Homeroom with Sal & David C. Banks - Thursday, September 10

Hi everyone, welcome to our homeroom live stream. Sal here from Khan Academy. Really excited about the conversation we're about to have with David Banks, who is really one of the leading educators in the country, president of the Eagle Academy Foundation.

But before we get into that, I will make my standard announcements. A reminder to everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through philanthropic donations, so if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate, and donations of all size make a difference.

I also want to give a special shout-out to several organizations that have helped us over the last few months, really some of these well before that, many years, longtime supporters. But when they saw that we were already running at a deficit pre-COVID, and that deficit only increased because our costs increased, because obviously our server costs have gone up two to three times normal, we are trying to accelerate a whole series of programs and content.

So special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and many others in helping us close this gap as we are trying to step up in any way we can to get the country, and actually the world, through distance learning and actually get to a place where personalized education and learning—not being bound by time or space—becomes a norm, not an exception.

So with that, I'm really excited to introduce David. Hi David, good to see you. President and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation, good to see you as well, Khan.

David: South South, appreciate it.

Sal: So David, maybe a good place to start is tell us, what is the Eagle Academy, and why have you put so much energy into this?

David: So the Eagle Academy is a network of all-boys public schools in New York City where we work with young men of color from grades six to grade 12. We’ve got a school in every borough in New York City, as well as one in Newark, New Jersey. So as we sit here today, we've got 3,000 young men across our schools and have graduated about 2,000 young men over the years and sent them on to colleges and universities across the country.

We started in collaboration with 100 Black Men in New York, really as a response to the national crisis that we have seen so many of our young men have faced, where they’ve not graduated from high school or are not presenting themselves for opportunities in industry, getting caught up in the criminal justice system—all the things that we hear about on a regular basis.

But there's really been relatively little response to that crisis, and so the Eagle Academy was created really in many ways as a response to giving young men a place where they can hope and dream and reach their full potential.

Sal: And there's at least two really interesting things that might be surprising for some folks that you just mentioned. This isn’t your traditional charter school; these are actual public schools in the New York City public school system, I guess in Newark in one case as well. And then the other surprising thing is you don’t hear a lot about single-sex schools anymore. This is a school for young men at risk. Young men, how first of all, how does the first thing work? How does a branded system of schools within the public school system work, and why did you make that decision? And then why the decision to focus only on young men?

David: Well, many years ago, when Mike Bloomberg was the mayor of New York City, he cast a wide net in terms of trying to get other not-for-profits and organizations to get more involved in the public education system. And in doing so, we became part of the 21st-century education reform effort that was happening in New York, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, where they said, listen, this is a huge system and we need others to get involved.

And so that's when our organization, 100 Black Men, decided to get involved. Over the years, it had become politically incorrect to have single-gender schools. But we leaned into that space, really to say, you know, what is it that causes young men to believe in themselves and to focus on their own potential?

I was the principal of the school; we created it in the Bronx with a group of ninth-grade boys and quickly realized that if we were gonna do this well, we needed to start earlier than the ninth grade. And our model soon after became a grade six through twelve model.

But we were intentional in saying that we wanted it to be traditional public schools because philosophically we really felt as though you can’t charter your way out of this educational arrest. Charters ought to be a big part of the response in education, but over 90 percent of high school kids in America still want regular traditional schools like most of us went to.

And if you can’t move the needle in that space, you’re just playing around on the margins, and so we wanted to be able to lean into that space, and that’s what we’ve done.

Sal: And what does it look like? What's different about an Eagle Academy public school, other than the single-gender focus? What are y’all doing that you think is different, and what have you learned that has been particularly effective?

David: Several things. It's about the culture that you establish that says to young men that we deeply believe in you, and that may seem like something really simple, but it is not. You have to remember that eighty percent of teachers across America are white and female and don’t necessarily have a background in it or training in how to work with boys.

First of all, there are some significant differences between the energy that boys can bring to the classroom and that girls can bring to the classroom broadly. But when you start talking about boys of color, there are some unique challenges that those young men bring to the classroom every day, and there’s a unique energy that they bring.

And very often, the boys find themselves getting disciplined in school or being called out for things that are really not bad behavior; it’s just having teachers having a level of sensitivity and understanding who the boys are, what their backgrounds are, and recognizing that there’s a certain way as adults that we have to show up if we want to get the most out of these young men.

