Apartheid ended in 1991, but its legacy still plays out in the educational gulf that separates disadvantaged South African students from their wealthier, and often white, peers. June 16, Youth Day, commemorates the start of the Soweto struggle. It’s a fitting time to highlight the amazing impact schools working to change student outcomes, and to call for the systemic transformation that’s needed to turn what are still slim odds of success into a distant memory.

Khayelitsha & COSAT: A study in the difference one impact school can make

Khayelitsha is a sprawling township located 35 kilometers outside of Cape Town. Founded in 1985, the township grew to an estimated 406,779 residents within 20 years.

Since then, rapid, informal growth has made accurate population numbers hard to come. What we do know is that life in the township is unstructured and hard, and the population is young. About 70 percent of residents still live in shacks, and one in three people has to walk 200 meters or further to access water. Approximately 40 percent of the township’s residents are under 19 years of age, and another roughly 27 percent are of school-going age.

We also know that the educational opportunities for children in Khayelitsha and townships like it are vanishingly slim. According to official figures, only about 40  percent of young South Africans nationwide obtain any qualification beyond grade nine. In 2011, 2,894 Khayelitsha students in 20 secondary schools, made it to and sat for the matric exams administered at the end of Grade 12. Of those who sat, a scant 16 percent earned a bachelors pass (the qualification needed for access to university.) And only 20 students went on to study at the University of Cape Town(UCT), a tertiary institution with an enrollment of over 25,000 students that’s located near Khayelitsha.

How did 20 children overcome so much? Impact schools

So among all the children in Khayelitsha, how did 20 manage to overcome so much to make it to UCT? Thanks to the extraordinary work of high-impact schools. In fact, for fully half, the opportunity came courtesy of one public school, the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT.) The school made history last year when the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) named COSAT one of the top ten schools in the province — the first time that a township school had achieved that distinction.

COSAT is a member of the South African Extraordinary Schools Coalition, which aims to provide high quality education for disadvantaged learners in spite of extreme challenges. Non-governmental organizations like Ikamva Youth seek to help high school graduates from disadvantaged communities gain the knowledge, skills, networks and resources to access tertiary education and employment opportunities. UCT itself has recently launched a 100 Up program to work with top students from 20 high schools in Khayelitsha to ensure they have access to the university.

Systemic change & private-public partnerships: The key to transformation

But heroic efforts like these will never be enough to drive the systemic changes that children across South Africa need. We need a more comprehensive approach that transforms today’s slim educational odds into a distant memory. Twenty students entering a prestigious university from the closest township isn’t okay. Such small numbers will never drive the systemic transformation those of us fighting for change are seeking.

To eradicate the cycle of inequity, we must make the case that South Africa’s government and private enterprise invest in supporting and replicating schools of excellence like COSAT. Without a concerted effort to make affordable access to high quality education a given for all South Africans, UCT and other top-tier institutions of higher learning will continue to serve a very small minority of privileged learners. And those countless learners who attend ill-resourced schools day in and day out will be denied the promise of a better future for themselves and their families.

A version of this story originally ran on June 25, 2012. Read additional posts about impact schools and how they can make a difference for disadvantaged South African students here.

A few thoughts sprang to mind as we read the piece:

1. It’s good that states and districts are beginning to rethink cumbersome evaluation policies, but reformer concerns over the unintended consequences of teacher evaluations are neither new nor news. We expressed our own back in 2011.
2. It’s odd (although common) to position the “education reform” movement as a unified whole that could fracture into civil war. Families across the US need better public school options. All of us, on every side of the spectrum, must pursue solutions that work. To the extent that we get caught up in debates that fracture along monolithic lines, we risk losing sight of the real issue at hand: Better outcomes for kids. (This same line of thinking cropped up again when we read Peter DeWitt’s recent EdWeek column, “Why Aren’t More School Leaders Fighting Against Ed Reform?”)
3. Charter schools are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential chilling effect that poorly crafted teacher evaluation policies may have on effective innovation in schools.

In light of Scott’s article, we thought it would be worth revisiting Joe Siedlecki’s original post on teacher evaluations, “Potential unintended consequences of new teacher evaluation approaches.”

