This site comes from a study, done with Lesley University as a part of my Master’s research project. It started as a project meant simply to point students toward online resources, to help them improve their grades in situations where they did not have certain privileges, such as parents with 40-hour work weeks that could help them with their homework after school, or, barring that, could hire someone else to do so. It looks critically at the resource gap as much as it does at the achievement gap. As I said in my research proposal draft,
“I believe that not enough attention has been placed on helping low-income and minority students achieve equally with their upper income and white peers, as Lisa Delpit’s research shows, instead focusing on very specific skill sets and content for these students, placing them at a disadvantage when being compared (as they are in AP classes and college admissions) with their suburban counterparts.”
The process, which was originally targeting Detroit youth, has in two ways expanded: I have included two students from Detroit, one from Chicago, and one from Boston, all in college-preparatory settings and without the resources to truly showcase their natural talent and abilities; this expansion happened because, as my Detroit contacts failed, I depended on my network of friends and fellow teachers across the nation to help me.
The other expansion happened as I talked with a parent of one of the prospective students from Chicago (he dropped out of it because, as with many youth in his situation and in my study, he had prior work commitments); she noted a serious dearth of quality academic help after school for high-achieving high schoolers. In addition to reading this study, entitled The Achievement Trap by the Jack Kent Cook Foundation, I was inspired – if students needed high-quality after-school programs, and my study was about using online interfaces to connect students with resources, then I could, with my experience with after-school programming and teens, figure out a way to provide that remotely.
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