So we engage them in all kinds of professional development and training for our teachers around what does it mean to meet the boys where they are. We’ve got expanded day programming that really is about what are the things that boys are really interested in. We’ve got game rooms. You think about it: the boys love to play video games, but yet in schools, we don’t often utilize the kinds of things that boys are interested in.

We use a one-size-fits-all kind of approach. Boys love to compete, but they don’t like to compete one-on-one. They want to compete my group against your group. So how do you frame a spirit of competition into how you do your day-to-day interactions in school?

But one of the most important things that we do is just about the culture of saying to young men, we see you. We recognize all of the challenges that you face on a daily basis. We have a daily town hall meeting for half an hour before the young men set foot into a classroom. We pour libation, and they get a chance just to reflect on what’s happening in their lives and the trauma that so many of them are feeling each and every day.

That’s not the kind of thing that you can measure in a standardized test, but it’s the kind of thing that says to the young men, we see you, and we’re here for you. And it makes all the difference in the world.

Sal: I can imagine that’s very powerful, and I want to encourage everyone watching to put questions on Facebook and YouTube about really anything regarding education. It could be a single-gender education; it could be this question around public schools, charter schools; it could be how we’re going to do distance learning. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that.

But David, as you’ve gone on this journey, I guess how many—first of all, how many years has it been—and what has been kind of your maybe some of the things you’ve been struggling the most with that you’re still trying to figure out? And then what have been some of the big wins that you’re like, wow, that’s a powerful data point that shows that we’re on the right track?

David: Well, there are a few things, Sal. I would tell you that first of all, I’ve been in education for over 30 years myself, having been a teacher, assistant principal, and founding principal—not only the Eagle Academy but of a wonderful co-ed school in the Bronx as well.

So this is a space that I’ve dedicated my life to. There are a number of things that we have learned in the space for boys, but we’ve also seen very broadly really for boys and girls. Internationally, there have been some studies that have been done around boys, and the biggest thing that emerges is that boys disconnect from school because school is boring.

The connection of what they’re doing in class to what their real interests are—very often are not aligned. Most teachers will tell you that they recognize that, but they struggle with how to make that connection. So intuitively, they know that boys check out easily, but you’ve got to figure out how do you make your lessons more fast-paced, more engaging in order for boys to really stay focused, and they’ve got to be relevant.

You’ve got to be talking about issues that really do make a difference, and that’s where I think we begin to see the overlap between boys and girls. I’m a firm believer after having spent three decades in this space that we’re doing education the wrong way.

What I mean by that, Sal, is that we’ve got to reimagine, we’ve got to recreate how we are doing the educational experience. What I mean by that is that we do a really good job of schooling, but not necessarily such a great job of educating. There’s a difference. There’s the routine of going to school every day, but when you think about the fact that in New York City, if somebody sends me their child at pre-K and I have them all the way through 12th grade, that means I’ve had them for 14 years.

And in New York City, if you had a child for 14 years, taxpayers have spent over $300,000 on each one of those children. So you kind of say, well, what’s our return on investment? You’ve got kids who come out after 12th grade; they can’t tell you the difference between a congressman and a councilman. They don’t know if they wanted to start a business where they would even begin. There are just too many things that we are not aware of.

And one of the things I’m deeply troubled by is the fact that you look at a presidential election; only 56% of age-eligible Americans even vote in a presidential election. That’s a little more than half of our population. Why is that? Why are people so apathetic?

I think that is because we don’t prepare young people through that K-12 experience to be engaged citizens. We hang that slogan up in every school in America, but that’s not actually what we practice. We practice kids getting ready to take standardized exams that don’t necessarily have any real relevance to what their lives really should be about, and that’s what I have seen in that space with boys. I’ve seen it in that space with boys and girls.

If we don’t figure out ways to make their education much more relevant to their day-to-day lives, we will just be doing the routine of going to school every day, but not necessarily preparing young people for what they need to be successful in their future.

Sal: And so as you engage—and arguably a lot of what you’re saying applies to both genders—but as you engage in this way, what are you seeing of your graduates? Are they being more successful in college? Are they just more confident in their lives? What data points have you seen so far?

David: What we have seen is something that sometimes is difficult to measure, right? And so how do you measure grit? How do you measure determination? That’s something that people have really been struggling with.

Every day at Eagle Academy, our young men recite the poem “Invictus.” “Invictus” is the poem of resilience; it was the poem recited by Nelson Mandela every day when he was locked up on Robben Island for 27 years. It was the favorite poem of John Lewis, who just recently passed away. It’s a poem that really talks about when you get knocked down how to get back up.