Some highlights from the article:

• These laws assume that students will be taught one subject by one teacher. That is, they assume schools of tomorrow will always look like the schools of today. They also run headlong into two other popular reform efforts – blended learning and the movement to offer schools autonomy in exchange for accountability.
• “Blended learning” models typically combine traditional classroom-based learning models with innovative instructional use of technology… Under new teacher-evaluation laws, schools experimenting with blended learning will not only have to overcome facilities, logistical and technology hurdles, but will also have to find a way to meet new legislative requirements that were written with existing instructional models in mind. 
• The most obvious example of the “autonomy in exchange for accountability” model is charter schooling. But many school districts are experimenting with giving traditional public schools and their principals’ charter-like autonomy over critical levers such as school budgets, schedules and staffing.

Read the rest of the post.

Such a system takes the mystery out of how districts allocate funds to each school and clarifies how funds move when enrollments shift. As students transfer from one setting to another, the funds designated for that student transfer as well.

Compare & contrast: Traditional funding v. student-based funding

Let’s compare a traditional funding model (based on total enrollment) with a student-based allocation model (based on actual number of students and their specific needs.)

The traditional staffing-based allocation system

The illustration below shows the budget of an actual Chicago school under a traditional staffing allocation system.

Figure 1:  Traditional budget allocation to one Chicago School. From John Myers, “CPS Budget Analysis: CPS Eyes Equity,” Catalyst Chicago,  February 2005.

In this model, school districts (rather than school leaders) hold the purse strings, deciding what gets purchased for each school (i.e., a principal, some number of teachers, a counselor, etc.) Larger districts use staffing formulas to determine how many of each type of staff a school gets, often allocating a vice principal for schools with more than 400 students, and so on. What’s then spent at each school is the actual salaries of the staff assigned to each school. The district spends more on schools with more staff per pupil or higher salaried staff.

Not surprisingly, this kind of allocation scheme – which allocates staff rather than dollars – tends to yield uneven per-pupil spending across schools.

The student-based allocation model

Now let’s look at a model budget for the same school, recalibrated under a student-based allocation model:

Figure 2:  Student-based allocation based on actual student enrollment at the same Chicago school. From John Myers, “CPS Budget Analysis: CPS Eyes Equity,” Catalyst Chicago,  February 2005.

Under the student-based funding model, dollars are allocated on the basis of enrollments for different types of students. This particular school would get an additional $3.5 million and change. (In the level funding environment created by this new model, some schools would also *lose* funds – a sticking point that often drives controversy.) In addition to the more equitable dollar allocations, school leaders also have greater latitude to ensure that staff and services address the real needs of the school’s individual students.

Real world benefits of student-based funding

From a practical standpoint, why would a superintendent want to consider student-based allocation?

1. Equitable access: Students and families rightly have an expectation of equitable access to district resources. A system that routinely directs more funds to some schools (often smaller or wealthier sites) flies in the face of this basic principle.
2. Portability: For school districts with choice-based assignment plans, funds are portable and follow individual children as they move to their preferred school.
3. Flexibility: Part and parcel of the student-based funding model is that principals are no longer bound to adhere to district staffing models. Building leaders can apply their dollars in ways that best meet the needs of their particular mix of students – setting the stage for innovation. For instance, under student-based funding, school leaders have the opportunity to implement models such as blended learning – which depend on the ability to invest in technology, lab monitors, and a host of other nontraditional expenditures – to drive better outcomes for their students.
4. Accountability: Districts with prescriptive staffing formulas can’t hold schools or principals accountable for the performance at their school, given that most of the resource decisions have been decided centrally. Furthermore, as schools use their flexibility to innovate and alter their delivery models, districts can ensure the financial viability of different school models by keeping per student (or per student type) costs comparable across all schools. Given the comparable funding, more successful models can be scaled across additional sites without draining undue funds from the district.

In the end, student-based allocation facilitates the goal of districtwide improvement: Funds follow students, thereby creating incentives for schools to attract students, keep full enrollment, and demonstrate excellent student performance. As families move their students to higher performing schools, the system begins to align to a continuous improvement cycle that drives ongoing performance gains at all schools.

A transition to weighted student funding (a.k.a. student-based allocation) is one of the key actions that defines portfolio school districts. Read our occasional series on portfolio districts for more detail.

Marguerite Roza, Ph.D., is Director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and Senior Research Affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Dr. Roza’s research focuses on quantitative policy analysis, particularly in the area of education finance.

