For Cambridge Students, A Harvard Summer

(Part I and Part III of this story appeared on May 7 and May 11, 2012.)

Students headed to summer school most likely imagine long days in stuffy classrooms filled with their least favorite academic subjects instead of their favorite summertime activities.

Most students probably do not envision the lush trees and historic red brick buildings of Cambridge. Nor do they expect top teachers culled from schools across the country, creative projects rather than remedial reviews, and other cutting-edge educational methods designed to generate enthusiasm among students.

Yet this is what happens when Harvard resources meet public summer schools.

The University supports two summer programs catered to Cambridge high school students. The first, Crimson Summer Academy, brings approximately 90 high-achieving, economically disadvantaged students from Boston and Cambridge to live in Harvard dorms and take rigorous classes for six weeks each summer. Students pass through a highly selective admission process to win a spot in the three-year CSA program.

Just a few blocks down Broadway, more than 300 high school students prepare for the coming school year at the University-funded Cambridge-Harvard Summer Academy, Cambridge’s sole high school summer school and a joint project of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Teacher Education Program.

CSA and CHSA, both funded by the University President’s Office, have garnered much attention since they were established in 2004 and 2001, respectively. Through these innovative programs, the University and the community help students to excel long after the summer ends.

CLOSING THE GAP

Waking up in his dorm room in Weld from a nap after his morning statistics class, Regal Sealy glanced at his clock to discover that he was an hour and a half late to his expository writing class.

Frantically, Sealy packed his backpack, ran through the Yard, rushed past Annenberg, and slowed as he entered CGIS.

He apologized to his instructor, who told him not to worry.

“It was a little different, the amount of time you [had] between classes,” Sealy says.

Sealy, the child of immigrants from Panama and Barbados, is a senior at the Academy of the Pacific Rim in Boston, and for the past three years he has attended CSA in hopes of becoming the first person in his family to go to college.

CSA students, known as Crimson scholars, spend weekdays in the summer taking classes and participating in activities on Harvard’s campus. The highly selective free program draws many students from Cambridge public schools—many of whom had spent time on the federal Department of Education’s watch list due to poor standardized test scores.

The program accepts about 30 students each year, with an average family income of $28,000, according to CSA Director Maxine Rodburg.

CSA started in 2004 as part of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, which eliminated family contributions for full-year students with incomes less than $40,000 and boosted recruitment of low-income students.

“The programs have evolved with what the needs are and have helped CPS’s efforts to address the achievement gap and inspire students,” says Thomas J. Lucey, Harvard’s director of community relations for Cambridge, speaking about both CSA and CHSA. Rodburg says that CSA aims to expose students to college opportunities and help them prepare to apply.

“It’s not a pipeline to Harvard but a pipeline to increase the opportunity of higher education at highly selective institutions among local students,” Rodburg says.

Since graduating its first class in 2007, CSA has helped nine of its graduates enroll at Harvard. Students have also attended other Ivy League schools and top-tier universities. For the first time, CSA students are headed to the west coast this year: two students will attend Stanford in the fall.

Rodburg takes CSA students on New England college road trips during February and April break.

Sealy says that before going on the trip, his top priority for a college was that it have a city campus. But as soon as he stepped off the bus at Williams College, he fell in love with the rural atmosphere.

“You never know what you’ll miss out on,” says Sealy, who will matriculate at Williams in the fall.

Doreen M. Kelly-Carney ’85, a college counselor for CSA who previously worked as a Harvard admissions officer and a freshman proctor, says the exposure to other schools is one of the key components of CSA. Last summer, she advised Eda Kaceli, a senior at Boston Latin School, to keep Harvard on her wish list.

“I didn’t think I would get into Harvard, but [Kelly-Carney] was very encouraging. That was exactly what I needed to hear,” says Kaceli, who applied to 15 schools. She was admitted to Harvard, which was her first choice, and will enroll in the fall.

Even though many of the students in the program live in Cambridge, some had not visited Harvard’s campus before CSA.

Tobias J. Estime ’13, a first-generation college student, did not consider applying to Harvard until after his third summer at CSA.

“[CSA] helped me direct my focus to colleges and universities, particularly liberal arts,” Estime says. “I thought to myself, well, if I get in, I’ll be excited, but if not I’m applying to nine other schools.”

