As she prepares to enroll at Spelman College in Atlanta, here are five things to know about Shepherd:

How she did it: Shepherd sent her bona fides — which include the publication of a book titled “Thirteen,” seats on the New Orleans mayor’s and superintendent’s youth advisory councils, and extensive community service — to every college or university she could find that waived the application fee. She also submitted her application to , an online portal that offers direct admissions to colleges whose criteria students meet. 

About those scholarships: KIPP New Orleans leaders believe Shepherd has received more scholarship offers, or nearly so, than any graduate, ever. Because of unprecedented delays caused by problems with this year’s FAFSA, her total tally is likely to keep rising as colleges and philanthropies continue processing awards. All told, so far her senior class has earned $26 million in scholarships.  

Where she’s headed: Shepherd is waitlisted at an Ivy she’d prefer not to name, but it wasn’t her first choice. She’s had her eyes on Spelman College for years — even if it wasn’t always clear how she’d get there: “My mom always told me to play my role and everything else would fall into place, and that’s exactly what happened. (They did also give me a full ride .)” Shepherd texted in response to The 74’s questions. “So I’ll be going to my dream school for free!”

After that: Shepherd plans to follow a political science degree with law school, after which the two-time winner of KIPP New Orleans’s Black Lives Matter writing contest plans to tackle some societal issues. “I want to be on the Supreme Court because I want to be a part of change to make a more fair, just and equitable society, and what better way to do that than from inside.”

Her inspiration: Shepherd was in kindergarten when her father died. More recently, she lost both of her maternal grandparents to COVID. “Education meant everything to them, so I didn’t really have a choice but to do well in school,” she says. When her grandmother passed, Shepherd channeled her grief into making her proud. “It made me feel like everything I do moving forward .”&�Բ�����;

KIPP middle and high school students were 31 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year college within three years of high school versus those students who were not selected, according to And their likelihood of graduating college within five years after high school shot up by 19 percentage points.

Among Mathematica’s sample of students, the effect of attending both a KIPP middle school and high school was so large that if it were applied to all students nationally, the longstanding college completion gap between Black and Hispanic students and their white peers would nearly close.

“The magnitude of these impact estimates is large, and effects of this size have substantial policy relevance,” the researchers write. 

KIPP, which got its start in Houston in 1994, now serves 120,000 students across 21 states and Washington, D. C. It currently operates 117 elementary, 121 middle and 42 high schools. 

KIPP enrolls mostly Black and Hispanic students from low-income communities, children who have been historically underserved and have lower high school and college completion rates. 

KIPP places much emphasis and resources on supporting its alumni through college and into their early careers. The model of following through with children beyond high school has seen tremendous success elsewhere: Students who participated in Chicago’s program, which spans students’ junior and senior year of high school in addition to their freshman year of college, had a 40% greater chance of earning a bachelor’s degree than their peers, a recent study found.

“We just have an unyielding belief in children and … we’re frankly willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that every child fulfills their potential,” said Shavar Jeffries, who joined the KIPP Foundation as CEO in January 2023.

The study tracked 2,066 students who applied to 21 KIPP middle schools in 2008, 2009 or 2011. Mathematica senior fellow Philip Gleason first studied KIPP in 2007, four years after his company began a broader that showed marked improvement in the achievement of children who attended charters in city centers.

“We wanted to know what was going on in these schools and KIPP was the largest network of charters that served students in urban areas,” he said. 

The 2007 study showed KIPP middle school students outperformed their peers — children who applied to the program but were not selected through the lottery system — in both reading and math. 

In this latest report, Mathematica went back to the students in the 2007 study to see whether they attended or completed college, using data obtained through the National Student Clearinghouse. 

While the findings were consistent with their earlier work, Gleason found the degree to which KIPP middle and high school students outperformed their peers surprising. 

“The earlier studies were also positive in terms of their impact on academic achievement,” he said. “But what we did not know was how important the combined effect of going to a KIPP middle and high school would be.”&�Բ�����;

Jeffries attributes the results to KIPP’s academic program — and to its efforts to counsel students long after graduation. 

“We are very intentional,” he said, adding that staff work hard to help every high school student find their path. “We have partnerships with well over 100 colleges throughout the country. We do a lot of work to match students with postsecondary placements.”

He said, too, that staff believe in the success of all students. 

“We go above and beyond,” Jeffries said. “We tend to have longer school days and longer school years. And we use data in very intentional ways so that in our classrooms, on an ongoing real-time basis, we can differentiate our instruction based upon where a kid is at any given point in time.”

While Jeffries said the network is very focused now on learning loss recovery following the pandemic, there are plans over the next five years, a KIPP spokesperson said, to open as many high schools as possible with an aim that every KIPP 8^th grader would be able to attend a KIPP high school.

Some 70% of students offered admission to a KIPP middle school attend one, the study found. Roughly 75% of these students graduate from those schools and approximately 71% of these graduates continue on to a KIPP high school.

Makala Faniel, 25 and who enrolled in KIPP WAYS Atlanta in fifth grade, credits the program with much of her academic and professional success. 

College readiness was built into the curriculum, she said, and counselors routinely helped students research universities, choose the right Advanced Placement courses to boost their chance of acceptance, fill out the Common Application and apply for key programs within a particular school.

Faniel visited the University of Pennsylvania as a middle schooler and would graduate from the college in 2020 with a degree in material science. 

“That early exposure really helped,” said Faniel, who is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in bioengineering at Georgia Tech University. 

She said KIPP’s partnerships with colleges and universities provided much-needed support: Faniel was in regular contact with other KIPP students at UPENN who helped her navigate next steps. 

Even after college, when she was first considering graduate school, she once again called on KIPP resources. 

“I talked to a lot of my former teachers when I was thinking about grad school, trying to figure out what do I do? How do I apply? What do I need?” she said. “I changed majors between undergrad and graduate school, so I talked to them about making that transition.”&�Բ�����;

Ivelyn Camano-Lucero, 16 and a senior at KIPP NYC College Prep, hopes to study computer science at Yale. 

She will be among the first in her family to attend college: Her older brother was a student at Syracuse University while her sister studies at Fordham. All three attended KIPP schools. 

