How Children Succeed

Wilmette and the surrounding towns. The crusading journalist Jonathan Kozol, in his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, chose New Trier as his archetypal suburban high school of privilege, cataloging its dance studios and fencing rooms and Latin classes and contrasting the “superfluity of opportunity” its students enjoyed to the “denial of opportunity” experienced by students at Du Sable High, a South Side school that, Kozol wrote, would be “shunned—or, probably, shut down —if it were serving a white middle-class community.” Nelson read Kozol’s book in his freshman sociology class at the University of Michigan, and it only increased the sense of urgency he felt, his growing determination to find a way to reverse the patterns that Kozol described; to bring at least a small measure of the opportunity enjoyed by students at New Trier to students at schools like Du Sable.

After graduating, Nelson joined Teach for America and taught sixth grade at a struggling, high-poverty South Side public school called O’Keeffe Elementary, a mile or so from Du Sable. He was a gifted classroom instructor, raising his students’ reading and math ability by an average of two years’ worth of progress for each year he taught them and, in his second year, winning recognition as the best Teach for America teacher in the Chicago region. He was a coach of the school’s football team and helped start a student council, and he became close with many of his students, visiting them at home and getting to know their parents.

From his first day at O’Keeffe, Nelson talked to his students incessantly about college. All of them were African Americans from low-income families, and few of them had parents who were college graduates—but that didn’t matter, Nelson promised them; if they worked hard, they could and would go to college and graduate. Then one morning in April of 2006, Nelson picked up the Chicago Tribune and read a front-page story, based on a report by the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, that challenged that promise. According to the consortium, just eight of every one hundred students who started high school in the Chicago public schools would go on to earn four-year-college degrees. For African American boys, the odds were even worse: fewer than one in thirty black male high-school freshmen in the city would graduate from a four-year college by the time they were twenty-five. For Nelson, the numbers were profoundly unsettling: even if he was able to create the most effective sixth-grade classroom in the city, could that possibly be enough to help his students overcome those terrible odds?

Nelson’s experience at O’Keeffe Elementary convinced him of two things: first, that he would spend the rest of his life working in the field of education reform. And second, that despite his success in the classroom, he wasn’t meant to be a teacher. As he was preparing to leave O’Keeffe, Teach for America’s national office offered him a job as the organization’s executive director for Chicago, a big responsibility for a twenty-four-year-old. It seemed like his dream job, but at the last minute, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand let alone put into words, he turned it down. It was an agonizing decision. Saying no to Teach for America “frustrated me beyond belief,” he told me. “I was so close to having found the right way to make a big impact, but for some reason it didn’t feel like the right role.”

The Tribune story had helped convince him that there was a missing piece in the education-reform landscape, a program or a system or a tool that could help kids like the ones he taught at O’Keeffe not only make it to college but also graduate. “I desperately wanted to find an organization, or start one, that closed the gap between high school and college,” he told me. “Every one of us in Teach for America was working so hard and creating results in our classrooms, but if our kids didn’t go on to graduate from college, who the hell cared?”

Turning down the Teach for America job sent Nelson into a crisis of the spirit, a period of deep inner turmoil that lasted almost six months. He had always been a hyper-busy person, a workaholic even in high school, and suddenly he had no official responsibilities, nothing to do but think about his life and where it was going and what it meant. Occasionally that fall, he got calls from some of the parents of the students he had taught the year before at O’Keeffe. The kids were in seventh grade now, and the gains they had made the previous year were slipping away, the parents said. Distraught, they asked Nelson what they could do to get their kids back on track. One even broke down in tears on the phone. Nelson didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to help.

Nelson started praying regularly, looking for answers, for some relief from his growing depression. He began to make a ritual of visiting a different place of worship every day—one day going to a Catholic Mass, the next a Baha’i temple. He went into therapy. He wrote pages and pages of poetry. It was a strange and intense period for Nelson, and when he talks about it now, he sounds like he still isn’t quite sure what to make of it. But what he thinks he was looking for, he says, was vocation. He was trying to find his mission.

4. The Call

In January of 2007, Nelson got a call from Eddie Lou, a young Chicago venture capitalist who a few years earlier had set up a small nonprofit with two friends, one of whom, Matt King, was a teacher at the Dunbar vocational high school, on the South Side. Their fledgling organization, which they’d named the Urban Students Empowered Foundation, managed and supported an afterschool program that King ran for a handful of juniors and seniors at Dunbar. It was a kind of college-prep boot camp: King tutored the students so they could increase their GPAs and improve their ACT scores, helped them figure out which colleges they should apply to, walked them through the financial-aid process, talked to them about how to survive at college. Though the program was small— King’s first class of seven students had graduated and were freshmen in college, and there was a second class of seven who were seniors at Dunbar—it was producing some impressive results. The students had raised their ACT scores, on average, from about 15 to around 18 over the course of their junior year, moving them from about the fifteenth percentile nationally to about the thirty-fifth percentile. Their GPAs improved as well, and all of the students who entered the program made it to college.

Lou, a serial entrepreneur who had been involved in several tech start-ups, wanted to expand the program beyond a single afterschool class—but then King landed a job as a vice principal at a local charter school and decided he couldn’t keep running the program. So Lou and King and their third partner, a doctoral student at Northwestern named Dawn Pankonien, went looking for a new executive director, someone who could not only revive King’s program but also turn it into something more ambitious. They interviewed more than twenty candidates, but none of them seemed like the right fit. They were on the verge of shutting down the organization altogether when, through a mutual acquaintance at Teach for America, they found Jeff Nelson.

That winter, Nelson was finally beginning to feel like he was emerging from his long season in the wilderness, and when Lou called, it seemed like perfect timing. The board of directors—the three founders, plus a couple of finance guys—offered him the job of executive director, and he quickly accepted, he told me, “without doing a lot of due diligence.” If he had, he might have learned before his first day on the job that the organization had no employees, no office space, no business plan, and just six thousand dollars in the bank, enough to cover operating expenses for ten days. At the end of that first day, it dawned on Nelson that he had somehow managed to turn down a job with the biggest and most established education-reform organization in the country in order to take a position with one of the smallest and least established. Oddly, it felt like the right move.

Nelson told the board he needed six weeks to come up with a plan for the future of the organization. He recruited two Teach for America teachers to work for him as unpaid interns during their summer vacation. Pankonien offered to work without pay for a few months as well. She was renting a room from a guy she knew who was a trader at the Mercantile Exchange, and the guy said they could use his apartment during the day when he was on the trading floor. And so that became the unofficial headquarters for the organization that summer—the four of them sitting on couches in a commodity trader’s living room, using their own cell phones and laptops. The one asset the organization owned was a printer. Five years later, Urban Students Empowered has a new name— OneGoal—an administrative staff of fifteen, an annual budget of $1.7 million, and more than twelve hundred students at twenty Chicago high schools enrolled in a three-year course modeled on King’s program but much bigger and more intensive.

Nelson’s belief is that underperforming high-school students can relatively quickly transform themselves into highly successful college students—but that it is almost impossible for them to make that transition without the help of a highly effective teacher. So Nelson and his team scour the city looking for and signing up motivated, ambitious high-school teachers, sometimes at charter schools, but more often at traditional Chicago high schools in low-income neighborhoods. (Fenger is one of those schools.) OneGoal has signed a unique partnership deal with the Chicago public schools that lets the organization work directly with individual teachers to help them run the