Scene 2:  A program review meeting at Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM.) The conference room is plastered with data-intense score cards documenting the academic and operational performance of the leadership and operational teams – which include three top Indian NGOs, UNICEF, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, McKinsey & Co, and city leaders – behind MCGM’s School Excellence Program. The municipal commissioner reviews each scorecard carefully as a three-hour meeting begins. He asks questions and probes a range of topics. But two themes cut across all discussions: Improvement in student learning and sustainability. How will each organization in the room ensure that improvements to the Mumbai public school system happen (e.g., that student learning levels are measured and improving), and can last?

Both scenes are atypical. Government schools are often both oversubscribed and underresourced. Their students often struggle to meet basic literacy and numeracy requirements. As a rule, city government leaders do not invite NGOs, philanthropists, international development agencies and consultants into their inner sanctums to regularly and repeatedly deep dive into data about performance.

With the nascent School Excellence Program (SEP), however, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) has begun to design a new normal. The program’s goal is to ensure that 1) all primary students in government schools have access to effective learning environments like the one described above, and that 2) their learning levels measurably and meaningfully improve. Its approach—involving expert players from a range of sectors in the implementation and design stages—adds a critical dose of rigor and discipline to the effort.

The Mumbai School Excellence Program: India’s first ever citywide school turnaround program

Mumbai’s School Excellence Program is the first and only citywide school turnaround program ever attempted in India. The multidimensional initiative seeks to transform the Mumbai school system into a benchmark for India’s government school systems.

What will it take to achieve lasting change? As a starting point, the leadership and operational teams involved in SEP have set measurable goals that are both clear and ambitious. These include quantifiable improvements in:

• Student learning outcomes (for example, from a baseline average of “52 out of 100 on a simple test” to “80+ out of 100 on a similar test” as measured by both schools and external third-party assessments)
• Teacher, headmaster and coach competencies
• Operational processes in schools such as:
  • the use of a proven and agreed-upon pedagogy in more than 80 percent of the classrooms
  • three to four hours of weekly coaching support for each teacher
• Significant parent involvement with over 90 percent parent teacher association participation and effective functioning of community-based, school management committees (SMCs)

Data and discipline: A program management approach to scale and sustainability

A series of parallel measures, a handful of which will have a disproportionate impact, will help determine the success or failure of the program:

1. Effective coordination: Given the complexity of the project, the foundation funded McKinsey & Co. to act as a backbone organization to hold the highly complex endeavor together. McKinsey’s mandate is to provide best-in-class program management for at least three years so that the education department can efficiently and effectively run, institutionalize and scale the process systemwide.
2. Focus on sustainability: Long-term sustainability of the program will require that MCGM develop an organizational capacity for strong program management.  Developing this capacity is one focal point of current efforts. Because buy-in and support from a cross-section of engaged stakeholders are also critical, the formation of a strong steering committee representing Mumbai business and civil society leaders is another focus. (Parental engagement, as spelled out above, is likewise a pillar of success.)
3. Disciplined use of data: Regular evaluation of data to guide decisions is yet another lynchpin for success. Core applications of this practice include on-time execution of external assessments to measure the SEP’s effectiveness and formal performance reviews that apply data analysis to ongoing improvement.

Early progress

Mumbai is India’s most populous city and the fourth most populous city in the world. Improving the school system and reliably measuring and increasing student achievement will be – to put it mildly — no small tasks. Complex though the program is, early SEP wins are encouraging.  Since it was started two years ago, the program has garnered strong support from the government. MCGM approved an unprecedented public-private partnership policy for measurably improving quality of education, and the first-ever system wide, third-party assessments were conducted in 2010. The program has been rolled out in 148 schools reaching roughly 45,000 students. At the leadership level, program reviews are held regularly, and all partners are accountable for their outcomes.

Achieving scale will take time. But with disciplined execution and ongoing commitment, we believe the program will succeed, both in improving the quality of learning for millions of students and in paving the way for other urban centers seeking to do the same.

Jamilia, a young Oakland mother of five, has drawn a clear line in the sand: Her family will not fall prey to the stats or to her own family’s history of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  Her entire community has taken note.

