Beating odds, graduating high school and beyond

In East Harlem, a neighborhood where half its residents never graduate high school, The Young Women’s Leadership School (TYWLS) has a graduation rate of 95-100%.

Founded in 1996 as the first school supported by The Women's Leadership Foundation (TLF), TYWLS public school currently serves 425 girls in grades 6-12.

Ann Rubenstein Tisch, a broadcast journalist and founder of TWL Foundation, believes that single-sex education is an important way to address a major crisis of confidence that strikes young adolescent girls.

"It seems to be where the unraveling begins, right out of elementary school," said Tisch.

According to Assistant Principle Drew Higginbotham, 88% of students in the class of 2009 will be first in their families to attend college. According to the school's website, small classes, emphasis on writing, discussion and debate and a dedicated faculty make TWYLS successful.

TWYLS's impressive graduation rate is also a result of the school's focus on college readiness. A full time college counselor meets weekly with students starting in their junior years and the TWL foundation supports student trips to tour colleges and universities.

The 65 young women getting diplomas in June are working to secure post graduation plans. Many of the 12th graders completed CUNY applications earlier this month. Teachers and administration focus the remainder of fall semester on helping students apply to SUNY campuses, liberal arts colleges and Ivy League schools.

While Higginbotham said some stay in East Harlem, three seniors, working side-by-side in the administration office after school, spoke of their excitement about experiencing life beyond their neighborhood.

Senior Shavon Olin applied to schools as far as California. She said she wants to go to college “because I don’t want minimum wage jobs. I want a career and money. Also, it’s the easiest way out of the community I live.”

Are you special?

Last weekend I read an article about a private high school in Colorado that specializes in snowboarding. The tuition is around $30,000 per year and the school provides its students with training to become pro boarders. The first question that pops into my mind is, does the pro snowboarder world have space for the number of students this private Colorado high school trains each year? If not, then what's the point of the school other than to make money and say "dude" a lot? My initial image of the school described in the article is of spoiled, self-righteous teenagers who are out of touch with reality and think that they are, literally, too cool for school. Okay, maybe I have watched "The O.C" or "Laguna Beach" two many times. But I have to ask, whose parents in their right minds would pay $30,000 per year to send their child to a high school with a curriculum that lays out the option for students to spend half of each school day snowboarding?

I must also admit, however, that I could not stop daydreaming about the Colorado snowboarding school; those kids must be having the time of their lives! The school boasts about excellent academics so why not be inspired by the breathtaking scenery and top off strong academics with daily lessons in a sport that you love? And then I started to examine possible benefits of such a school. I snowboard and played soccer then volleyball from K-10th grade. I strongly believe in the power of sports to build character, self-estyeem and humbleness. Most athletes, like actors, take risks to improve their technique and experience physical and emotional vulnerability. Also, being part of a team is a powerful way to experience important life lessons about tolerance, indurance, responsibility, loyalty and relationships. It is possible that just as many or more students snowboarding in Colorado's exclusive terrain will grow to be socially responsible citizens as in any public school. Maybe the students in the article are more enlightened than the average high school-er because the students in the article were not only privileged in terms of dollars spent on their high school education but privileged to go to a school that revolves learning opportunities, time and expertise around what their students love.

Too often I hear people complain, myself included, that their primary education was or is too general. We learn to write; we learn a little about the civil war in 4th, 6th, and 11th grade; we learn a little bit about lots of types of math; we learn a little bit about lots of types of sciences; we sit through several choppy classes on how our government works and every so often we read a good book. Scratching the surface of a subject is not enough to understand our world. Learning about a particluar matter well enough to experience all the ups and downs, ins and outs, failures and triumphs and suprises of doing and spending time and focus is what changes us forever and teaches us about ourselves.

I want to go full circle and return to a word I used in the first sentence of this post, specializes. Why not specialize all schools? Why not teach students to follow through with ideas, thoughtfully approach an issue, and understand what they bring to the table as individuals. Confidence and enjoyment come with knowing a subject well, whether it be cooking potato soup or changing your state laws on carbon emissions. I think most public school systems are so afraid of limiting their students that they risk teaching nothing meaningful. Standards are often one dimensional. We emphasize product and not process; general and not specialized.

If you are a high school student and have a passion, even if it is not a big one, why can't adults help you excel at it and explore its potential? Why, in public schools, can't half a school day be spent in general academics and the other half spent learning about something we are naturally curious about? Maybe more schools should be divided by areas of interest rather than residential districts. If you end up not pursuing the interest beyond high school, at least you will have learned crucial life lessons along the way. Even though the government treats us like a number, we must not forget that we are people with unique interests and inclinations. Why is specializing at an early age only reserved for the rich and eccentric, or technical schools where the academics suffer, what about the rest of us?

