Nick Ehrmann

2010

Nick Ehrmann

Blue Engine

http://www.blueengine.org

Education & Youth Leadership

The Bold Idea:

Bold Idea: Trains teams of recent college graduates to serve as "high dose" tutors to enable low-income high school students to graduate with the skills they need to succeed in college and career.  

In schools across America, students are sold on the dream of college without acquiring the core academic skills they need to succeed once they get there.  This problem is compounded in low-income communities, where only 15 of every 100 students entering college each year complete bachelor’s degrees.  Because increased academic rigor is the strongest predictor of degree attainment, the challenge must be helping students acquire more advanced academic skills before they arrive on campus in the first place.   

Engine is a one-year urban education fellowship for recent college graduates to connect with small numbers of students in a different way—not as teachers, but as full-time academic tutors.  Our fellowship program centers on small group tutorials, curricular planning, college visits, and family outreach in high-need public high schools.  By concentrating thousands of service hours in classroom settings, Blue Engine seeks to increase the percentage of graduates who develop the habits of mind required to complete two- and four-year college degrees.  

Biography:

Nick Ehrmann is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a Bowen fellow at Princeton University.  His dissertation explores the roots of academic underperformance in Washington D.C., where he taught elementary school with Teach For America from 2000-2002.  In 2002, he launched “I Have a Dream”—Project 312, a partnership that secured over $1M for a ten year youth development program for his fourth-grade students, many of whom are currently struggling to make it in the world of higher education.

Moment of Obligation: What experiences led to the desire to start your own organization?
In the spring of 2006, I accompanied Tim Coleman, one of my former students, on his first overnight college visit.  He was 16 years old--a sophomore in high school--and from the windows of our 15-passenger van, Tim looked out onto an angled world of slate and green unlike anything he’d ever seen.  During an afternoon panel discussion with the Black Student Union, he asked the question that had been tugging at his insides since he arrived:  “how do I make it to a place like this?”  Take challenging classes in high school, they said.  Surround yourself with the right people.  And work as hard as you possibly can.    A few days later back in DC, Tim was informed by his college counselor that his 1.32 GPA would disqualify him from taking advanced coursework as a junior.  Like a doctor delivering bad news, she simply reported facts.  Tim left her office with a mixture of anger and self-loathing:  if I only would have done better….if I only would have pushed myself harder…if only I would have known before what I know now…    Tim’s fleeting moment of obligation —that advanced coursework represents an opportunity for personal growth and long-term college success—inspires our work at Blue Engine.  Thousands of students like Tim enter high school each year with an incomplete awareness of their academic potential and the curricular routes and roles required to push the boundaries of their thinking.  Blue Engine was founded to help those students experience Timothy’s same sense of discovery and translate those aspirations into accelerated academic performance before it’s too late.

Gall to Think Big: What has given you the ability to dream big and take on deeply entrenched social and difficult problems? (Such as experiences, skills, events, etc.)
After graduating from college ten years ago, I have spent my professional life—as teacher, researcher, and social entrepreneur—engaged in the movement to expand educational opportunities for low-income students.  I began working as a fourth-grade teacher with Teach for America in Washington D.C.   During my second year, I founded Project 312, an organization that would provide my students with a 10-year program of tutoring, mentoring, and guaranteed tuition assistance for higher education.  The twin challenges of teaching and leading Project 312 forced me to abandon romantic illusions about urban strife and replace them with a more unvarnished understanding of the forces that were affecting my students’ ability to succeed in the classroom.  Project 312 has provided a foundation for the majority of my former students to enroll in higher education (vocational, 2-year, and 4-year college tracks), but for many, armed with poor academic skills, college completion is a dream that fades by the day.       As a doctoral student in sociology, I sought to build upon these experiences with advanced training in the social sciences.  For three years, I donned pocket protector and glasses and immersed myself in the quantitative analysis of the predictors of academic success in college.  I came up for air in 2006 to augment this “left-brain training” with a three-year ethnographic study that explored the connection between educational expectations and achievement during high school.  Rather than sit behind a computer screen and crunch numbers, I had the opportunity to return to Washington DC to shadow my former students in their classrooms, live with their families, and conduct extensive interviews in the local community.  The resulting study—Yellow Brick Road—directs critical attention on the promise—and pitfalls—of academic interventions designed to help low-income students prepare for success in college. The commitment to ‘dream big’ and take on the problem of college readiness in this country comes from watching my former students crash headlong into environments for which they were underprepared and feeling like despite our best intentions at Project 312 there was little we could have done (from outside the classroom) to prevent this from happening.  Watching the collision of high expectations and poor academic performance in college is like watching in slow-motion the unfolding tragedy of dreams deferred.  High expectations are not enough.  Neither are good intentions.  And until we figure out a way to create critical masses of students in low-income communities prepared for the rigors of college-level coursework, Blue Engine’s own work will continue.

New and Untested: What's innovative about your new idea for social change?
When you hear the word “tutoring,” two scenarios come to mind—volunteers who help individual students catch up in their coursework, and expensive, Kaplan-style services that help high achievers improve their standing in the college admissions game.  Most volunteer programs, however, are haphazardly organized and produce only limited academic gains; and at upwards of $100 an hour, private tutoring is cost-prohibitive for the majority of families.      Blue Engine—a professional tutoring corps of recent college graduates—represents an innovative approach to accelerating academic achievement in high-need public high schools, schools where these kinds of intensive instructional resources are scarce yet the needs extreme.  There is strong evidence that tutoring, when consistently and effectively administered, can result in dramatic gains in academic achievement.  Our approach at Blue Engine builds upon this evidence base with a program of high-dose tutoring that:      > creates critical masses of high achievers in our partner high schools  > extends learning time by making more productive use of regular school hours  > focuses on academic acceleration for all through small group instruction, curricular planning, college visits, and parent outreach

Seeing Possibilities: What are the most important qualities to be a successful social entrepreneur?
A clear vision.  Audacity verging on recklessness.  Getting people to believe in you.  A passion for storytelling.  Some weird combination of overconfidence and a commitment to constant learning.  And recognizing that no matter what challenges we face during the course of a single day that it's a privilege to wake up every morning and call this work.

Which musical artists/albums get you going and keep you inspired?
I love me some old school Fugees.  Counting Crows.  Bruce Hornsby, live.


What books do you recommend (pleasure, work and anything in between)?
Anything Michael Lewis writes.  Also Ian MacEwan and J.M. Coetzee for good, powerful downers.      Five off the top of my head :     > The Mismeasure of Man  > Song of Solomon  > Nonzero  > The Corrections  > Where the Sidewalk End

Which websites do you visit often (work and/or personal)? www.google.com, www.nextbillion.net, www.ted.com

What advice or quote do you keep close to your heart as a social change leader?
Einstein.  "You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created it."    And these days, the incomparable Shel Silverstein:     "When the track is rough and the hill is tough, thinking you can just ain't enough"  -from The Little Blue Engine