Building the Talent Base/Profiles

Jumpstart
Young, low-income children often lack sustained adult attention, particularly with literacy-building activities; college students seek out appealing community service activities that are compatible with their busy schedules. Jumpstart solves two problems by placing college students on work-study or in service-learning programs in early childhood classrooms in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Jumpstart college students work with at-risk four-year-olds for six to eight hours per week.

Jumpstart corps members receive 30 hours of training before they begin work and are closely supervised throughout the academic year. They work one-on-one with selected children, on-site at local Head Start and child care centers. Jumpstart’s assessment data suggest that Jumpstart children make significant progress toward becoming school-ready.

In 2006, CityBridge became the lead funder for Jumpstart’s effort to expand in D.C. from roughly 85 corps members, all from George Washington and Howard University, to nearly 400 corps members from five or six colleges and universities. Just a few months after the grant was awarded, Jumpstart added Georgetown University as a partner. Jumpstart is considering a placement expansion in disadvantaged neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.

CityBridge is looking for two outcomes from Jumpstart’s Washington, D.C. expansion: We hope to see a meaningful difference in school readiness for disadvantaged four-year-olds, and we are placing a bet that some number of Jumpstart corps members will attach to the field of early education. CityBridge and Jumpstart will work together to encourage corps members’ future in the field.

For more information about Jumpstart, click here.

CityBridge/Jumpstart Grant: $1.25M over five years

Teach for America
Since its 1990 launch by social entrepreneur Wendy Kopp, Teach for America (TFA) has placed over 17,000 corps members as teachers in the nation’s most challenging public schools. TFA recruits from the top ranks of graduating college students, and nearly two-thirds of TFA alumni have stayed—as teachers, principals, nonprofit entrepreneurs, consultants—in the field of public education.

Although TFA corps members had occasionally been placed in early childhood classrooms, TFA’s first structured pre-k pilot was done in collaboration with CityBridge starting in the fall of 2006, with 12 TFA teachers placed in early childhood classrooms in D.C. With the early success of this pilot, TFA added 14 more early childhood placements in Washington in the fall of 2007, another 6 first-year corps members in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, and an additional 120 in nine other communities around the nation. By 2010, TFA has plans annually to place 500 of its 7,500 corps members in pre-k classrooms across the country.

For more information about Teach for America, click here.

CityBridge/TFA Grant: $765,000 over three years

New Teacher Project/Early Childhood Leadership Institute (ECLI) at the University of the District of Columbia
New Teacher Project works with public school districts across the country to help them overcome human-resource challenges. Its signature initiative is the Teaching Fellow Program, which recruits recent college graduates and mid-career professionals to become teachers. New Teacher Project has set up Teaching Fellow programs in a number of cities, including D.C.

ECLI develops and implements professional development programs for novice and experienced early childhood practitioners in the D.C. region. Founded and led by Maurice Sykes, a past director of early childhood programs at D.C. Public Schools, ECLI stands on the front lines of efforts in D.C. to improve the quality of early care and education and to raise public awareness on the issue.

In a partnership partially funded by CityBridge, New Teacher Project is recruiting teaching fellows to become early childhood teacher interns. The interns take courses at UDC and are coached by experienced teachers. They serve as assistant teachers in the city’s Pre-K Incentive Program classrooms, which are located in community-based child care centers but provided with sufficient funding from D.C. Public Schools to offer competitive salaries. By the fall of 2007, the program will have placed 13 teaching fellows around the city.

For more information about New Teacher Project, click here.  For more information about ECLI, click here.

CityBridge/New Teacher Project/ECLI Grant: $100,000 over two years

Georgetown University Early Childhood Teacher Training Program
Traditional academic training for early childhood teachers focuses more on pedagogy than on scientific research findings and emphasizes performance on papers and tests more than effective performance with children in classrooms. Leading colleges and universities offer few courses in early childhood education, discouraging young people who are making their first career decisions from entering the field.

In partnership with Georgetown University (arguably D.C.’s most competitive academic institution), CityBridge has created a small, pilot teacher training program. Led and designed by Sharon and Craig Ramey, two of the nation’s leading scholars in the field of early education, the teacher training program will combine intensive, monthly weekend coursework with coaching and observation of teachers in their classrooms. At the end of the 2007-8 school year, Georgetown will issue a diploma to participants who successfully demonstrate early childhood teaching practices. The first cohort will have 23 teachers, drawn from six local charter school partners.

In the spring of 2007, the Rameys partnered with ECLI and the D.C. Early Care and Education Administration (which oversees the city’s publicly subsidized child care centers) to form the Early Childhood Teaching Excellence Partnership and submit an application to the Department of Education for a grant that would enable a randomized controlled trial of the teacher training model and an expansion of the program to nearly 100 participants in the 2008-9 school year. The Department of Education awarded $4.6M to the Early Childhood Teaching Excellence Partnership in August 2007. This grant will be matched dollar for dollar with public and private contributions.

CityBridge expects the Georgetown program to become an education destination for new talent in the field. The Rameys, highly-respected international scholars and practitioners, have pioneered innovative teacher training techniques in Mississippi and Montgomery County, Maryland. Their commitment to their home town is significant, however, and they intend that the program will have a meaningful, long-term impact on how we teach young children in D.C. and whom we attract to teach them.

For more information about the Georgetown Center on Health and Education , click here.

CityBridge/Georgetown Grant: $632,000 over three years