Jamilia’s story

My motto in life is, “Be ambitious enough to see your child grow old.” I watched my grandmother die of complications from Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  I promised myself that my kids would live healthy lives.

I knew I needed to give the kids fruits and vegetables, but it was hard to get them. Most of the grocery stores didn’t have fresh foods.  My kids could find a gun where we lived easier than they could find fresh vegetables.

The only way I could get good, fresh food that I could afford was to go to farmer’s markets, but there weren’t any in my neighborhood.  I’d have to load up the kids on a bus and ride across town to get to the closest one.  It took a lot of work, but it was cheaper than buying the vegetables at a grocery store closer to where we lived.

Teachers and parents in the school where I worked started listening to me talk about being healthier and the things I was doing for my kids.  So we started some cooking classes at the school to teach people how to make healthier meals and how to get their kids to eat them. I taught them some of my ideas:  If my kids don’t like the vegetable for dinner, I cover them with fruit or put a splash of orange juice on the top. I make homemade pizza with wheat dough so the kids can make smiley faces with vegetables—including spinach.  My kids call that the “good green stuff.”

I want to see my kids get old.  I want to see their kids. So I’ll do whatever it takes.

Jamilia’s tips for fighting childhood obesity at home

• Cut out fast foods.
• Find out where produce is available and inexpensive, and make the effort to get it.
• Buy extra vegetables and freeze them in bags so they are available when you need them.
• Involve your kids in planning a weekly menu.
• Add fruits and vegetables to foods that are cooked or baked.  Toss vegetables into pasta sauce, lasagna, casseroles, soups and omelets.
• You don’t have to change everything in one day.

Hear more about Jamilia’s efforts to counter the threat of childhood obesity at home and in her community. For tips from Jamilia and other families who’ve adopted healthy habits to combat childhood obesity in their own homes, visit www.bewellbook.org, and order or download your free copies of A Year of Being Well: Messages from Families on Living Healthier Lives.

But the reasons are simple:  People living in extreme poverty face numerous challenges and conflicting priorities every day. When financial stability is so precarious, tradeoffs are necessary and constant. And of course, the poor are like all of us:  New habits don’t come easy, even when we know they are good for us. That’s human nature 101.

Helping people address these issues requires pragmatism and creativity. It demands the flexibility to broaden the focus of our mission-driven work just enough to enhance effectiveness—without drifting into undisciplined scope creep.

It’s not an easy balance to achieve, but a number of organizations working in urban India have found effective ways to creatively cluster solutions that people both want and need.

1. Mahila Housing Trust: Fostering the community’s ability to address urban poverty

During a conversation with the field staff of one Ahmedabad-based grantee, Mahila Housing Trust (MHT,) I learned that in addition to helping slum families obtain basic water and sanitation services (through education, community empowerment efforts, and linkages with local government agencies and microloan organizations), staff also provide guidance on a range of other issues. For instance, if someone has a chronic health problem,  MHT staff try and link them with another NGO or government program who can help. Over a period of time, MHT transitions this role to the community by fostering the creation and capacity building of community-based organizations.

This sort of cross pollination of solutions gave rise to MHT itself, born out of insights gained by another organization. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA,) a 31-year-old nonprofit, provides low cost loans to self-employed, female workers in Ahmedabad’s slums. One SEWA survey found that clients didn’t simply want traditional microloans to grow their businesses. They also wanted loans to address home improvement concerns such as improved water and sanitation services.

2. Operation ASHA: Fighting TB, headaches and stigma

Other organizations have increased their effectiveness using similar strategies but different applications (e.g., clustering treatments versus social services.) For instance, Operation ASHA, a nonprofit that sets up tuberculosis treatment centers in slums, started providing patients and their families with antacids and pain killers along with the TB medication.

This strategy addresses a couple of barriers to compliance. The first is fairly straightforward: Tuberculosis drugs cause unpleasant side-effects, so people may not take them as directed. But the second issue is both less obvious and more powerful: TB carries a huge social stigma, so many people would (quite literally) rather die of the disease then let people know that they have TB.  By providing antacids and pain killers, ASHA also helps minimize this stigma. No one who sees a patient walk into the ASHA treatment center is necessarily a TB patient.  They might just have a head or stomach ache. This simple strategy not only kept more patients from defaulting on their treatments; it also created goodwill for ASHA among families.