The youngest of the trio, Camano-Lucero, who lives near the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, wants to become a cybersecurity engineer. 

She talks often with other students about her plans beyond high school and noticed that those who attend other public schools don’t seem to have as much support. 

“When I talk to my friends about my career counselor, they aren’t familiar with that,” she said. “I think that aspect is pretty different.”

Kelly Gallagher, KIPP NYC manager of college counseling, said the counselors on staff have manageable caseloads: a maximum of 60 students each, allowing them to work closely with each of them.

Counselors edit college essays, talk to the families about their student’s next steps, explain the documentation needed to obtain financial aid — and how to appeal when schools don’t provide enough, among a host of other duties, Gallagher said. 

Another set of staffers, the College Success Team, visit students at college at least once per semester, she said. Students who are headed for the military, seek to pursue certifications or enter the workforce also have designated staffers to help them progress. 

“This is my 10^th year at the high school and I have former students who are now my coworkers,” Gallagher said, adding it’s not hard to focus KIPP students’ attention on college. “They are excited about it.”

The Mathematica study released today leverages the lottery-based samples from the earlier research and was funded by , a philanthropy which has given millions of dollars to KIPP since 2011.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the City Fund provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.

Abandoned by and dogged by a for poor performance, the local school system shrank over the past few decades to a fraction of its former size. If they choose to stay in the area, a sizable number of parents now either opt for a charter alternative or shell out for private tuition.

But Barnett, a mother of two, was dissatisfied with the pandemic-era instruction her daughter had received at a nearby private school and wanted to make a change. It was the exact kind of move she often recommends to other families as the CEO of , an activist group she founded in 2019 to lobby for better educational services throughout the city and empower parents to advocate for their kids. 

Soon, however, Barnett was alarmed to see her daughter floundering even before she’d gotten a chance to settle in. She’d never experienced significant disciplinary problems before, but within days, she was involved in a fight and placed on a behavior plan. Barnett attributed the struggles to the “vast difference” between her daughter’s prior experience of school and the new environment she was adapting to.

“It was our first week in St. Louis Public Schools,” she said.

The institutional troubles facing St. Louis students are typical of those that have marked much of the city’s last half-century. As in other regional metropolises that faltered in the middle of the last century — from Detroit to Cleveland, Milwaukee to Memphis — disorder rose, the middle class fled and public services like K–12 education unraveled spectacularly. 

The situation now appears especially dire to many onlookers. A national study this spring , showing that the pandemic saddled St. Louis elementary and middle schoolers with some of the worst learning damage suffered by any students in the United States. The district is also navigating a generational shift in leadership, with Superintendent Kelvin Adams retiring last December after 14 years of service; his successor, former Seattle Public Schools administrator Keisha Scarlett, only took office in July.

Collin Hitt, the executive director of the Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRIME) Center at Saint Louis University, said that the task ahead is to not only turn around learning outcomes in the short term, but also set a sensible course for the transformation of the district into a smaller, more successful entity for the foreseeable future.

“You’ve got some kids two or three grade levels behind where we would have expected them to be if not for everything that’s happened over the past four years,” Hitt said. “Recovering from that has got to be the focus of the education policy conversation for the next decade.”

‘Upheaval, turnover, chaos’

Missouri is not a high-flier nationally, ranking for the most part around the middle of the pack in test scores and graduation rates. But it would be impossible to overlook St. Louis and its vicinity as the most educationally woeful community within its borders. A 2019 inventory of the weakest schools in the state — those performing among the bottom 5 percent of all that receive Title I funds, which are themselves only granted to schools enrolling high percentages of students from low-income families — , with over one-quarter in the city itself. 

Decades of failure, segregation and financial dysfunction finally led the Missouri State Board of Education to in 2007, turning its governance over to a three-member administrative board appointed by both state and local leaders. After a dizzying sequence of seven superintendents in the space of five years, Adams’s lengthy tenure , though he held far less authority than chiefs in other districts.

In 2011, Kelly Garrett became the executive director at KIPP St. Louis, a charter network that has grown to six schools in the last decade. Garrett credited the former superintendent with steadying the ship given the “insane amount of managerial upheaval, turnover, chaos” that preceded him. But after previously working to seed charters in districts like Houston, Memphis, and Boston, he said the change on display closer to home fell short of the transformational.

“The goal was stability, which was not a bad goal at the time,” Garrett said. “The past 12 years, we’ve seen stability, but we’ve also seen further deterioration of the district.”

The administrative panel to restore control to a locally elected board, even as serious concerns remained. In that year’s administration of the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) standardized tests, the district’s schools were awarded just 78 percent of all possible points — much lower than Missouri’s state average of 90 percent, or even the 88 percent earned by similarly troubled Kansas City.

After the ravages of the pandemic, those numbers . The state average in 2022 fell from 90 percent to just 65 percent, while St. Louis Public Schools earned a staggeringly low 31 percent. , no more than 56 percent in any grade scored at or above the level of Basic ( as demonstrating “a partial or uneven command of” the test’s necessary skills and processes) in English; two-thirds or more students in all grades scored below that level in math. 

Recent research suggests that while Missouri students absorbed a sizable blow from COVID, the once-in-a-century emergency left a particularly distinct mark on St. Louis. In May, conducted by Harvard economist Thomas Kane and Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon found that the city — along with a handful of others, including New Haven, Connecticut, and Richmond, Virginia — in academic performance anywhere in the United States.

While Kansas City is home to approximately the same percentage of students from low-income families, its average drops in learning were not as severe: the equivalent of -0.52 grade level in reading and -0.95 grade level in math from 2019 and 2022, compared with St. Louis’s slide of -0.81 grade level in reading and -1.64 grade levels in math. The split between the two districts is all the more notable given that, according to Kane and Reardon’s data, Kansas City students spent considerably more time in virtual instruction than their St. Louis counterparts.

In Kane’s view, learning loss of that magnitude is likely irrevocable without drastic changes to instruction. He believes the same old quality of teaching, delivered in the same quantity as before the pandemic, couldn’t possibly make up the difference.

“If I’ve lost a year and a half of school, or more, it is just impossible to imagine making up for that lost ground without additional instructional time,” Kane argued. “Otherwise, it’s imagining that teachers are teaching 150 percent of what they would normally teach within the school calendar, and that’s unreasonable to hope for.”

