The regular school day may be over at the Global Technology Preparatory school in New York’s East Harlem, but the students are still hard at work.
In rooms all over the building, kids are learning how to make video games, create and market products, run for political office, and much more, all under the instruction of professionals who are volunteering their time to teach kids real-world skills.
It’s all part of a program called Citizen Schools, which aims to enrich the offerings of urban public schools by extending the school day and bringing in members of the private sector to share their knowledge and expertise.
Citizen Schools apprenticeships weave academic principles into the curriculum and invest them with real-world relevance.
Eighth-graders in the video-game workshop, taught by employees of Intent Media, are riveted to the lines of code on their screens, creating games incorporating images they find online, and in some cases their own original artwork. In an entrepreneurship workshop run by staff from the asset management firm AllianceBernstein, sixth-graders are coming up with hypothetical snack foods and marketing plans. One team has decided to go with individually packaged red velvet cake, calling them Dynamite Cakes. "The slogan is, ''Taste the blast!'" says a boy named Eric.
The Citizen Schools program, founded in 1995 in Boston, brings people from corporations such as Google, Raytheon, Microsoft, Amgen, and many more into 31 middle schools in low-income neighborhoods around the country. There, the professionals teach 10-week apprenticeships that lead up to a final presentation called WOW!, where the students show off the work they have accomplished. In the case of the entrepreneurship group, they’ll be pitching their ideas to a panel of AllianceBernstein staff who will react as potential investors. The kids watched clips from the reality TV show "Shark Tank" to prepare.
The central idea of Citizen Schools is to extend and complement the work that teachers are doing with the kids during the regular school day. Many of the apprenticeships focus on STEM skills – science, technology, engineering, and math. Volunteers from Google have helped kids build computers. Texas Instruments and Apache Corp. have mentored students in building electric cars.
East Harlem’s Global Tech Prep is typical of the schools served by the program. Eighty percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and it is what Citizen Schools defines as a school with high academic need: only 34 percent of its students meet proficiency standards in English, and 49 percent in math. The extended school day keeps middle-schoolers engaged in productive and positive activities during the tough after-school hours, when many kids find themselves at loose ends.
Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.
Citizen Schools apprenticeships weave academic principles into the curriculum and invest them with real-world relevance. Students learn, for instance, that graphing skills can come in quite handy when you’re trying to work out the logistics of a video game. Maybe the Pythagorean theorem isn’t completely pointless, after all.
Apprenticeships meet twice a week. On the other days, students get academic support and guidance from Citizen Schools staff. The program also helps them make decisions about what high schools to attend. As part of the Citizen Schools "8th Grade Academy" program, students visit college campuses and learn about their options for attending and paying for college.
Citizen Schools now serves about 5,000 middle school students each year across eight participating states, and the program documents lasting effects for its participants. Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools in middle school are less likely to be absent from high school, and graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.
Michael Andrew says he knows participating in the program had a positive effect on him. When he was a fourth- and fifth-grader in Boston, he was one of the earliest enrollees. Now, he’s a 24-year-old graduate of Syracuse University who works at AllianceBernstein in information technology. And he’s back with Citizen Schools, this time as a volunteer.
"I was a popular kid, one of those kids who thought he was cool," says Andrew, who says he sometimes played the class clown. "In the program, I didn’t have to be that person. I met a whole new group of friends. Nobody was trying to show off." He admits that he did try to win over a girl he liked by demonstrating his ability to sew in a quilting class. "I made sure my skills were tight so that I could impress," says Andrew. "The pillows I made are still in my parents’ house today." He also built an engine in another apprenticeship that impressed in a different way -- when he fired it up at the WOW! demonstration, it was louder than anybody else's.
Andrew says his time as a Citizen Schools student gave him skills that he has used in all the years since, in school and at work. The program improved his once-shaky public speaking, says Andrew, and built up his leadership potential. "The teachers I worked with were awesome," he remembers.
Now he wants to be one of the teachers that the sixth-graders he’s working with today remember when they grow up. "I want to help inspire young black men and men in general," says Andrew, who is black. "It only takes one teacher to inspire you for life. I want to be able to do that. If I can only do that for one student each semester, it’s well worth it."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/putting-inner-city-students-path-high-paying-jobs-real/5526/
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Transforming Public Housing, Minus the Wrecking Ball
From Baltimore to Los Angeles, Chicago to New Orleans, public housing authorities have demolished low-income housing projects and replaced them with privately built mixed-income developments, often based on New Urbanism’s principles of low-rise, high density neighborhoods arranged along traditional streets and parks.