3. Saraplast: Pairing services to encourage adoption

The approach is equally relevant for socially oriented companies working in the for-profit space. Saraplast is a commercial company that sets up and maintains portable toilets in slums, and operates them on a fee-based model. The company is in the early stages of collaboration with a partner who provides clean drinking water. The reason? In many of the slum communities where Saraplast works, clean drinking water is a priority need among residents. Saraplast has discovered that community members are far more likely to do business with them if their sanitation services are paired with access to clean water.

Creativity + pragmatism = A whole solution that’s more compelling than its parts

Models that cluster complementary services with one another make good sense, from both the business and development perspectives. Successful programs must be designed to address the conflicting priorities and incremental needs of the people living in urban poverty. They can’t stray too far from their central purpose, but they should creatively group simple solutions that make the whole solution more compelling than its parts. By more effectively addressing people’s interlocking needs and motivations, we can dramatically increase chances of lasting progress.

As this wave builds energy, it has the potential to shift authority back to educators in the classroom.

Education data tools: Waves one and two

The first two waves of the education data movement too often treated teachers—and support for their day-to-day work as an afterthought.

For instance, wave one, which was kicked off by No Child Left Behind, prioritized summative test results and longitudinal data trends. These efforts to bring important insight to educators were helpful, but not sufficient. Daily instruction and the formative insights provided by students in the classroom were too often overlooked and undervalued.

The second wave of the education data conversation then focused on using data, including value-added data, to evaluate teachers. Arguments over evaluation metrics trumped a focus on supports to help teachers improve instructional practice.

And although the sector embraced tools and laid the foundations for interoperable data pipelines during this second wave, efforts to rethink the types of supports that would be useful and relevant to teachers in their daily practice were more the exception than the rule.

The result was that teachers, already overloaded with work, were often also overloaded with information and the expectation that they’d be able to readily transform data into better outcomes for students. Data was often viewed, at best, as tangential to day-to-day professional practice and, at worst, as a blunt instrument for administering accountability in its most punitive form.

The changing outlook: Education data tools that help teachers do what they do best

The good news is that lessons learned during those first two waves are on the verge of bearing fruit. We’re now seeing a wave of innovations focused on ensuring that teachers have access to data tools that address their most pressing needs.

The foundation’s work to develop studentGPS dashboards, which are now being implemented across Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, represented an early foray in this direction. Through focus groups, over 2,000 teachers vetted what insights would be most helpful to identify emerging issues such as problems in attendance, class work and test performance. Continued advancement of tools that address a broader range of insights and instructional needs is vital to addressing the pressures teachers face as their profession evolves.

To accelerate third-wave innovations, the foundation has begun to look for solutions that address the pain points we’ve heard time and again from teachers. These include:

• Better access to high quality, differentiated content to help tailor lessons to the needs of individual students
• Better tools to support specific populations of students for targeted interventions (e.g. English Language Learners, special education students, or a particular instructional approach like Response to Intervention)
• Tools that can integrate not only attendance, demographic, disciplinary and test data, but that are built to incorporate other rich sources of information (particularly formative data such as  exit tickets and class homework) in real time

The foundation’s approach is rooted in a firm belief that more effective use of the daily information generated and gathered by teachers is the key needed to finally unlock the power of education data. These daily data surface learning patterns and gaps that might otherwise remain unnoticed, and make routine the insights that great instructors have always been able to tease out of their students. They are the core of great teaching & learning practices.

The wisdom of the classroom crowd

One recent foundation investment with MasteryConnect, a company that focuses on helping teachers track student mastery of learning standards, seeks to accelerate this third wave of innovation. MasteryConnect grew from co-founder Trenton Goble’s insight into needs of the public schools where he built his career. As a long-time public school teacher and principal, Trenton recognized insight into student learning from exit tickets and class homework could be put to much better use than it was. Teachers needed a better way to understand what students had and had not learned.

The company’s MasteryTracker tool, on-line learning community, and common assessment sharing platform were developed and provided free to teachers.  To date, over 70,000 teachers across the country participate in the site’s learning community. This represents 27,000 schools in over 8,700 school districts.  These teachers are not using data provided top-down from the state or district. Adoption grew from bottom-up teacher use, vetting and insights gleaned from working with students in the classroom.