For parents like Jen Wadley, it can seem optimistic to even expect more than a year of stability from local schools. 

As COVID shuttered schools throughout the city in early 2020, she learned that Carondelet Leadership Academy, the K–8 charter school attended by all three of her children, due to persistently poor academic results. Similar news came the following January, when Cleveland Naval JROTC — a her oldest son, Troy, attended as a freshman — was similarly targeted for after a year substantially spent in remote learning. 

In a process she called “chaotic,” Troy moved on as a sophomore to a public magnet program, Central Visual and Performing Arts, for his third school in three years. “The options were very limited for high schools in the city,” Wadley said. “Finding a school in St. Louis City — an adequate school — is a job within itself.”

Representatives from St. Louis Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.

A shrinking district

Major urban districts like St. Louis were once hulking entities dotted throughout the Midwest, each serving six-figure student bodies. So plentiful and diverse were the schools that locals still frequently resort to the introductory “”: Where did you go to high school? 

But total enrollment in the district , almost unbelievably, from a peak of about 115,000 in 1967 to under 17,000 in 2022 — a reduction of more than 85 percent. This is a proportionately greater decline than the broader city’s contraction from over 850,000 residents in 1950 to roughly 285,000 today. 

The gradual dissipation of huge swaths of school-age children is a factor of multiple trends. Births throughout much of the metropolitan area , resulting in fewer and smaller young families within the district. According to produced by the PRiME Center, the elementary-aged population of St. Louis fell from 17,300 to just 15,300 between 2010 and 2019. Over 60 percent of the city’s neighborhoods lost children between the ages of 5 and 9, with an average decline of about one-third, and no area saw a greater drop than traditionally African American North St. Louis.

Barnett of Bridge 2 Hope — who was raised in north St. Louis but attended school in the suburbs through — reported that large areas of the city have been transformed by the departure of families to nearby suburbs like Eureka and Ladue, each located across the county line. While speculating that many students would prefer to attend schools in their own slice of the city, she said that it was difficult to contest the perception that “schools there are better.”

“My whole neighborhood looks different,” Barnett said. “All those people are in west County, north County, south County now. I don’t know if the experience is better, but the education is better. The chance to give your child a great education is a great chance.”

The end result is , with a few enrolling just 100 students or so. Former Superintendent Adams shuttered . The district intended to attract developers to its acres of surplus properties.

But in a shrinking city like St. Louis, closures also devastate families and alumni, which look to schools as anchors of their communities. When officials considered closing Sumner High School in the historically African American neighborhood of The Ville, at the prospect of losing an institution that once schooled luminaries like Chuck Berry, Tina Turner and Dick Gregory. after an eleventh-hour organizing drive, but the necessities driving it have only grown greater since.

John Wright Sr., a Sumner alumnus, later enjoyed a career as one of the region’s most distinguished educators. After serving as a teacher, administrator and superintendent at the suburban Normandy and Kinloch districts, he led St. Louis Public Schools as an interim chief in 2008. In retirement, he has also advised both mayors and Missouri governors on K–12 education, and served another brief term on the St. Louis Board of Education last year. 

Wright’s perspective dates back to the 1940s, when he attended three different local schools before the fifth grade due to overcrowding. At that time, he recollected, a typical classroom might hold 40–50 students and even elementary schools sometimes consisted of multiple buildings. Now, many have fallen into dilapidation and disuse. 

While a disappointment to some, Wright said, the diminished scale of St. Louis Public Schools could become an asset to Keisha Scarlett, the incoming superintendent. Rather than presiding over mass building campaigns, he argued, she could mostly focus on consolidating assets and improving outcomes for the students who remain.

“It’s a matter of how you use that smaller size to bring about change,” Wright said. “What’s left of the population has stabilized, so how do you improve matters now that you’ve got a size that you can put your arms around?”

‘Poised for rebirth’?

Scarlett’s arrival this summer has been seized upon by some parents and educators as a cause for hope. 

Amidst a around the district, the 24-year veteran of Seattle Public Schools is already leading around 21 schools. She that the city is “poised for a rebirth” in the years to come. Whatever her long-term vision, however, even the prospect of fully staffing classrooms this September is looking hazy. District representatives that 15 percent of its teaching positions, amounting to nearly 280 jobs, were as yet unfilled. 

Another lingering question is how Scarlett will choose to deploy two sources of newly available money. According to Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, St. Louis Public Schools in federal COVID relief funds since 2020, only 13.7 percent of which has yet been spent. (Federal law stipulates that 30 percent of such aid must be spent directly on learning recovery; the offers little in the way of specifics.) In a hopeful sign of public faith, voters a $160 million bond issue last year to fund building repairs and upgrades.

City leaders, meanwhile, have devoted the last two years drafting to address the most pressing issues confronting both traditional and charter schools. But while some observers applaud the efforts at strategic thinking in a system that has too often veered from one emergency to the next, the 128-page document for on how to stem the migration of families to suburbs or offload unneeded building inventory. Some of its recommendations essentially advise still more planning.

A further worry, highlighted by Scarlett in an interview with a local news station, is the threat to students posed by violence in school facilities or elsewhere. The city has been one of America’s most crime-afflicted for decades, and scores of children in the St. Louis area with guns in 2022. KIPP’s Garrett said the local levels of gunplay seemed unique.

“I’ve personally watched — within 100 yards of me sitting in a chair or standing at a window — four different shootings in my day-to-day activities,” Garrett said. “The access to weapons and the level of violence in the community is constantly present.”

The community’s worst fears , when a former student broke into Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and shot nine people with an assault rifle. A 61-year-old teacher and a 15-year-old student were killed, along with the perpetrator after a shootout with police.

Though enrolled in his second year at the school, Jen Wadley’s son Troy wasn’t present on the day of the attack. Still, the tragedy threw up yet another obstacle in the way of his education. Having already sat through months of virtual instruction in the eighth and ninth grades and switching to a new high school as a sophomore, he didn’t return to in-person classes after the shooting. 