The thinking is this: economically segregated housing built on architecturally modernist superblocks doesn’t work, so it’s better to start from scratch. Give tenants rent vouchers to move to private market off-site locations, demolish the projects and erect new buildings where some project tenants can return to live among middle-class neighbors.
In New York City, the potential for an alternative model for redeveloping public housing has only fairly recently emerged. In the face of cuts in federal support for operations, the New York City Housing Authority announced plans to lease 14 sites within eight Manhattan projects for the development of privately built mixed-income housing. The sites, currently parking lots and playgrounds, are usually at the projects’ edges and face streets and avenues, leaving the majority of open spaces in the middle of the projects undisturbed.
Approximately 4,300 apartments will be constructed, 80 percent as market-rate units and 20 percent of them reserved as "low-income affordable" housing (in New York City, open to four-person households with annual incomes slightly above $51,000, more than twice the NYCHA average of $23,000). The idea is that such development would generate revenue that will help address NYCHA’s annual $57 to $67 million operating deficit as well as years of backlogged building repairs.
Perspective shows new buildings in blue inserted among existing Lower East Side public housing projects. With up to 22 million square feet of development potential in the area, there is room for a rich mixture of uses, included college campuses and reserarch centers. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
In a city of giant development deals, NYCHA’s plans for just a few of its properties are relatively modest. On the other hand, their implications are profound. If NYCHA were to execute a comprehensive plan for all of its 343 projects, an arc of new neighborhoods covering 2,500 acres could be built across New York. It’s a chance to go beyond developing the occasional parking lot by re-imagining projects and aligning them with New York’s 21st-century future in technology, the arts, research, health care and higher education – not just for the benefit of NYCHA’s bottom line but for the city as a whole.
Recently groups of architects, urban planners and landscape architects enrolled in my studios at the University of Michigan Master of Urban Design Program focused in on this re-imagining New York City’s public housing. Held before NYCHA’s plans were announced, I organized the studios to 1) address through design and programming the near-universal criticism of public housing’s superblock planning and segregation of low-income people; 2) leverage the projects’ development potential toward the benefit of their residents and surrounding communities; 3) identify development opportunities to help address NYCHA’s well-known annual deficit.
Figure ground of Astoria housing projects illustrates potential development sites (red) that define new streets as well as courtyards that preserve open space. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
The students looked at two different neighborhoods with large concentrations of NYCHA projects – the Lower East Side in Manhattan and Astoria in Queens. Their discovery: the projects offer room not only for new, revenue-producing housing but whole neighborhoods featuring schools, work places, retail space, recreation facilities and cultural venues. And because so many project superblocks leave 80 percent and more of their land open, such development can occur without demolition and displacement, preserving the projects as one of New York’s most important sources of low-income housing. (Public housing currently serves more than 400,000 New Yorkers. That’s a population larger than Cleveland as a whole.)
Here are some of the ways Michigan MUD studios re-imagined New York City’s housing projects:
Identify and capitalize on community economic and demographic trends (e.g., in the Lower East Side the growth of nearby New York University and in Astoria the emergence of arts and technology-related businesses both in the neighborhood and nearby Long Island City).
Mix training and workplaces in new buildings so that project and neighborhood residents can enjoy pathways to economic development.
Include primary, secondary and post-secondary schools to help prepare young people for the future.
Open up project superblocks with new streets and public spaces that make new services and amenities visible and accessible to people inside and outside the projects.
Incentivize services and amenities by allowing developers to build taller and more profitably if they include them, just as zoning does elsewhere in the city in support of public benefits.
To address NYCHA tenants’ likely concerns about development, the studios recommend making them part of the "deal" by assuring them the continuance of low-income housing through new subsidies brought by development, giving them priority for new and/or improved apartments, or offering them equity stakes in new development.
They also propose that tenants be engaged in shaping project plans, not just for their input but to make the process a community-capacity building tool, especially for young people who can be introduced to the fields of architecture, urban planning, engineering, construction and real estate development (perhaps for school and college credit). Here’s a way to help grow the city’s next generation of thinkers and builders that should inspire parents in the projects to support the plans.