As this third wave gains momentum, those of us helping to shape it— educators, entrepreneurs, foundations, technologists, and others — should all work to ensure commitment to an iterative process that gives teachers’ voices equal billing. Tapping directly into the wisdom of the classroom crowd, as MasteryConnect has done, is one way to ensure that.

Susan Dell is the co-founder and board chair of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and a mother of four.  Her experiences as an athlete, mother and champion for good health have taught her the importance of being well and modeling healthy habits for our children.

Susan’s story

My personal philosophy has always been “fuel for performance & train for life,”  so I’ve tried to teach my four kids about fueling their bodies with healthy foods that will give them the nutrients they need so their minds and bodies perform at their best.

I’ve told them that eating foods like lean meats, fresh fruits and veggies, low-fat dairy items and whole grains as fuel will help them whether they’re taking a test, running a race or just playing with friends. But as any parent can attest, telling our children things can only do so much good. I’ve had to show my kids how to choose the right fuel for their bodies.

One way I’ve tried to do this is to really include my children in meals. When kids are involved in planning and preparing meals, they are more likely to eat what is on the table.  I always have a bowl of clean, fresh fruit on the kitchen counter—full of different options to choose from for breakfast and snacks. I allow my kids to choose which green vegetable is served at dinner.  And I involve the kids in cooking. The more involved your kids are, the more they will want to eat the healthy meals they helped create.

Eating a rainbow, modeling good habits

I also keep plates and bowls of healthy snack options in our refrigerator.  We always have “ready to eat” sliced fruits, grilled, steamed or raw veggies, healthy tuna salad or chicken salad, or healthy dips like hummus or spinach dip.  If you have healthy foods in the refrigerator, the kids will get excited about going there to get a fresh snack instead of something out of a bag or box.

When my kids were younger, they enjoyed doing things like “eating a rainbow” by eating different colored foods that only occur in nature. They’d have contests to see who could eat the most colors.  They learned to enjoy “real foods” that were healthy and full of nutrients instead of foods with a lot of artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives.

Most important, I fuel my body with the same healthy foods that I expect my kids to eat. I’m physically active and train for life. Modeling healthy habits is first—and most critical—thing I can do to help my kids understand the importance of a healthy lifestyle.  Helping my kids fuel for performance and train for life means teaching them that the right combination of healthy food and regular physical activity can help them perform their best and live longer, healthier lives.

Susan’s tips

• Involve your kids in every meal.  Allow them to choose at least one of the dishes served.
• Don’t buy chips, candy and junk food. If you don’t buy it and have it in your home, your kids won’t have access to it there!
• Encourage your kids to learn to cook. Kids love to eat the meal they help create.
• Make sure you have healthy snacks on hand and ready to eat. If good food is easily available, kids will grab it on the run!

Susan is the narrator of A Year of Being Well: Messages From Families on Living Healthier Lives. To read more about some inspiring families who’ve adopted healthy habits to combat childhood obesity in their own homes, visit www.bewellbook.org, and order or download your free copies of A Year of Being Well. 

Now over 100 years old, Alexandra has a rich legacy. But it’s still haunted by the remnants of apartheid. Built to house 70,000 residents, Alexandra is now home, depending on who’s counting, to an estimate 350,000 to 700,000 residents, 70 per cent of whom are younger than 35. The township has 13 government run primary schools, and one private primary. There’s a rough ratio of 1200 students to each primary school. Today, many parents send their children outside of the community to get a better education.

Transforming South African education: One school in Alexandra; a network of impact schools nationwide

Kgololo’s vision is to provide learners with a transformative university preparatory education within the community. That base, we hope, will then prompt them to transform their lives and their communities. But Kgololo Academy, no matter how great it becomes, can’t serve all the children in Alexandra Township, let alone all the other underserved families and children across South Africa who want better schools.

The fact is that no individual or school can do this work on its own. Kgololo Academy will become a member of a broader network of South African impact schools that seek to prepare learners from economically disenfranchised communities for university. These schools charge low or no-fees, and promote an approach that supposes that all students are capable of learning.

As we develop this network, it’s critical that we become effective as soon as possible, which means building on and learning from the lessons of others. I’m lucky in that I have the opportunity to tap directly into the expertise of KIPP, a network of 125 charter schools in the United States that has a well-documented track record of closing the achievement gap in economically disenfranchised communities.

