I knew there must be millions of other people like me who would really love to connect with kids, but

didnt want to become full-time teachers.

Eric Schwarz
Co-Founder and CEO, Citizen Schools
For seventeen years, Eric Schwarz has been ghting to level the playing eld in American education. The disparity between a lower and upper income childs access to extra curricular activities and mentorship compelled Schwarz to develop Citizen Schoolsan unconventional educational program that extends the middleschool day with hands-on teaching and personal tutoring. A combination of community volunteers and trained AmeriCorps Fellows make up this second shift of citizen teachers, who engage students in a variety of creative learning opportunities, including apprenticeships taught by accomplished professionals suchas chefs, jewelers, engineers, architects, writers, and doctors who share their expertise and real-life experiences with students an afternoon a week.

ve been interested in education my whole life. I grew up in Manhattan and my mother was a freshman English teacherand I think a really great onein East Harlem. She involved the kids in the community and created amazing experiences for learning while holding them to very high standards. It inspired me a great deal. At the same

time, l personally had a very tough time academically when I was young. I bounced around to a couple of different high schooIs, and barely graduated. Fortunately, I had an incredibly supportive, close-knit community and extended family, to which I owe a lot of my ultimate success. I think in many ways, the idea for Citizen Schools was borne out of that desire my mom instilled in me to connect with kids, but also the recognition that I didnt want to become a full-time teacher. I nally hit my stride in college. I got the chance to edit my college

Eric Schwarz with a group of students at one of the Citizen Schools in Boston, MA.

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This interview and this photograph appears in a book: Everyday Heroes: 50 Americans Changing the World, One Nonprofit at a Time, by Katrina Fried, with photographs by Paul Mobley, and published by Welcome Books. It is reproduced here as part of a Citizen Schools media package by permission of the publisher. Text 2012 Katrina Fried. Photographs 2012 Paul Mobley. Foreword 2012 Arianna Huffington. For a full list of the heroes and more information about this historic project, please visit www.welcomebooks.com/everydayheroes

newspaper at the University of Vermont and it was an incredible experience to lead a team of fty people to put out a forty-page newspaper every week. Then I worked on Gary Harts senate campaign in 1980 and then his presidential campaign in 1983 and 1984. My job was to organize and mobilize student volunteers by the thousands. That was just an amazing leadership experience for me, in which I was able to see the power of ideas and of young people to make a difference. I went on to work as a newspaper journalist for ve years, both as an investigative reporter and as a political columnist. I became frustrated with essentially tearing things down and nding fault in things that werent working. I really missed collaborating with a team to build something up. So, I made a career shift in my late twenties to join two friends of mine who had started City Year, a very successful national service program. Initially, I thought it would just be a one-year sabbatical from journalism, but I was bitten by the social entrepreneurship bug, and it became a calling. I was their thirteenth hire and ended up becoming the rst vice president and then the executive director of our efforts in Boston when we started to expand nationally. After four years, in 1994, I decided to go off on my own. Many of the young people who did a year of service in City Year had never graduated high school. Invariably, they had tuned out in middle school even though they didnt drop out until tenth or eleventh grade. Middle school is when the brain is changing very quickly. It is the forgotten link in the educational reform chain. It made me realize how important that time is in a childs development, and how important it had been for me. I was a pretty good athlete and had some great experiences in summer camps and after-school programs. So, those adolescent years werent a total wasteland. But, a lot of my fuel came from my experiences outside of school. Kids are only in school for about 20 percent of their waking hours. It seems crazy that we are putting all these resources into changing that 20 percent while giving almost no thought to how to organize that other 80 percent differently for low-income kids, and zero thought to how to really provide these kids with all the experiences that I took for granted growing upfor instance, having someone there to help with homework and being

