish communities of learners.

The Central team devoted significant amounts of time to developing communities of educators, community members and students committed to raising expectations for young men of color. Through monthly professional development sessions, regular Young Men’s Gatherings, annual symposia, and other activities, the Central team was committed to creating safe and collaborative spaces that fostered conversations about race and education. These efforts were not only important for establishing trust among participants, but also for the sustainability of the initiative.

As was often repeated in ESI trainings, the work started through ESI seed money was, ‘for a movement, not a moment.’ The team sought to develop a comradery among like-minded students and educators to ensure efforts to support young men of color lasted far beyond the ESI funding period.

Recommendations

If collaboration is a key element of your initiative, it needs to be built into the design.

Collaboration across schools is always a welcome idea. However, school staff often struggle with balancing the immediate needs of their own school community (and indeed engaging colleagues within their building) with reaching beyond their school walls to work with other colleagues in the district. Collaboration was most successful with the ESI schools when it was built into existing systems and structures, and focused on topics that were top of mind for educators. But importantly, collaboration will not just happen; initiatives need to take specific design approaches to embed this learning strategy into their work.

Devise program supports that promote cohesive implementation at the school level.

One of the most valuable lessons learned from the Research Alliance implementation evaluation was a way to identify schools that were implementing ESI more cohesively a strategy to assess the cohesiveness of the ESI initiative at the school level. The cohesion rubric created by Research Alliance included measures on whether school staff could describe the theory of change for the initiative,

Encourage school staff to examine their data by race and gender.

In New York City, the district has access to some annualized student data. The ESI team shared this data with their school teams as often as possible, always broken down by young men of color and all other students, to help focus attention on this population and identify particular areas of where support is needed. Additionally, many ESI schools had data systems that provided more frequent student data that was also important to examine by race and gender. Examining their own data by race and gender was an important process for many of the schools involved in ESI, and would certainly be a recommendation for other districts implementing a similar initiative.

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CONCLUSIONS

When the Expanded Success Initiative (ESI) was launched in February 2012, the excitement among New York City educators was palpable. Giving schools power to design their own initiatives to serve young men who have been marginalized was unique and empowering. Many schools were proud of the work they had done to date, and recognized the need to go further and push themselves even harder. The initiative offered a unique chance to experiment with new services and academic approaches with financial supports to do so.

As the initiative rolled out, so too did national events that drew greater attention to the need for this type of critical work. While ESI is drawing to a close, the passion and commitment to serve young men of color does not. Indeed, the education community is intensifying efforts to educate our male students in new, innovative and effective ways. Learning from what has been to increase chances for the success is critical.

It is the hope of the ESI team that lessons learned through its implementation can inuence the work of schools in New York City and beyond as we improve the educational opportunities for Black and Latino young men nationwide.

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