Even outside of school, driver shortages have forced St. Louis Public Schools to bus routes, including to credit-recovery programs over the summer. Heading into what should be his senior year, Wadley said, her oldest son has spent almost as much time outside of high school as in, and the status of his graduation credits is still unclear. She worries that he views his time at school with more apathy than interest.

“It’s hard enough to get a kid to participate in high school,” Wadley said. “But then they’re thrown so many curveballs — their dream school closed, there’s a school shooting, there are no buses — and they just get to the point where they don’t care.”

I am not just advocating for one public charter school. When it comes down to it, it’s not just about my child, it’s about all kids. Everyone may not have the ability or the privilege to be able to come to D.C. and to advocate. Everyone doesn’t have that, but I do. I naturally have the desire to help and to fix and to be a part of the change that I want to see. I walked into these legislators’ offices hoping that they would hear me say our communities are crying for help. We need more quality schools, and we need to stop gun violence and address the mental health crisis in our schools. 

Across our group of parents and advocates at March 29’s Charter Family Hill Day, we met with the offices of 37 members of Congress. We talked with Democrats and Republicans, with senators and members of the House of Representatives, and shared our call to action. As a parent, I was grateful to be able to choose KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools for my child’s education. All kids and families deserve access to a high-quality public education. That means not only do we need to invest in mental health and keeping our students safe from gun violence; we also need to invest in public education and high-quality public charter schools like KIPP Philadelphia. We all went to Washington, D.C. to tell our families’ stories to Congress. We also got to hear each other’s stories and to learn from one another. 

My story began this fall, when we gladly accepted a founding kindergarten seat at the newest KIPP Philadelphia school. We were excited to put the last two years of home learning during COVID-19 behind us and start life in our new normal. Except, things didn’t feel normal. My 5-year-old didn’t act like other children her age. She’s what I affectionately coined my firecracker child, but a lot like a firecracker, things always explode. 

Our first few months at KIPP were not easy. She struggled with transitions, she couldn’t sit still and sometimes she got so overwhelmed the only place that she felt comfortable was under her desk. As a parent, I felt all types of failure. I felt like because I chose to keep the lights on and not spend more time by her side during those Zoom classes while she was learning at home, that I had set her up to fail. I felt that I had somehow dropped the ball on my biggest responsibility — my daughter.

It wasn’t until a few conversations with the school social worker, then with the dean of students, which led to more conversations with her pediatrician, that I started seeing things a lot differently. I was able to see that the behaviors that she was exhibiting weren’t a result of my failure, but instead, were signs that her brain works differently than some of the other students. 

I was able to work with the staff at KIPP Octavius Catto Elementary to get a referral to have my daughter receive an extensive evaluation, one that outlined exactly where she’s struggling and identified interventions and strategies that will allow her to thrive in any classroom. For the first time in a while, I was able to breathe. It gave me a feeling of joy that I was able to advocate for my daughter so that her needs would be in the conversations that led to her evaluations.. I advocate for mental health support for students because it is a top priority for me and families across the country, especially as we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

During Charter Family Hill Day, I was also able to reinforce my top priorities as a parent: investing in student mental health and keeping our kids safe from gun violence. Our children deserve to feel safe at school. These children have seen more trauma in their short lives than some of us ever experienced. My daughter deserves to live her life. My daughter deserves to be able to walk into a building that she knows she’ll walk out of. She deserves to know that she can be safe, even when I’m not around. 

There is a fire in me that deserves to continue to grow, and with that growth, I’m not only advocating for my child, I’m advocating for thousands of other kids and families across the country. If two days in Washington D.C, is what it takes for me to light some stuff on fire, then give me the two days, let me do it.

DFER promotes education reform-minded Democratic leaders who push for innovation and accountability in schools with an eye toward improving equity, teacher preparedness, public school choice, data transparency and accountability. They support those who wish to make higher education affordable for all. The organization, founded in 2008 at a time of greater consensus around education reform, seeks these goals in a fractured 2023 political landscape where schools have become fodder for the culture wars.

Elorza, 46, a Harvard-educated lawyer, served two terms as Providence mayor, from 2015 to 2023. Former Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, now U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and Elorza called for an outside review of Providence Public Schools after its 2018 test scores showed . The results released by  Johns Hopkins University were damning, paving the way for a state takeover. 

Elorza made in 2019 by bringing his 15-month-old-son to work with him in City Hall. He said in December he to his city’s troubled .

The law school professor sat down with The 74 last week, just before his new job was announced, to talk about growing up in an immigrant community, building consensus in education around what works for students and who he can rely upon in Congress.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Tell me about your parents.

Jorge Elorza: They came from Guatemala in the mid-1970s, fleeing the civil war. They came here to Providence because there were a lot of factory jobs in the textile and jewelry industry. They were undocumented for the first 12 years of my life. (They became citizens in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan’s .) My father dropped out of school in the 7th grade and my mother in the 5th grade. That’s a big part of my story. Even though I was born and raised here, I identify so strongly with immigrants because that’s the household that I was raised in and that’s the community where I grew up.

You say immigrant families put a tremendous emphasis on education, yet you floundered in K-12 before eventually graduating from Harvard. Do the problems/obstacles you faced back then have relevance today? 

All (immigrant families) place their hopes and dreams on public schools. I’d love to say I was that model student that always listened to their parents and was just destined for success. But the reality is I didn’t have a sense of direction as a young person: I got rejected from every college and university I applied to. When I was 17 years old and graduated from high school, that was a big pivot point for me in my life. I had to decide whether I was going to work in the factory with my parents, aunts and uncles or get my act together. And so that’s when I applied to community college.

You say part of your struggle was that your parents, who worked opposing shifts to manage child care, were not able to help you with schoolwork in part because of the language barrier. 

My father never spoke too much English. They would come home after work, we would have homework and they could only help us to a certain point. 

You attribute part of your success to your ability to score a seat at a coveted magnet school. It was a guidance counselor who urged you to take the admissions exam. 

So, you had to sign up for the test and then they had sent several papers home, but if they were in English, my parents couldn’t read them. My guidance counselor had seen something in me, some potential, and literally came and picked me out of my chair, took me to his office and he made me sign to register. 

You’re plagued by the arbitrary nature of that success. 