If coordinated across NYCHA projects, similar plans could create new neighborhoods extending from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Sound View in the Bronx, intersecting with the ongoing redevelopment of areas such as downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and Harlem as well as with new parks, ferry systems and climate-change projects along the waterfronts to help define 21st-century New York. (Citywide coordination of NYCHA properties also opens options for transferring "air rights" between sites to keep development scale appropriate for different projects and their surrounding neighborhoods.)
View of proposed new housing and work places along streets, bikeways and soil channels inserted between NYCHA buildings in Astoria. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
And with such plans, New York’s public housing will be treated differently from the way it has been in the rest of the country. It will be identified as an asset worthy of investment and revitalization rather than a problem to be demolished, as is appropriate for the city that built the nation’s first public housing in 1935.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/05/transforming-public-housing-minus-wrecking-ball/5532/
The thinking is this: economically segregated housing built on architecturally modernist superblocks doesn’t work, so it’s better to start from scratch. Give tenants rent vouchers to move to private market off-site locations, demolish the projects and erect new buildings where some project tenants can return to live among middle-class neighbors.
In New York City, the potential for an alternative model for redeveloping public housing has only fairly recently emerged. In the face of cuts in federal support for operations, the New York City Housing Authority announced plans to lease 14 sites within eight Manhattan projects for the development of privately built mixed-income housing. The sites, currently parking lots and playgrounds, are usually at the projects’ edges and face streets and avenues, leaving the majority of open spaces in the middle of the projects undisturbed.
Approximately 4,300 apartments will be constructed, 80 percent as market-rate units and 20 percent of them reserved as "low-income affordable" housing (in New York City, open to four-person households with annual incomes slightly above $51,000, more than twice the NYCHA average of $23,000). The idea is that such development would generate revenue that will help address NYCHA’s annual $57 to $67 million operating deficit as well as years of backlogged building repairs.
Perspective shows new buildings in blue inserted among existing Lower East Side public housing projects. With up to 22 million square feet of development potential in the area, there is room for a rich mixture of uses, included college campuses and reserarch centers. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
In a city of giant development deals, NYCHA’s plans for just a few of its properties are relatively modest. On the other hand, their implications are profound. If NYCHA were to execute a comprehensive plan for all of its 343 projects, an arc of new neighborhoods covering 2,500 acres could be built across New York. It’s a chance to go beyond developing the occasional parking lot by re-imagining projects and aligning them with New York’s 21st-century future in technology, the arts, research, health care and higher education – not just for the benefit of NYCHA’s bottom line but for the city as a whole.
Recently groups of architects, urban planners and landscape architects enrolled in my studios at the University of Michigan Master of Urban Design Program focused in on this re-imagining New York City’s public housing. Held before NYCHA’s plans were announced, I organized the studios to 1) address through design and programming the near-universal criticism of public housing’s superblock planning and segregation of low-income people; 2) leverage the projects’ development potential toward the benefit of their residents and surrounding communities; 3) identify development opportunities to help address NYCHA’s well-known annual deficit.
Figure ground of Astoria housing projects illustrates potential development sites (red) that define new streets as well as courtyards that preserve open space. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
The students looked at two different neighborhoods with large concentrations of NYCHA projects – the Lower East Side in Manhattan and Astoria in Queens. Their discovery: the projects offer room not only for new, revenue-producing housing but whole neighborhoods featuring schools, work places, retail space, recreation facilities and cultural venues. And because so many project superblocks leave 80 percent and more of their land open, such development can occur without demolition and displacement, preserving the projects as one of New York’s most important sources of low-income housing. (Public housing currently serves more than 400,000 New Yorkers. That’s a population larger than Cleveland as a whole.)
Here are some of the ways Michigan MUD studios re-imagined New York City’s housing projects:
Identify and capitalize on community economic and demographic trends (e.g., in the Lower East Side the growth of nearby New York University and in Astoria the emergence of arts and technology-related businesses both in the neighborhood and nearby Long Island City).
Mix training and workplaces in new buildings so that project and neighborhood residents can enjoy pathways to economic development.
Include primary, secondary and post-secondary schools to help prepare young people for the future.
Open up project superblocks with new streets and public spaces that make new services and amenities visible and accessible to people inside and outside the projects.
Incentivize services and amenities by allowing developers to build taller and more profitably if they include them, just as zoning does elsewhere in the city in support of public benefits.
To address NYCHA tenants’ likely concerns about development, the studios recommend making them part of the "deal" by assuring them the continuance of low-income housing through new subsidies brought by development, giving them priority for new and/or improved apartments, or offering them equity stakes in new development.