But we talk about that poem, and we recite that poem across with all 3,000 of our young men each and every day, and that poem really represents what we want from our young men—to know that life is going to hit you and you’re going to get knocked down. But our young men who’ve graduated and gone off to colleges and universities across the country have been able to persevere.

We’ve been able to get our graduation numbers higher than the national average, and we believe that’s because our young men may not come out with the highest test scores, but they come out with something inside of them which talks about how to stay focused—that when the going gets tough, you’ve got to continue to fight and press on, and that your destiny is wonderful and full of potential.

And that’s what the whole Eagle experience has really represented for them, and that’s what we continue to push for. We’re continuing—listen, we’re still very much a work in progress; we’re still learning every day. We’re very much a learning organization, but our young men have been doing our young men have been doing well and doing us proud.

Sal: Yeah, no, I could imagine. And a lot of great questions coming in from social media. From Facebook, Kid Show Ricardi is asking: Are there strategies already in place to educate the parents simultaneously to engage them to nurture their kids and the importance of their role in their kid’s life while educating and nurturing the kids?

David: Huge part of the work that we do at Eagle. One of the reasons why we’ve been as successful as we have been is because we don’t just talk about parents being involved and engaged; we practice that. We let our parents know we are partners in this.

So let me give you one example of something that we do that most schools across America don’t do. We gather our parents for community gatherings with their teachers and principals on Saturday mornings. Now, why is that important?

Because the traditional Wednesday/Thursday night after-work meeting is something that people have been doing all across America. We lament the fact that lots of parents don’t come out and don’t get involved; well, they’ve got other kids, they’ve got two or three jobs—it’s really tough. And that’s because we generally set our schedule of how we want parents to be involved; we set that in a space that benefits school personnel.

It’s good for us to show up on a Wednesday night; we’re already in school, we just stick around for a couple of extra hours. But we had an idea that if we met parents on Saturday mornings, we could get them much more involved, and it has been absolutely amazing the response that we’ve gotten from our parents when they show up on Saturdays.

We’ve encouraged them to take the lead so it’s not just the school principal who has to run those meetings, but the parents themselves are leading the work and the efforts in how you engage the community. It’s a huge part of the DNA of what we do and a real big part of the reason why we’ve been so successful with our young men, because their parents have been running this race side by side with us.

Sal: Now I love that idea. But a lot of the things we’ve already mentioned feel like things that many schools can replicate. These aren’t like completely re-engineering everything; making sure that kids feel supported, believe in themselves. I love “Invictus,” and I love the fact that you all are reciting that or invoking that every day. Having Saturday meetings so it’s much more—it’s much easier for parents to engage. A lot of questions coming in.

Sure from YouTube, Smart Smartbear asks, David, what I guess you already talked a little bit about this: why you started Eagle Academy, but you know, what are your inspirations? I mean, maybe I’ll broaden the question: describe this path. You’ve talked about spending three decades in education. Why did you pick—what were you like in high school and middle school? What brought you down this path? And, you know, at the end of your career, what do you hope you can look back on and say happened?

David: I didn’t go to school initially to become an educator. I started out as an engineering major at Rutgers University, and after a couple of years, I switched to political science with the intention of going to law school, which I ultimately did. I started teaching and having a family, and then went to law school at night—left education, never thinking that I was coming back and worked for the New York City and New York State Department of Law.

But as fate would have it, I was really supposed to be working with young people, and I came back and became a school administrator. And I’ve had a wonderful career and am absolutely living my purpose.

Sal: So let me ask you one question on that. So you were a practicing lawyer, and then you somehow went to become a—I mean, what was—I mean, you know, I famously I was a tech guy, hedge fund analyst, started tutoring cousins, Khan Academy. How did you make that transition from being a practicing lawyer to being a school administrator?

David: Well, it was because I really—as a person of faith, right? I just felt my calling was—well as a child, I thought I always wanted to be a lawyer, but as I got older, I realized that my real calling was working with young people. And so I decided to go back into education, and I went back and I got my certification to be a school administrator in one semester by going to three colleges at the same time, which people have found to be somewhat inspiring.

But for me, it was just an example that when you’re very focused on what it is that you’re supposed to be doing in life, you know, they say the universe will conspire for your success, and doors will open if you’re prepared to put in the work, and I was prepared to put in the work.

So for me on a personal level, that’s kind of how I got to be where I’m at, kind of being back in this education space. But I was inspired around this work of Eagle Academy because Columbia University put out a report that said that 75% of the state’s prison population was coming from seven neighborhoods in New York City.