What if I happened to be absent that day or if an emergency came up and my guidance counselor just didn’t have the chance to get me? My entire life would have been completely different. We want to live in a world where every kid succeeds as a matter of course. But the reality is that so many kids who do succeed, succeed by overcoming all of the odds and, frankly, by just being fortunate at key moments in their lives.

Will your own ethnic background play a role in your leadership?

I’m absolutely a product of my upbringing and my past. When I think about the importance of education, I think about my friend Juan, one of the most brilliant, smart, sharp kids I have ever met in my life. He had those critical moments in his life where it was a combination of bad decisions and being unlucky. Juan is still a very good friend. He has a great family. He works hard every day, but he’s a laborer. He should have been a doctor. 

I think about my friend Jose … who had grown up next door, who was a year older than me and who I always looked up to. I found out that he had been murdered. I think that many of those stories, unfortunately, are still being recreated today … kids with limitless potential, having that potential either cut short or never being allowed to fully blossom.

The nation has been politically fractured for years. Where do you see consensus in education? 

Speaking about my community here in Providence, the number of Black and Latino families that support charter schools, for example, and that support common sense education policies that research has shown works, is extraordinarily high. Part of the challenge we have is lifting up their voices to make sure that voice on the ground is what’s driving public perception within the Democratic Party.

For example, there’s a lot of support for high-impact tutoring programs, especially as we’re coming out of COVID: Dedicated 1-to-1 tutoring that can help us not only make up that lost learning time, but also make learning gains. Those are things that are strongly supported across the board.

We also very much support summer learning programs that go beyond remedial to actual enrichment classes. Many of our students fall behind: They lose about two months of learning during the summer when other families move forward. 

There’s also mental health investments that make a lot of sense and pathways that can connect our students to careers. 

And you note these programs don’t just have support in Providence, but far beyond. Who are your allies now?

What’s different today than say, 10 years ago, is that there’s this critical mass of progressive and reformers of color. There are organic, grassroots efforts out there: There’s so much energy around this work. Part of my job as a leader of this organization is to organize and harness that enthusiasm and energy that we see at the grassroots level and amplify their voices so they drive more and more of the national conversation in this space. 

Your organization works with the National Parents Union, The Education Trust, Unidos, KIPP, Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, Educators for Excellence, Alliance for Excellent Education and others. But who are your friends in Congress? 

Sen. Cory Booker has been an early supporter and he’s been steadfast throughout. Sen. Chris Murphy from Connecticut has been an amazing champion of this work … and Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland (of Washington state). We’ve identified about 200 elected champions around this work throughout the country.

Democrats have lost ground in education as Republicans have succeeded in using race, gender, immigration-related and transphobic rhetoric to whip up their base. How do you manage that environment?

On the one hand, you have Republicans who are infatuated with their culture wars right now: Republicans want to ban books while Democrats want to teach kids to read them. What we want to do is speak to the real issues as problem solvers. 

I get extremely frustrated hearing the way that education is being exploited for political gain and this is part of the performative aspect of politics today. But as Democrats, we’re going to continue to focus on the substance of it, call out things that are not working and propose solutions that are proven to work. And ultimately that’s what people want.

Three members of the San Francisco school board were recalled in 2022 after focusing on issues like renaming schools rather than core academic concerns as their city suffered through the pandemic. Do Democrats and progressives miss the mark? 

I’ll tell you what I know. Families want high-quality education options for their kids and they want them now: They’re just not getting enough of them. We see families continuing to apply for the charter lotteries and oftentimes in excess of 10 applicants for every one seat that’s available. It’s really clear what families want most and what they care most about is great public schools for their kids. 

Our job is to make sure that our focus remains on that, that we continue, in our party and in this movement, to always be about substance. That doesn’t mean being blind to the issues happening in society … but in order to meet the moment and what our families are demanding, it always has to be about ensuring that there are great public school options for our kids.

A civil rights lawyer by trade and an education activist by avocation, Shavar Jeffries was thrust into the spotlight in early 2010 when he was elected to a school board seat in Newark. It was an era when odd political bedfellows Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker showed up in Newark bearing a $100 million check from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to be spent on both charter and district-run schools.

On Jeffries’s watch, Newark’s schools posted historic gains — inviting gale-force political blowback that’s still reverberating.

He then embarked on an eight-year run as the head of Democrats for Education Reform and its nonprofit sister, Education Reform Now. He took the helm at a time when many Democrats were abandoning the centrist school-improvement policies of the Obama era, yet Jeffries — who is a distant cousin of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — coordinated dozens of winning political strategies.

Now, Jeffries is heading up the KIPP Foundation, which coordinates a coast-to-coast network of highly regarded public charter schools. His new job is to lead 280 schools — and affiliated groups tackling everything from increasing alumni college persistence rates to recruiting and training the next generation of education leaders — out of an unprecedented pandemic crisis.  

The 74 caught up with Jeffries recently to hear what prompted him to move to KIPP, his advice about the Democrats’ education agenda and what he believes will meet young people’s needs at a critical juncture. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: How many people have hit you up in the last two months for a pipeline to your cousin? 

Shavar Jeffries: A lot. It reminds me a little bit of when I was school board president in Newark. Every time I go into my LinkedIn, there’s somebody. So yeah, we’re getting a lot.

What advice do you have for Democrats who want to shepherd an education agenda? 

We need more political infrastructure to support Democrats. There’s a heavily funded infrastructure to oppose charters within the Democratic Party. A lot of that is funded by our colleagues in the teacher unions, who we work with on many different issues. 

There have to be more political assets made available to candidates and elected officials. As long as many Democrats feel like they have to put their political career on the line in support of an issue, we’re going to have challenges. Having said all that, we continue to get bipartisan support for the charter school program in Congress. President Biden has supported that, Roberto Rodriguez [U.S. Department of Education assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development] has spoken publicly about that. Many of the communities with the largest charter school shares of enrollment are run by Democratic mayors and Democratic school boards. 

Tell us about the impetus for your move to KIPP.

I’ve been a part of the KIPP family for 22 years. My children attended both KIPP elementary and middle schools. I’ve been on the KIPP national board for about five years. I love it. I love our mission. I just believe in our promise. 