As ususal, my post ends with an assignment: if you or someone you know goes to any high school that costs close to $30,000 per year please post a comment about what makes your experience in school so special. I am not going to insult you; as someone who may want to open her own school one day, I am seriously curious about the kind of education and life experience you are receiving.

Ask your parents: my mom was a well-groomed hippy and my dad was a hip nerd

So I have two questions for you. As a kid, my parents and most of my friend's parents were products of the civil rights movement, the feminist era, rock and roll, peace not war and experimenting with drugs and sex; their deepest identity relates to the values of what United States glorifies and labels as hippies of the 1960's. My parents always told me that their parents treated them differently than they treated me while growing up.

It seems to boil down to this:
1) My parents and grandparents had a much harder time understanding one another than my parents and I
2) While my parents would rather have a deep conversation than punish me when I was in touble, their parents would have thought strict punishment is what their children need to keep out of trouble
3) My parents often spoke about real issues and were comfortable letting me know when they didn't know the answer, rather than simply pretending everything is and will be okay
4) Almost nothing was black and white in the house I grew up, while my parents' parents had a firmer grasp on right and wrong for the family
4) My parents usually sociallized with the kids around, while their parents went out a lot on their own
5) Kids' ideas wer almost as important as adults' in the family when I was growing, while children were not allowed to question authority when my parents were kids

Last year I met this man who has a teenage daughter. The man had been a young 1980s punk rock kid who grew up into an adult who still held the same values as a punk rocker: anti-government, loud and fast music, Do-it-yourself attitude, hating hippies, etc.

How do we describe parents today? We need to think about what the world was like when they were teenagers. Most parents of young teenagers were teenagers themselves in the 1990's. What was the world like in 1990s? Globalization was beginning, the Cold War was ending, personal computers were begining to be popular, social issues (like suicide, poverty, AIDS) were hot topics, TV sitcoms like Seinfield, Friends were big, boy bands came into existence, grunge was on MTV and political correctness entered the spotlight. Ask your parents about what they were thinking of during the 1990s.

My two questions for you:
1) Do you think your parents relate better to you than they did with their own parents?
2) Do you know what kinds of people your parents were when they were your age or a little older?

Alpha Kitty, eh?

Hi. So in researching other sites that already exist I found a few. One called "In the Mix," a TV show on PBS that focuses on topics and dialogues brought to the foreground by youth. If you have seen "In the Mix," please let me know what you think of it. Do you think the show speaks from a teen's point of view or an adults point of view? Here's another question for anyone to answer, what do you use to express yourself? Video, internet blogs, myspace, journal, phone, tape recorder...And why?

On another note, I saw this article online (see "Say Hello To Alpha Kitty" below.) The article is about a woman advertising herself before having a company. No one knows what she does! She has 43,000 friends on MySpace and she left her job at Seventeen Magazine to become her own version of queen of the teenage girls. Yet, she has not shown us what her company or website will actually do. She is trying to win fans only bassed on her personality. To me this sounds like a cheap Paris Hilton strategy of being famous because everyone sees her in magazines or at parties. Yet, I am interested in seeing if she will make it big and who her audience will be...teenager girls or business people. Check her out, google "Atoosa Rubenstein," and please tell me what you think. Is she smart and cool or a self-centered businesswoman failing to impress teens? Would you ever market yourself like this, do you think its a good idea?


READ ARTICLE BELOW:

"Say Hello To Alpha Kitty"

In certain mediacentric precincts of Manhattan and Los Angeles, a striking and charismatic young woman named Atoosa Rubenstein moves from handshake to handshake, from meeting with advisers to pitching potential financial backers. In this, Rubenstein resembles a Presidential candidate testing the waters in Iowa. But her campaign is to build the next big multimedia brand around a person. This person happens to be named Atoosa Rubenstein.

She is about to find out if her status within an insular sphere—as a star magazine editor with fashion cred—and more than 43,000 friends on MySpace.com (NWS ) can propel her to something much grander. For this ill-defined opportunity, centering initially on the unbuilt Web site atoosa.com, Rubenstein last year dumped her job as editor-in-chief of Seventeen. "I saw what was coming," she said, referring to the ongoing Web-driven destruction of the teen magazine. "What I want to do is gather my tribe"—yes, Rubenstein actually says things like this—"the ones reading Seventeen, and the ones who were, and grew out of it." This tribe is 13 to 30, female, thoroughly digital, and, in Rubenstein's view, lacking an "alpha kitty" addressing their concerns and sensibility. What she brings is her big-sister, geek-gone-glam persona. She honed this act editing Seventeen and teen title CosmoGIRL, and now shows it in full plumage in her MySpace blog entries, which are a riot of excessive capitalization and estrogenic display. The ultimate shape of Atoosa Inc. is inchoate, but Rubenstein is certain of one thing. "The next Oprah will not be born on TV," she says. "I left to launch my brand."

