When President Barack Obama spoke at the Ohio State Commencement Exercises on May 5, he mentioned the education nonprofit Blue Engine in the same breath as the Peace Corps and Teach For America. I had to find out what Blue Engine was.
It’s a startup that recruits recent college graduates, just like Teach For America does, and places them in classrooms in poor schools. But it’s a little different from Teach For America in that Blue Engine brings these new grads into targeted schools as teaching assistants, not full-fledged teachers. They call them BETAs, which stands for Blue Engine Teaching Assistants. The BETAs help bring the student:teacher ratio down, in some cases to as low as 6:1 in classes like algebra, geometry, and ninth- and 10th-grade English/language arts, the New York Times reports.
The reason President Obama mentioned it is that the program has a successful record in the small number of classrooms and schools in which it has operated so far. After only one year of the Blue Engine program, the number of students who satisfied the “college ready” standard last year on the New York State Regents Exam was 140 in the three schools, up from 49 the year before, representing an increase of about 285 percent.
BETAs also make extensive use of student tracking data to provide rapid feedback to students having trouble with certain problems, but a 6:1 ratio can often do the trick. It gives students time for instruction in “social cognition” classes every week, where they learn skills that can help them tap every ounce of potential. These skills include using the difference between a “growth” and “fixed” mind set. Although we used to think praise always increases a child’s self-esteem, some praise can be detrimental to children’s academic growth because it inhibits them from taking chances when they fear they might not be successful.
Blue Engine’s results so far are mixed: some teachers have trouble working with BETAs—younger teachers are more comfortable with the arrangement than their older peers—and there is still a significant variance between classes. The model, I think, is still in its early stages of development, but it holds promise.
Also, gains in math seem to come more easily than gains in literacy. One hypothesis is that this difference is due to children’s preference for either objective/rational communication styles or subjective/emotional styles. The emotional communicator/learner doesn’t respond as well as the rational communicator to objective data that BETAs may use. Math is, almost by definition, an objective activity, and reading, imagination, writing, and so on, are often the stuff of our emotional communicator side. The heavy use of objective data in providing feedback to students may support learning in math more than literacy, which often involves imagination and storytelling.
But one thing is certain: providing more individual attention to any student, whether the student is an emotional or rational communicator, is going to help that student master class material. The data approach may work better for math than language arts, but having roughly six students in your “small classroom” is going to help those six children with their literacy and creativity at some point.
Very small class sizes also give the BETAs time to challenge individual students. Students don’t get “busy work”—a massive quantity to complete by a deadline. Rather, they are challenged with assignments that meet a certain quality standard. One BETA writes on a blog:
My [low-income, public school] education failed me when I needed it the most, but my determination and support system helped me overcome that obstacle. Not every student has the drive and support to continue in the face of adversity and that is why only 8% of students from low-income backgrounds are actually getting bachelor’s degrees.
Blue Engine prepares students for college with academic skills, but we also help students change their mindsets. Our students learn to welcome challenge (with a little whining) and face it head on. Some students even expect the challenge and feel disrespected if we give them something too easy.
The Blue Engine website says it is currently being used in 44 classrooms. The program has enrolled 39 BETAs and works with 19 teachers for a total of 775 students. The computed average student:teacher ratio is a little more than 13:1, slightly higher than the ideal for the model, but the actual ratio would be lower if any students among the 775 are enrolled in more than one teacher’s classroom, which is a very likely scenario for high school.
Can you see a place for BETAs at your school? One Illinois Teacher of the Year candidate told me a few years back that having an assistant in every classroom would be a very good idea. Well, the cost for 10 BETAs at a school is about $150,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average annual salary of teacher assistants is $23,220; hiring 10 would add up to $232,200 in just salary expenses, so Blue Engine’s efficiency of scale may be playing a role.