Really what motivated me was how profound the impact of a pandemic has been on our country from a student learning standpoint. When the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress came out showing that throughout the country we lost about 30 years of gains, I was convinced to use the resources and talents I have in a way that will be even more directly connected to kids and to student outcomes. 

KIPP is the largest public charter school network in the country, with 120,000 kids in 27 regions. We ought to be the model for the country in terms of how to deliver educational excellence and equity at scale.

Before COVID-19, a lot of research outlined how successful schools in networks like KIPP are with students from traditionally disadvantaged communities. The pandemic spared almost no one, though. What is the challenge for the high-quality charter sector right now?

Delivering academic good for kids, first and foremost. Given the pandemic, given school closures, given the disruption evidenced by the NAEP data and other data, all of us in public education — whether public charter schools or traditional public schools — we all have a lot of work to do to address unfinished learning, to support young people to obtain the skills, the competencies they need in order to fulfill their potential. That’s job one, as far as I’m concerned, for everybody in public education.

Throughout our network, when we’re sharing best practices, we’re able to deliver for young people. Most powerfully, we’ve seen this in our early literacy program. Several of our regions are working together to implement aligned, consistent [strategies] rooted in the science of literacy. We’ve already seen 28 percentage point gains in literacy rates for the [KIPP] regions participating in that program.

In high school, we see acute mental health challenges many young people are experiencing. In many places, we’re now seeing levels of violence in our communities coming to bear in our schools, so we’re pushing an aligned high school strategy focused on academic health, but mental health support as well.

We’re working on a middle school math [strategy]. And we’re focused on leadership. We have a principal pipeline program. We’re also excited to see the diversity throughout our organization. More than 60% of our school leaders are Black or Latinx. That’s three times the rate of what we see in public education broadly.

Policy wonks and researchers have floated lots of evidence-backed strategies for different aspects of pandemic recovery. But traditional school leaders often say, “Well, I can’t find the people.”

The teacher shortage is really a national challenge. We would love to see policymakers work with traditional public schools, public charter schools and a broad diversity of stakeholders who are committed to making sure that we have great teachers in every classroom. This is a macro-level problem, and we really need national leadership, a Marshall Plan-type level of engagement. This should be a call to arms that one of the most important things that any set of human beings can do is to go into our classrooms and educate our babies.

Similarly, there is a lot of talk about circumstance as a hurdle to student success, especially over the last three years. Many families’ circumstances are jaw-dropping. How should that inform our thinking going forward?

We have to be very clear that we’re equipping our young people with the skills and competencies they need to have a limitless future. That means we need to be unwavering in the idea that our kids are geniuses, they’re brilliant, they’re amazing. We need to hold them accountable to the hard work they need to invest in and we need to support them in. And then, the quality of teaching and learning so they actually obtain those skills. 

Our children are dealing with very difficult circumstances. And most of the communities that we work in, they’ve been dealing with difficult circumstances for generations. Notwithstanding all the macro-level, political, social, economic work many of us are engaged in, they’re likely to be in difficult circumstances for the foreseeable future. Our job is to work within the reality that the challenges they face can actually be a source of strength and power. Some adversity that actually can make you stronger, right? 

We have to be clear with all the adults who interface with our children that they do not need, or want, your pity. With the right expectations and the right practices, their challenges can be converted into energy to power them into their dreams. We have to be unwavering with the bar of what we expect students to be able to achieve. We have to make sure the adults are clear about that bar, and that we provide them the support, training and coaching they need to deliver against that bar, day in and day out.

Some people will talk about, “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and figure it out.” That is problematic. We have to make the investments that young people — and, frankly, adults — have the support that they need, and the coaching and training to recognize the greatness of our kids, to recognize that we have to support them as they’re dealing with very difficult and adverse circumstances.

Do you have fears about all this being subsumed by what feels like a societal inflection point?

It’s always been hard, right? When I was president of the Newark School Board, we dealt with a version of all of that. All kinds of misinformation, efforts to politicize the curriculum, to politicize accountability. We’ve been working to break cycles of poverty and the bonds of intergenerational racism for a long period of time. This work has always been challenging. In the current moment, there’s been many conversations around education, around equity and efforts by political figures to micromanage the curriculum. That’s obviously very concerning. Perhaps we’re seeing this play out in more uncomfortable ways than it has in the past.

We just want to continue to focus on children, to try to not get caught up in a partisan food fight, to really focus on what’s going to support students to love themselves, to recognize their culture and their identity as a source of power and a source of strength in order to fulfill their potential and change the world.

We’re going to ensure that student achievement and outcomes are the lodestar. And hope and hope that if we tell our story to enough of the right people, over a long enough period of time, more often than not, that’ll be good for kids.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.

The spotlight shone on economic and educational equity has become increasingly bright in recent years, and the iron is hot for those ambitious leaders looking to level up or strike out into a new career field. It seems companies now, more than ever, are looking to groom leaders from Black and other marginalized communities like me. It’s an exciting time for opportunities, but it can be scary for young professionals of color who don’t know how to position themselves to take advantage.

One significant benefit of having a coach is working with someone who understands my professional strengths and weaknesses. My executive coach, Toni Purvis, who I met during the KIPP Alumni Leadership Accelerator program, tailored her technique to unlock my potential and maximize my leadership capacity. My approach to success has always been relatively siloed yet diligent in pursuing goals. My method of achievement has changed with a career coach. 

Toni, founder of and the , was instrumental in increasing my chances to “win.” She gave me recipes for reaching my desired outcomes in both my personal and professional endeavors. Having led consulting initiatives at Goldman Sachs and Booz Allen Hamilton and compiled an accomplished resume of consulting expertise, Toni turned to entrepreneurship out of a desire to prepare diverse young professionals for a “paradigm shift.”&�Բ�����;

My confidence, knowledge, and skill set all increased under her coaching. The flexibility of her approach allows for keen insight, strategic intervention and collaborative investment into clients’ success. We meet in person and over the phone to discuss alternative means of accomplishing my ambitions. I learned to redefine ideas of achievement and dissect the signals around me for greater clarity. For those who’ve never been there before, avoiding pitfalls en route to success and climbing the ladder in general can be daunting because oftentimes “you don’t know what you don’t know.”&�Բ�����;

One of the keenest pieces of advice I received changed how I viewed the path to success. For many young professionals of color, missteps early in your career can be fatal to your professional trajectory. This reality routinely leads to an overabundance of caution akin to having blinders on when conducting risk assessments. Fear of making the “wrong” move can be a huge deterrent to recognizing windows of opportunity when charting your course. When assessing opportunities, Toni would encourage me to “keep the ambition, [but] lose the chokehold.” This became a mantra that underscores the importance of calculated risk over rigid frameworks that exert cautious control to the point of paralysis.