So you think about that sound right? 75%—if you look at the entire state of New York, 75% of the inmates were coming not just from New York City but from seven very specific zip codes in New York City. This is where people of color are, right? Central Harlem, the Lower East Side, Southeast Queens, Bedford-Stuyvesant; it's the communities where Black folks are.

And people knew it. People were writing books about it; they were analyzing data. It was all kinds of research and white papers, but at the end of the day, it seemed like the most you could hope for was a good after-school program for maybe 20 kids. And I said, no, we’ve got to do more than that. That’s the reason why we leaned into creating Eagle Academy—not that Eagle would be the answer as a cure-all, but we certainly wanted it to be a learning space for us, a lab if you will, to figure out, you know, how do we get these boys to believe in themselves?

How do we get them to avoid the lure of joining gangs and being on street corners? And for even boys that don’t get caught up in that, who just never reach their potential, how do we get mentors into the lives of young men?

Recognize that almost 70% of Black boys in America are growing up without a father at home. The hip-hop generation in many ways is a fatherless generation. So boys come of age and they don’t have men to help them navigate the transition from boyhood to manhood, and then when they get it wrong, we blame them as a society.

And so we said we wanted to lean into that space to try to figure out some answers, and that’s just a journey that we have been on. But what we have learned are lessons that we think are good for boys as well as for girls.

So I’ll give you an example: How can a boy dream of becoming an investment banker if he’s never met one, right? You’ve got to open up opportunities to activate the power of possibility for young people. If all you see is a very limited number of things in your own neighborhood or on your block, it’s hard to even dream of doing great things.

So how do you bring an astronaut in so folks get a chance to meet him and help them to demystify what does it take to become an astronaut, or a scientist, or an investment banker, or an architect, or a politician? These things don’t just happen; you’ve got to be exposed. And that’s one of the things we recognize with so many young people, particularly young people of color, who are not getting exposed to the possibilities.

And that’s where I think we have great opportunity now. Even in spite of this COVID pandemic, what it has thrust us into is a space where technology can actually be the space that closes the gap on so many of those opportunities, where you can use technology, where you can show young people what does it mean to work at a Wall Street finance firm or a midtown law firm?

You don’t necessarily even have to always take the trip there, but you can be exposed inside the walls and meet with those kinds of career professionals just like we’re doing right now. And young people are already—and I think, thank goodness so many of our adults—because we’ve been zooming every day—have gotten much more comfortable in this space.

Think about this as well, Sal, and the implications in our classrooms: If you have a school that doesn’t have a good math teacher, now the school—the kids are not getting good math results. Well, why should we be limited by simply that math teacher that’s right in front of us every day?

Why can’t you take the best math teacher that you can find? They may be in Detroit, Michigan, but through technology, why can’t that person teach those kids in Harlem if you have the vision to do that? We now have the tools to close this gap in ways that we never had before, and that’s what I mean when I say thinking out of the box, being much more imaginative around the possibilities of what we can do through the use of technology can help to transform the lives of so many young people.

Sal: And that kind of—you think about obviously the circumstance we’re in with distance learning. I am curious; there’s obviously everyone’s been talking about the pros and cons, mainly cons, of distance learning, but you’re also saying that there are some silver linings and things like this.

How are y’all navigating it, and what do you hope is lasting coming out of this crisis?

David: We’ve got something that we call a virtual village where we have engaged with our young people on a regular basis even throughout this pandemic. We’re getting ready to roll out something now that we’re calling a master class where we’re going to bring in experts from all kinds of areas, but all of our young people will have an opportunity to be exposed to that they would not normally get that exposure in their day-to-day schooling experience.

So think about it: so many young people are interested in sports, they’re interested in music, they’re interested in the music industry, but you get very little exposure to that throughout the normal course of your school day.

But what we’re doing through this master class series is bringing in people who are well-versed in all those areas who can come in and now just share with these young people. All of our young people; you know if you’re interested in getting into the music industry, here are the things that you need to know.

These are the skills that you need to have; that’s why it’s going to be important for you to continue to do your homework and stay very focused in your English and your math classes because you’re going to need these kinds of skills.

What if you want to become an investment banker? Well, first of all, what does that even mean? And so for young people to hear from folks who can demystify that process, that’s the space that we’re touching on now, but we’re getting ready to blow that out in a major way.

Sal: No, that’s incredible, and that completely jells with what a lot of—what we've been saying. You know, a lot of people associate school as a place to learn content standards, and it is that, but it’s also a place for socialization, a place to be inspired, a place to be supported, and that’s not often explicitly stated in standards.