SHE ALREADY HAS, OF COURSE. Rubenstein's got the high-wattage personality and presence that gets noticed, and she possesses ambition that's impossible to miss. It is not just anyone who gets named editor-in-chief of a major magazine at 26, which is how old Rubenstein was in 1998 when she started CosmoGIRL. "You thought, she had to do it,'" says Hearst Magazines President Cathleen Black, recalling the first meeting in which Rubenstein described that magazine. "It was seeping out of her pores."

These days Rubenstein's parent company is her own Big Momma Productions, which explains the enormous ring that emblazons "big momma" across three fingers, (a gift from her husband, she explains). In a meeting, she says about her audience, without apparent irony: "They are unborn to me, but they're mine." Still, her sense of ownership and her furiously fashionista exterior is often punctured by glimpses of the homespun and deeply idiosyncratic. At a meeting with potential investors she skips PowerPoint in favor of construction paper decorated, grade school project-style, with a crazy-quilt of colored pencil notations. Her first offering may be what she terms her "art project," Psychic Kitty, a series of psychedelicized videos on her MySpace page. They will star her cat Thurston spouting, in Rubenstein's electronically processed voice, brief inspirational tidbits. Rubenstein calls Psychic Kitty "the cat in the family," and she's mum on a debut date: "You know how it is with cats."

You may, like me, find Psychic Kitty so bent as to be half-brilliant. But what I find conceptually neat isn't relevant; the question is how weird the mainstream is willing to get. Of course, well-conceived media brands that assuage the spiritual thirst of American women have an impressive track record. (Ask Oprah.) "I have a dream," says Rubenstein. "I see a family. I see a tribe. At the end of the day, I know how to connect with this audience." Rubenstein says her brand attributes—again, she really does this—are inspiration and motivation, sisterhood, positivity, and activism. Wreathed around that is a certain Atoosa-ness: an ease with the off-the-wall, an acceptance of the mess and dorkiness of existence. Rapt comments on her blog suggest at least some receptivity for this message. We will soon see if the smoke signals she's sending out, in all her inimitable style, can gather a tribe big enough to make a business.

For Jon Fine's blog on media and advertising, go to www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia

Thunderbolt World

I believe in helping youth succeed in carrying out their own ideas and changing our world for the better. We need to learn from and be inspired by each other, not corporate advertising companies. Teenagers have power and know how to express their power but need a new vehicle for their expression. Through a new website I hope to provide a place for youth entrepreneurship, thought-provoking dialogue and idea exchanging between people all over the world, and relevant knowledge that big business and government might not want you to know, but could make the world a better place.

This blog is especially directed towards the sharp minds of youth, ages 12-18, who have a voice and would like to be heard, and people of all ages who believe in the unique potential of this age group. I am creating a website designed to connect innovative teenagers with each other and the world around them.

The site features mini-videos and podcasts starring youth from around the country with something to say or something they have created. Anyone can be in these videos/podcasts. For example, say you have been handcrafting your own shoulder bags or think you write music better than anyone on MTV; write to me and we will try and showcase your work or ideas to your peers. The mini-videos/podcasts can also be about someone who inspires you, something important to you about your friends, family or community, or a topic you would like to express your opinion on- such as what it means to go college, how drugs have affected your life, what has changed in your life since the war, your favorite website to visit, what do you think about product (red) and using global marketing to help people dying of AIDS, or what you think is the worst fashion statement so far in 2007. The site will expand off of these videos and podcasts and provide supplemental knowledge to help further develop the raw and real-to-life content brought to the foreground by today's youth; bringing in special guests and other relevant resources and facts.

What do you think? If you want to get involved on any level, I encourage people of all ages to write me back or give your feedback on anything. If you like the ideas in my blog, pleaseforward this blog to five of your friendsor family and get them involved. I am blogging to get a feel of whether people would dig on this kind of project. Is this a site you would go to after school/work? What would attract you to a site for youth to connect and share? This blog is for youth, mentors, artists, activists, professional people, educators, and elders to post on. Let's connect in a quality dialogue on what matters, what is needed, in our world. Let's support each other's artwork, music, writing, education, technology, talents and personal triumphs. Let's become a thriving community of ideas and creativity!

Power to the people!