Her advice has helped me accelerate through the professional pipeline. She’s taught me the best way to attack my goals, which included seeking a board of directors membership, growing my salary and elevating my community and professional impact. After two years of working with her, I’ve joined the boards of directors for KIPP North Carolina and , which works to strengthen rural communities. I’ve tripled my salary, run for a seat in my state legislature and I’m currently on the partner track at my law firm. 

Other key reflections I took away from professional coaching include employing pragmatism in and deconstructing the fear pyramid in order to better capitalize on opportunities and understand the larger implications of me “playing small” in spaces where I belonged. An additional asset to Toni’s tutelage is that she’s a Black woman who has excelled in corporate America. She recognizes the challenges of navigating sectors and spaces where there are few mentors or support networks for underrepresented individuals. White aspirants are statistically more likely to find a career coach within their immediate peer network. That’s not a reality for most professionals of color. A Black woman guiding my career works on two fronts: she’s attuned explicitly to my challenges as a Black professional, and it’s easy to relate to her. 

Although corporate America is taking strides towards more diversity, equity and inclusion, the opening in the door is still merely a crack. There’s so much more work to do. According to CNN, of all executive or leadership roles while also making up less than 1% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. It’s not due to a lack of expertise or skills. It’s primarily .

Having a good career coach could increase those numbers. Research on the efforts is limited, but the benefits are clear. Professionals in alternative career models and provided a confidante with whom they could openly discuss their experiences. Career coaching is undoubtedly an essential factor in success for Black and minority professionals, with ages 18-34 believing those relationships can create a more equitable workplace culture.

Colleges and universities can do more to support students and alumni and most are uniquely positioned to do so. Most, if not all, institutions have career service offices, but there’s a greater need for continued assistance post-graduation. Colleges should be fully engaged in skill refining, network expanding and optimizing personal coaching opportunities for their graduates. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and minority serving institutions in particular can help fill critical gaps through new professional development programs for alumni aspirants in pursuit of better circumstances. 

Not everyone has a network or family member who can guide their career path, and professional coaches are expensive. Career coaches can charge anywhere from $75 to $500 per hour, a hard sell for professionals with more tangible needs. Colleges and universities can bridge that gap.

For diverse professionals desiring a strong foundation upon which to build leverage and launch themselves into leadership, the right coach can provide the blueprint. By myself, I walked toward my future. With a coach, I’m on a private jet flying toward my dreams. My privilege as a KIPP alumni granted me the chance for a coach, but more paths need to be opened.

In the civil forfeiture complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, prosecutors said Kevin Ward spent $2.2 million in school funds on property in West Virginia, a Jeep Gladiator, a Tesla Model S Plaid, a Tesla Model Y, an Alfa Romeo Giulia, a Subaru Impreza, a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, a Jeep Wrangler, a Ducati Diavel motorcycle, a Ford Super Duty F-450 pickup truck, a Taxa Cricket camper and sports memorabilia including autographs from Jerry Rice and Michael Jordan.

The funds were supposed to pay for for students at KIPP DC, which serves some 7,000 kids at eight schools in the District. KIPP officials said they found financial irregularities during a routine internal review in December and contacted federal authorities.

In a statement, the network said a further investigation found “this was an isolated incident conducted by a single individual who took advantage of extraordinary circumstances during the pandemic and the individual’s role as head of technology.”

KIPP officials “said they have already recovered $1 million from [the network’s] insurance provider and are ‘optimistic’ the Justice Department’s recovery process will return more than $800,000 of the missing funds,” . The network also said it had instituted additional financial controls to prevent future fraud.

Ward worked at the charter school network from 2017 until he in July 2021, several months after being elected mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland. A and the , Ward died from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in January.

Read the full complaint here:

Sandberg, who stepped down earlier this month as the longtime chief operating officer of Meta, Facebook’s parent company; and Goldberg, founder and CEO of Fresno Unlimited, took the mentorship aspect seriously. Both assumed that role themselves for two students in the inaugural 30-member scholarship class that became the first to graduate college last month.

“I am so hopeful about the impact these students will have in the world and am confident they will build a brighter future for us all,” Sandberg told The 74 via email this month.

The Goldberg scholarship was created to honor Dave Goldberg — Sandberg’s husband and Rob Goldberg’s brother — who died in 2015 at age 47. Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, was close with KIPP Foundation CEO Richard Barth, and all the scholarship recipients are alumni of the charter school network, which predominantly serves low-income students of color. 

Sandberg’s mentee was Maleah Densby, a Duke University graduate who struggled with veering from her long-determined plan of being a pre-med major and eventually, a doctor. Floundering at first in her hardcore STEM classes, Densby, a top student, credited Sandberg with helping her to see that her grades did not define her or her dreams.

“Over the last four years, I’ve seen Maleah excel in her classes, wrestle through hard decisions, and navigate challenges both small and big. I’m so inspired by her drive and determination — and grateful for the special relationship we have built,” Sandberg said.

 “I have tried to teach her a thing or two, but I am certain she has taught me more, especially about perseverance.”

First-generation, low-income students face multiple barriers graduating college — nationwide, the six-year completion rate is 28% — and while the Goldberg Scholars had many additional supports, COVID also blew a hole through their college careers.

Rob Goldberg’s mentee was Metzli Garcia, a 2022 UCLA graduate and the first in her family to earn a college degree. Her dad cried, she said, when she told him she had gotten into UCLA and graduating “is a super big deal for my family.” When staying that high-stakes course became difficult, Garcia said, having someone like Goldberg believe in her made a powerful difference.

Goldberg said for him, that person had been his older brother.