They also propose that tenants be engaged in shaping project plans, not just for their input but to make the process a community-capacity building tool, especially for young people who can be introduced to the fields of architecture, urban planning, engineering, construction and real estate development (perhaps for school and college credit). Here’s a way to help grow the city’s next generation of thinkers and builders that should inspire parents in the projects to support the plans.
If coordinated across NYCHA projects, similar plans could create new neighborhoods extending from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Sound View in the Bronx, intersecting with the ongoing redevelopment of areas such as downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and Harlem as well as with new parks, ferry systems and climate-change projects along the waterfronts to help define 21st-century New York. (Citywide coordination of NYCHA properties also opens options for transferring "air rights" between sites to keep development scale appropriate for different projects and their surrounding neighborhoods.)
View of proposed new housing and work places along streets, bikeways and soil channels inserted between NYCHA buildings in Astoria. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
And with such plans, New York’s public housing will be treated differently from the way it has been in the rest of the country. It will be identified as an asset worthy of investment and revitalization rather than a problem to be demolished, as is appropriate for the city that built the nation’s first public housing in 1935.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/05/transforming-public-housing-minus-wrecking-ball/5532/
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Why Your 'Green Lifestyle' Choices Don't Really Matter
That's because energy isn't about your personal choices, and it's not even exactly about the sources we use at a regional or local scale. Energy is systems. And all the green lifestyle changes in the world don't alter the fact that fossil fuels are safely embedded at the center of our global energy system.
Like it or not, what Mann's article shows us is that climate change and environmental sustainability aren't grassroots issues.
In fact, that's exactly what economists told me two years ago, when I was researching Before the Lights Go Out, my book on electricity infrastructure in the United States. Energy is a systemic issue. If you want to change it, you have to start at the level of systems -- not with the downstream effects.
That's why economists think carbon taxes are such an important idea. There are multiple benefits. Taxing carbon means accounting for currently ignored costs of fossil fuels -- in 2009, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that Americans spend $120 billion every year dealing with the health effects of air pollution. Carbon taxes also incentivize and simplify sustainable personal decisions -- instead of doing lots of research to buy just the right green product, all you have to do is buy the thing that's cheaper.
Most important, though, is the effect on infrastructure. We're going after unconventional fossil fuels today because of economic incentives that have made once too-expensive sources of energy appealing. We're willing to develop new technologies and set up whole new industries to get at those fuels. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to the wind, the sun, the waves and other non-fossil fuel based sources of unconventional energy. If we price carbon at what it's really worth, then the forces that Mann shows as working against us can start to work for us.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/05/why-your-green-lifestyle-choices-dont-really-matter/5501/
Like it or not, what Mann's article shows us is that climate change and environmental sustainability aren't grassroots issues.
In fact, that's exactly what economists told me two years ago, when I was researching Before the Lights Go Out, my book on electricity infrastructure in the United States. Energy is a systemic issue. If you want to change it, you have to start at the level of systems -- not with the downstream effects.
That's why economists think carbon taxes are such an important idea. There are multiple benefits. Taxing carbon means accounting for currently ignored costs of fossil fuels -- in 2009, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that Americans spend $120 billion every year dealing with the health effects of air pollution. Carbon taxes also incentivize and simplify sustainable personal decisions -- instead of doing lots of research to buy just the right green product, all you have to do is buy the thing that's cheaper.
Most important, though, is the effect on infrastructure. We're going after unconventional fossil fuels today because of economic incentives that have made once too-expensive sources of energy appealing. We're willing to develop new technologies and set up whole new industries to get at those fuels. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to the wind, the sun, the waves and other non-fossil fuel based sources of unconventional energy. If we price carbon at what it's really worth, then the forces that Mann shows as working against us can start to work for us.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/05/why-your-green-lifestyle-choices-dont-really-matter/5501/
A Gun Giveaway Program, Coming to a City Near You
No doubt the ACP will face stricter opposition still in some of the other target cities they officially announced this weekend at the NRA convention in Houston. They include Baltimore and Detroit, which have two of the highest big-city homicide rates in the nation, and New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent millions advocating for stricter gun policies in New York and nationwide. Even legal loaded guns lead to accidents, opponents point out, and some counter the presence of a gun may actually encourage break-ins: it's valuable loot.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/gun-giveaways-coming-city-near-you/5504/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/gun-giveaways-coming-city-near-you/5504/
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