CSA requires students to take a college preparatory class and teaches them about interviews, essays, and the Common Application.

A major difficulty in creating the program, Rodburg says, was crafting a curriculum that would not overlap with any of the 34 Boston and Cambridge schools from which CSA accepts students.

In the first year of the program, students take a quantitative reasoning course, a writing course, and an elective, and in the following summer, they can choose a science course and other electives. In the third year, students choose their own math and expository writing courses offered through the Harvard Summer School.

“At school, classes were easy enough to go through. CSA was like something else. Quantitative reasoning really gave me trouble. I was like, maybe I’m not as smart as I thought,” Sealy says.

CSA students also meet three times a week before classes with mentors who are Harvard students or CSA graduates.

Mentors continue to help CSA students beyond the summer, including providing weekly homework help.

When applying to colleges, Sealy says he reached out to CSA graduates to ask about their college experiences.

In its early years, CSA benefitted from a grant from Goldman Sachs, which allowed CSA graduates to return to the program to take classes during the summer after their senior year of high school. Although that grant no longer exists, many CSA graduates, including Kaceli and Sealy, wish to return as mentors.

AN INNOVATIVE SUMMER

Instead of a history paper or a biology worksheet, an assignment at CHSA might be a family history narrative or a mock trial about genetics. This project-based learning is supported by teams of teachers, often three or four in one classroom—one veteran educator and several student teachers from Harvard’s Teacher Education Program.

As the official summer school of Cambridge, CHSA primarily serves students who failed classes in the previous school year. Others enroll in the same classes voluntarily to take extra courses for enrichment.

These innovative classes attract teachers across the nation. This summer, teachers will come to CHSA from Los Angeles, Denver, and Philadelphia.

Amanda Dillingham, a teacher at East Boston High School, says that the program is well known in Boston. She will teach at CHSA for a third summer this year.

“I’m tired of being asked, ‘Why do I care? Why do I need to learn this?’ [and being told,] ‘I don’t care. I don’t care,’” Dillingham says. That frustration led her to come up with the mock trial method to teach her summer school students about genetics.

CHSA is directly connected to Cambridge’s public high school as well as its two charter high schools and one Boston school, Cristo Rey, but any student in Cambridge, including those who attend private schools during the year, can apply.

While originally the program was geared toward cramming remedial course content into students’ heads, former co-directors Kyle J. Hartung and Drew M. Echelson decided to revamp the curriculum in 2010 to focus on project-based education. The new approach has received much praise from the school community.

“I want to credit the folks at the academy for taking that feedback and improving it so the students are doing less of the drill and kill and more of the project-based learning,” says Cambridge Superintendent of Schools Jeffrey Young.

Brendan Kells, a teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School who serves as co-principal of CHSA, says that the new method does not attempt the nearly impossible task of teaching a summer school course as if it were a regular class.

“You can’t condense all of U.S. History II in six weeks,” Kells says.

Instead, Kells asks his students to interview their family members of different generations and then write about their relatives’ experiences in the context of the historical events of their generations.

Since working at CHSA, Dillingham has tried to incorporate more project-based learning into her classroom during the school year as well.

CHSA was the brainchild in 2001 of Katherine K. Merseth, who directs the Teacher Education Program at the Ed School, and Paula Evans, the former principal of Cambridge Rindge and Latin.

Teacher Education Program participants have their first student teaching experiences at CHSA, where they work under experienced mentor teachers. The Ed School students gain teaching experience and high school students benefit from the lower student-teacher ratio. Merseth calls it a “win-win.”

The experienced and novice teachers motivate each other. “Working with inspiring educators, there is a certain energy and excitement that renews some of your faith and challenges you to take some risks in the classroom,” Kells says of his shared classroom time with new educators.

Every teaching team leads one course for two hours, then spends another two hours assessing their work.

At the end of CHSA, students present their projects at an exhibition night. Local residents are invited, introducing community members outside of the school system to the summertime collaboration between Cambridge schools and Harvard.

Administrators of CSA and CHSA say they hope their innovative summer schools to be used as models for other cities, and Cantabrigians who spent their summers as Harvard students hope for others to be able to share the enriching experiences.

“I just wish there could be more Crimson Summer Academies. It changed my life,” Sealy says.

—Staff writer Kerry M. Flynn can be reached at kflynn@college.harvard.edu.