“Dave was the person who instilled confidence in me and helped me to believe my dreams were attainable,” he told The 74. “When I was 22, I started a company … Dave had started a digital media company a year before and not only did he help me become a founder and an entrepreneur (at a time when there was no internet or access to online resources about starting a company), he also showed me how impactful it was to take time out of your day to help others, and to put other people first.”

There are now 93 students in the Goldberg scholarship pipeline, including the 17 who just graduated from KIPP high schools across the country and are headed to college this fall. Looking back on the first four years, Goldberg said he learned what an enemy imposter syndrome can be for these young people.

“I was raised to believe that college would always be in my future and it wasn’t until I met these brave Goldberg Scholars that I realized that higher education is not something that is inherent in all of our futures — let alone a place where everyone feels they belong,” he said. “Overcoming these feelings of self-doubt makes Metztli’s achievements, and the entire inaugural class’s accomplishments, all the more impressive.”

Here are five of those graduates:

MALEAH DENSBY

Duke University 

METZLI GARCIA

UCLA

HORUS HERNANDEZ

University of Houston 

JALIWA ALBRIGHT

Duke University

BREON ROBINSON

Duke University

Disclosure: Campbell Brown oversees global media partnerships at Meta. Brown co-founded The 74 and sits on its board of directors. Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to KIPP and The 74.

The nation’s largest group of K-12 charter schools said last week that the will provide four years of mentoring, summer internship assistance, financial literacy training, networking advice and funding to defray college costs — supports valued at $60,000 per student. The grant covers 50 students a year, up to 250 students over five years.

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For KIPP students such as Harlem-raised Airam Cruz, who landed a spot in a prestigious high school as a result of attending a KIPP middle school, and then entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, these networking-assist scholarships mean everything.

Cruz, who was chosen for a similar (which inspired the Rales) got a summer internship at a computer gaming company as a result of meeting the company’s chief executive officer at a 2018 Silicon Valley dinner hosted at the house of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Goldberg is her late husband.

Also as part of that Goldberg scholarship program: Cruz, now 21, had his own mentor for four years of college, former Samsung Chief Innovation Officer David Eun. “I texted him almost any day about anything. Life advice, school advice.”

What’s truly newsworthy about the Goldberg and Rales scholarship programs is why they are needed in the first place.

Two decades ago, KIPP and other top-performing charter networks started out with a simple promise to parents: Send your sons and daughters to our schools and we will get them enrolled in college. As years passed, however, every charter network found out that enrolling in college wasn’t the same as graduating.

As early as 2009, KIPP leaders realized their college-going students were falling short on actually graduating, and in April 2011 released a starkly worded revealing that only 33 percent of its KIPP middle school students were graduating from four-year colleges within six years.

While that rate was three times the national graduation rate for low-income, minority students, it was far below what KIPP had predicted: a graduation success rate of 75 percent. That was a wake-up call for KIPP, which launched aggressive changes including expanding its network to opening elementary and high schools to give students more time on task with KIPP teachers and counselors.

While those changes, and similar ones at other college-focused charter networks around the country, succeeded in boosting college graduation rates, KIPP and others soon discovered yet another unpleasant reality: simply earning a college degree wasn’t enough. Too often, their graduates settled for jobs that fell short of the kinds of professional opportunities landed by white and Asian college graduates.

That amounts to underemployment, explains Tevera Stith, senior director for National Alumni Impact at KIPP.

“We see more and more students not having access to proper networking who then struggle to get the kind of work experience needed to land the perfect first job that will propel their career,” said Stith For college students coming from middle- and upper-income families, those internships and first-job connections often come from family connections.

A 2016 survey of KIPP college graduates revealed that roughly half felt they were underemployed. The most common reason is having to pass on unpaid internships during their college years.

“When they can get a paid job at a local supermarket they are absolutely going to take that supermarket job,” said Stith.

Programs such as Rales offer students salaries for summer internships that don’t pay.

Underemployment is what I saw first hand when reporting the book, , which documented the first graduating class at KIPP’s Gaston College Prep, a school in rural North Carolina located in a town where college graduation is not an expectation. But in this class, 61 percent of the graduating seniors earned four-year degrees within six years, a rate that exceeds the degree attainment rates for middle-class students.

While that success rate was impressive, it soon became clear that a fair number of those alumni didn’t consider themselves successes in life, at least not when compared to middle-class college graduates. While they were all employed, their jobs often fell into the category of underemployment, such as a finance major working as a bank teller.

These latest iterations in the learning curve around what it takes to get low-income minority students into college, through college and into a job commensurate with their skills, explains the multiple name changes for KIPP’s college promotion programs. It began in 1998 as Kipp To College, then in 2008 became KIPP Through College. In 2021 it became which acknowledges both the need to help students with non-college careers and that even college graduates need ongoing assistance.

Other charter networks make similar efforts. The New York City-based Success Academy schools, for example, have their .

The Northeast-based , which usually turns in the top college graduation rates, rivaling the success rates for middle-class students, also recognizes the need for follow-up support. Uncommon is building a network to link all its alums and connect them to outside organizations for career support.

Chicago-based Noble Network of Charter Schools offers one-on-one career counseling and networking events as well as employer programs like .

Aide Acosta, Noble’s chief college officer, said a 2016 survey of their alums showed that six months after earning college degrees only 41 percent had full-time employment or were in graduate school. Compared to middle-class college graduates, she said, “our students were having different career exposures.” After launching Noble’s coaching/job placement efforts, that number is now up to 80 percent.

Some students get exposed to multiple programs. Kourtney Buckner, for example, attended a KIPP middle school in Atlanta. KIPP then helped her win acceptance at George Washington University. Buckner, a junior who plans on being a lawyer, has a KIPP college adviser who checks on her and the network helped her land a KIPP-supported summer internship at a Washington-based nonprofit.

At the same time, Buckner is also a scholar, a program that ensures first-generation students find a network of similar students to support them in college. “Having a Posse cohort here has made all the difference,” said Buckner. “I have nine other (Posse scholars) here and I also have a Posse mentor.”

Applications for the Rales Scholars Program opened Oct. 1 to KIPP high school seniors or KIPP middle school alumni now in their senior year. The first group of Rales scholars will join the program in May 2022.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.