But especially during distance learning, it’s a lifeline for kids to a broader world, so that’s really powerful what you’re doing. A bunch of questions here.

So, Smart Bear, you answered this a little bit: Why only boys? I guess, you know, Smart Bear's question is like, "Why not girls?" Is there kind of a corollary? Are there sister schools that are addressing that? Or just maybe the need—it sounds like you were motivated by some degree of this incarceration issue in a fairly concentrated way, which is disproportionately boys.

Are there other elements? Are there benefits for girl-only schools? Is there something there?

David: Absolutely. In fact, when we opened our doors in 2004 with the very first Eagle Academy in the Bronx, and I was the principal of the school for several years, earlier there had been schools that had already been opened up for girls.

And so our sister schools, in many ways, the Young Women’s Leadership Academies, they opened up about four or five years before we did, and they had already opened up at least three schools. And so in some ways, we balanced the playing field.

So the question was being asked of them, well hey, what about the boys? And so Eagle Academy came as a response. And so Hillary Clinton and Claire McCaskill and other senators at the time put forth legislation that essentially allowed for the proliferation of single-gender schools.

But the caveat there was that if you have a boys' school, there ought to be a girls' school. It doesn’t have to be started by the same organization, but the school district itself ought to be putting in place a similarly situated for one as well as providing for the other as well.

And that’s what we’ve been doing across wherever you see an Eagle Academy; you’ll see a girls' school—may not be run by our organization, but that will also be in place.

Sal: Yeah, no. Time always goes by fast when we’re having an interesting conversation. One last question is, you know, longer term, over the next few years, you know, how do you see yourself scaling? How do you see—is the Eagle Academy a lab that other people will replicate?

Is there at a higher level policy changes that you think we can make to replicate some of the work you’re doing? What do you think is the 5-10 year path to getting more impact?

David: So we are, as an organization, we’re not going to be opening up more schools per se, certainly not more Eagle Academies, because we don’t believe that a brick-and-mortar approach is the way to go.

But really looking at Eagle in many ways as a lab. So there are school districts that want to open up an all-boys school like ours— not an Eagle Academy but something similar—and we have set ourselves up to help to support school districts, for what we call the Eagle Institute.

So the Institute is set up to help to train school districts; we helped Los Angeles open the first all-boys public school in their history called the Boys Academic Leadership Academy. It’s built on the Eagle Academy model.

But I will tell you Sal that the bigger issue is that it’s not single-gender schools. No matter what you do, there are going to be a limited number of single-gender schools. The bigger issue is what have we learned in working with the boys in this single-gender model that will help teachers in co-ed schools who struggle every day with the boys?

And that’s where our work over the next 10 years is really going to be focused on. We’ve already started that in a number of places where we’re training the educators in these school buildings and in these districts, and we’re expanding on that work now across the country to help to teach them the most promising practices around how do you get the most out of the boys who are in your classroom?

Because across America, it’s the boys and it’s the boys of color who are the ones who are at the bottom of all the indicators of success. So if you can lift them through the work and the teachings and the things that we’ve learned, you will by definition be lifting your entire school.

And anyway, I will just leave you with that one of the most important things is about how you engage these young men in relevant education. If the things you’re doing are just about doing the routine of school because we're just supposed to go and do our work, that’s not going to get it done.

Kids have got to be engaged in things that they can see outcomes in their own lives and in their own communities. And it can’t simply just be about we’re preparing kids to take standardized exams, and then if you do standardized exams well, we said it’s a great school.

Kids may not know much about anything in life, but we said it’s a great school because they did well on exams. That won’t get it done in working with the kind of population that we’re talking about. You’ve got to talk about real-world issues and how they can wrap their hearts and their minds and their work around that and develop skills around solving problems in their own communities.

Sal: Well, David, this fascinating conversation. Obviously, we’ve met in many contexts before, but I look forward to seeing how we can help on this journey and learning from all the incredible work that y’all have done and are likely to do in the years ahead. Thank you for joining us.

David: Look forward to it. Thank you so much, Sal.

Sal: Well everyone, thanks again for joining our homeroom live stream. I look forward to seeing y’all. I think we’re gonna go pick up next week, but as you can tell, I live my life hour to hour; I need to look at the schedules a little bit better.

But anyway, stay safe, and keep learning, and I’ll look forward to seeing you all on the next live stream. Thanks, everyone.