David Carmel

1993

David Carmel

Jumpstart

http://www.jstart.org/

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Education & Youth Leadership

The Bold Idea:

In the Carnegie Foundation's Starting Points publication, teachers reported 35% of American kindergarten children arrive at school unprepared to learn. These statistics are even more alarming for children from low-income families. A 1993 study showed that about 50% of all poor children start first grade up to two years behind their peers in preschool skills. Since these early inequities in skill persist an increase with time, a child's performance in preschool is directly linked to success later in his or her school career.

Jumpstart is a national organization that recruits and trains achievement-oriented college students to deliver an innovative early learning program via a yearlong mentoring relationship with a three to five-year-old child. Jumpstart provides individual attention to develop a child's language and literacy, social, and initiative skills. Its outcome-based model includes a comprehensive package of training, curriculum, and assessment strategies for both summer and school year programs. As of 2003, Jumpstart is serving 4,500 children in 15 states and 120 early learning centers across the country.

Biography:

Carmel is vice president for business development in the Princeton, N.J., office of StemCyte, a company in Arcadia, California that collects and stores stem cells. He is a founder of Jumpstart, a nonprofit literacy program in Boston. From 2002 to 2003 he was a White House fellow in Washington, working as a health-care-policy assistant to the Treasury secretary. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received an M.B.A. from Stanford.