around successful adults, or having the chance to participate in the arts, sports, music, internships, science fairs. I knew there must be millions of other people like me who would really love to connect with kids, and who wanted to make a difference in their communities, but didnt want to become full-time teachers. The idea that evolved was to build an organization that allowed successful professionals to share their knowledge and talents with kids in an extracurricular setting, through a variety of apprenticeships. I got the rst concept paper together for Citizen Schools and recruited a team to co-found it with me. The rst apprenticeship was a journalism class where I worked with ten kids to publish a newspaper. Every kid got a chance to write several articles, we had comics and editorials, and we raised $400 by selling advertisements. The last week, I rented a van and we drove to a printer in Chelsea, MA, and the kids got to see their newspaper come ying off the press. They were so proud. They took that paper back to their school and handed it out. It was transformative for them and for me. I became totally hooked. The next semester, we started recruiting for a full-edged pilot program. We were off to the races. Seventeen years later, weve grown from a $100,000 budget to a $30 million budget. Were living in a world where everything is changing very quickly. Companies like Google, which didnt even exist ten years ago, are leading the world. But old paradigms die hard. In education, hardly anything has changed. We still have kids sitting in chairs for six hours a day, listening as the teacher talks in front of a chalkboard. That is crazy. Its very difcult for people to think of valuable learning taking place outside of school, and of kids being taught by anyone other than teachers. So, our model is counterintuitive, a disruptive innovation. Were letting kids learn by doing and by producing things for the community. We also give kids practice on the academic basics, building their prociency in math and English. The good news is, were delivering great outcomes. Weve got a couple external multiyear studies that show huge results in erasing and reversing achievement gaps. Were helping kids go on to four-year colleges and to careers in science and engineering. Weve had 25,000 volunteers so far, and there are millions more like them. Theyre lawyers, architects, chefs, web designers, engineers. Theyre graduate students and retirees and people in the middle of their

careers. We ask them to take a couple hours, one afternoon a week, to work with a team of kids to create an amazing project. We work with the volunteers to design the courses and we now have a databank of more than one hundred that have really worked. We want each volunteer to bring their own special sauce and expertise to it, but we also provide them with a template, which dramatically increases their chances of being successful. Were always adding new courses as well. In our second year, we had an undertaker suggest that she teach a class. We were a little worried it might upset the parents and freak out the kids. But she persisted. Were in the grief business, she said. Were good at dealing with bereaved adults. But were not very good with the kids. Wed love to work with your kids to design a set of activities that we do with young people when theyve lost someone. That was a perfect Citizen Schools apprenticeship: middleschool kids working with a talented adult to do something important for the community that would otherwise be outside their experience set.

over the years, but one kid I especially remember, John, was a specialneeds student, getting Ds and Fs. It seemed like he wouldnt nish high school and was on his way to becoming a depressing statistic. But he happened to love animals. Hed even nursed a bat back to health once in a shoebox. He took an apprenticeship, Drugs on the Brain, with a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. He got to hold a human brain in his hands and take little pieces of tissue from a sheeps brain and study them. All of a sudden, the light went on and he saw the connection between animals and biology and math and science and the future. Because of that one experience, he got out of special education and became a B student in science and math. Another kid, named Francisco, took an apprenticeship in carpentry with a teacher named Joel Bennett. The project was for every kid to make a really high quality toolbox. On the side of his toolbox, in big letters, Francisco wrote, Miguel. Joel asked him, Whos Miguel? Francisco said, Miguel is an older gentleman in my community and he took me out to a baseball game. He always takes me out for ice cream. Ive never had anything to give him. This kid was nally able to give something back to a caring adult. What were doing isnt supplemental to education reform: it is education reform. I think what weve got in America is a broken, industrial-era, agricultural-schedule model for education thats not working. Thirty percent of our kids arent even graduating from high school. The United States has moved from rst in the world to twelfth in the world educationally, because school is not connected enough to the real world. Its not preparing kids for college or the workforce. And truthfully, its not very interesting. Citizen Schools is a new model for education that supports teachers and allows schools to truly reinvent themselves in much more successful ways. The ideas behind our program need to become commonplace as opposed to the exception. Our goal is not only to grow and extend our own reach, but also to see other organizations replicate our model and partner with local school districts all over the country. Regardless of the delivery method, the central idea is to provide kids with more time for more relevant learning, and more exposure to successful adults. When you do that in middle school, it sets them up for success in high school, college, and beyond.

Middle school is when the brain is changing very quickly. It is the forgotten link in the educational reform chain.
Our other key pillar, besides apprenticeships, is the hundreds of really talented AmeriCorps teaching fellows who join us for a two-year fulltime commitment right after college. These are the best and the brightest, and they are so dedicated to changing the world that they are willing to work for starvation wages. They help kids academically, talking to teachers in the morning and to parents at night, knitting together the worlds of the regular school, the extended day, the home, and the community. They help kids with their homework, bring them on eld trips to college campuses, and support the volunteer Citizen teachers. Citizen Schools adds three hours to the school day, four to ve days a week, all through middle school. The apprenticeships are two afternoons a week. Then every day, theres some time to practice academic skills. There are so many great stories about the kids weve worked with

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Eric Schwarz

Citizen Schools

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