- Students get a chance to pitch business plans during DC Entrepreneurship Week [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
- Why not a Jefferson High for poor kids?
Students get a chance to pitch business plans during DC Entrepreneurship Week [Maya Angelou PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Mohana Ravindranath
October 30, 2012
Chauntal Bittle, Tracey Coleman, Sade Hawkins and Maurice Burleigh are not typical entrepreneurs pitching to investors.
They are all 15-year-old sophomores at Maya Angelou High School’s Evans campus in Northeast Washington. When they’re not in class, they’re refining the plan for their clothing business, called It’s a Hoodie Thing.
The team designs custom hooded sweatshirts for clients using stencils, fabric paint and iron-on transfer paper. “It’s all goodie with the hoodie,” their slogan proclaims.
All students participate in Build, a national four-year after school program providing entrepreneurship training and college preparation for students at risk of dropping out of high school. As part of D.C. Entrepreneurship Week, eight groups of sophomores from Build’s D.C. branch presented business plans to potential investors, requesting a few hundred dollars each.
The team behind It’s A Hoodie Thing asked for an investment of $428.99 to cover their start-up cost — the cost of supplies required to design the hoodies. They would only need to sell 21 hoodies for $25 each to break even, the team said, a point they’d likely reach in March of 2013.
Potential investors gave the team feedback about their plan. Craig Mathews, who earlier pitched his own tech business to other investors, suggested sending a sample to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, famous for wearing hoodies.
After their presentation, the team said they were initially very nervous to make their first investment pitch. “I didn’t want us to not get the money,” Burleigh said.
Investors have not yet decided which projects to fund. But the team said they were surprised at how understanding the investors were, and having experienced one pitch will “make me calm down more” for future presentations, Hawkins said.
Why not a Jefferson High for poor kids?
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
November 1, 2012
While we wonder what should be done about our region’s most demanding public high school — Thomas Jefferson— having only 3 percent of its students from poor families, let’s consider a different experiment in selective education. What if we created a school that gave as challenging an academic experience as Jefferson’s to a student body that was 100 percent low-income?
That sounds impossible, doesn’t it? The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County is the most selective in the country. It has the highest Advanced Placement test participation rate in the region, and it has more college courses on top of that. It dumps a huge academic load on every student. How could we ask so much from kids whose poor, non-college parents lack the affluence and educational achievement to support such serious study?
Yet there is such a place, a sixth-through-12th-grade public charter school called Preuss on the La Jolla campus of the University of California at San Diego. It admits only the children of parents who are low-income and never went to college. It has more than 800 students, 59 percent of them Hispanic, 23 percent Asian, 12 percent black and 6 percent white.
The Advanced Placement test participation rate at the 13-year-old school is nearly equal to Jefferson’s and higher than that of any other public school in this region. Like Jefferson, 100 percent of Preuss graduates each year have at least one passing AP score, while the national average is 18.1 percent.
The story of Preuss is told in a compelling new book, “In the Front Door: Creating a College-Going Culture of Learning,” by one of the school’s founders, Hugh “Bud” Mehan, professor emeritus of sociology and founding director of the Center for Research on Education Equity, Access and Teaching Excellence at UC-San Diego.
Mehan and three contributors analyze Preuss and other efforts to raise low-income minority students to University of California standards after university regents and voters banned affirmative action in admissions.
Preuss’s school year is 18 days longer than the state standard. All Preuss high school courses meet college entrance requirements defined by the state’s university systems. Students may serve as interns in UC-San Diego biology and engineering labs, music and theater departments. UC-San Diego students act as tutors. Parents are required to devote 30 hours a year to school activities such as PTA or trip chaperoning.
Under D.C. law, a charter school similar to Preuss would be forced to admit any student who applied, low-income or not, and make the selection by lottery if there weren’t enough space for everyone. California charter law, at least as Preuss officials interpret it, allows more leeway. It goes so far as to open its lottery only to low-income applicants a Preuss committee judges “to have high academic potential but underdeveloped skills,” Mehan says.
That makes Preuss relevant to a long debate over whether charter schools have an unfair advantage because their low-income students have supportive and well-informed parents who took the trouble to apply to a charter. There is no proof that charter parents are better than regular-school parents. Many smart and involved parents have good reasons for preferring regular schools. Many charter parents fail to help their children much.
But if it were true that high-performing charters draw the children of some of the best low-income parents, so what? The Preuss parents raised children who met the school’s standards. They put in their required 30 hours of school support each year. Don’t such conscientious people, given their economic disadvantages, deserve a chance for their children to be taught to the highest possible standard?
Fairfax is a big county with more than enough promising low-income children to fill a magnet school modeled after Preuss. If only a dozen such kids a year can get into Jefferson, how about a Jefferson-like education for the rest?