As a member of the KIPP Global Fellows Program, I’ll be one of a handful of aspiring school principals and school leaders from South Africa, Mexico, Israel, and Chile who will take part in an extensive one year training program to learn how to lead high performing schools in their home countries. In the first six-months, we’ll focus on leadership theory and philosophy, and complete residencies at high-performing schools in the US. Then, in the last six months of the fellowship, we’ll work virtually with a coach. This coaching period will be critically important: We’ll learn by actually leading, making mistakes, and then doing it better the next time. We’ll have the opportunity to share, learn, and unlearn those things which do not serve their students.

Serving the most vulnerable as a matter of course

Last week, as I was preparing to embark on a six month journey that promises to be challenging and life altering, butterflies fluttered in my stomach and insomnia dogged me nightly. But it wasn’t fear that kept me awake; I have a strong base for this work. I was an educator for over seven years, three of them at a top performing charter school in Washington, DC. I have a keen sense of what good teaching looks like, and feel confident modeling best practices for educators at Kgololo Academy. I believe I can achieve my dream of creating a dynamic and academically rigorous learning institution that provides learners with the space to cultivate and live out their ambitions.

What keeps me awake at night is excitement and the knowledge that I’m part of a dream that’s bigger than my own: To design new South African education models and build a vibrant network of high-impact schools that serve the nations’ most vulnerable as a matter of course. I’m ready to begin.

Waahida Tolbert-Mbatha believes that education is one of the keys to breaking the cycle of poverty.  In 2011, Waahida co-founded the Khulula Foundation, which seeks to equip a cadre of change agents from economically disenfranchised communities with the tools to transform their lives and their communities.  Prior to establishing the Khulula Foundation, Waahida worked for seven years as a middle school humanities teacher and as an after school program coordinator in Washington, DC.

Our trash can used to be full of food wrappers and empty soda cans

I live in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago called Little Village. A few years ago, I felt like every time I looked around, I saw more and more obese kids. I saw my friends’ children developing diabetes at a young age. At home, our trash can used to be full of food wrappers and empty soda cans. My kids and I all liked desserts like cookies and cakes.

I needed to make a lot of changes. My father had diabetes. I had high cholesterol. I didn’t want my kids to have those issues.

The kids eat what I buy and serve

Now my house is a “no fry zone,” and I don’t do whites. No white flour or white sugar is used in our house. The kids didn’t like it at first.  But they eat what I buy and serve.  They can’t eat fried foods or sugar if I don’t put them on the table.

What I do put on the table are healthy options. I keep clean fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table so it’s easy to grab. I make a lot of healthy shakes with oatmeal, mangoes, and flaxseed so my kids have a quick, healthy breakfast. I serve whole-grain, high-fiber breads and cereals rather than refined grains. I look for ‘whole grain’ as the first ingredient on the food label and make at least half of our grain servings whole grain.

Healthy habits are formed over time. We learned little by little to cut unhealthy foods out of our diet and to start eating fruits and vegetables and lean meats.  I cut out the sugars and fats I used to eat a lot of.  Now, we’ve basically eliminated fast foods from our diets. I do my shopping for the week at one time so I don’t have to stop by a fast-food restaurant when I’m in a hurry. I’ve got food ready at home no matter when we need it.

Jovita’s tips for fighting childhood obesity

• Make your home a “no fry zone:” Eliminate fried foods from the homemade meals you serve your family.
• Skip the whites: Avoid white flour and white sugar.  Use whole grains and avoid other excess sugars, including juice and sugar-sweetened beverages.
• Make healthy snacking easy: Keep a bowl of clean, fresh fruit on your kitchen table so the easiest snacks to grab are healthy ones.
• Shop ahead: Weekly planning takes time, but it cuts down on unhealthy impulse snacking on junk and fast foods.

In January 2013, Jovita Flores, a longtime advocate for healthy schools and HSC’s manager of Parents United for Healthy Schools/Padres Unidos para Escuelas Saludables, was recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change. Hear more of Jovita’s story.

To read more about Jovita and other families who’ve adopted healthy habits to combat childhood obesity in their own homes, visit www.bewellbook.org, and order or download your free copies of  A Year of Being Well: Messages From Families on Living Healthier Lives.