Teachers As Mentors: Models for Promoting Achievement with Disadvantaged and Underrepresented Students by Creating Community

The book describes two similar and successful models of youth mentoring used by two acclaimed urban high schools that have consistently achieved exceptional graduation rates. Providing a detailed description of their methods – based upon extensive observation, and interviews with teachers, students, administrators, and parents – this book makes a major contribution to the debate on how to reduce the achievement gap. Using similar teacher-as-youth mentor and youth advising models, these two inner city schools – Fenway High School in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Kedma School in Jerusalem – have broken the cycle of failure for the student populations they serve―children from underrepresented groups living in poverty in troubled neighborhoods with few resources.

Apart from the potential of these models to narrow the achievement gap, these two schools have a record of creating a school climate that promotes safety, and reduces the incidence of bullying and violence. At the heart of both programs is creating community–between departments and fuctions in the school; and between teachers, staff, students and parents. Everyone in the school system should read this book.

Aram Ayalon has been a professor of secondary education since, 1989 first in the State University of New York College at Potsdam and then in the department of Teacher Education at Central Connecticut State University. He has published and conducted research in the areas of multicultural education, teacher as a mentor, school-university partnership, and action research. In 2008 he was visiting professor in Tel Aviv University where he taught qualitative research and teacher-as mentor courses. He now serves as school board member in the New Britain school district, an urban school district in the greater Hartford, Connecticut area. Born in a Kibbutz in Israel, Dr. Ayalon graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in Animal Science, and after working as a high school science teacher in Tucson, Arizona; graduated with a Ph.D. in curriculum instruction from University of Arizona.

Deborah W. Meier is currently at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, as senior scholar a as well as Board member and director of New Ventures at Mission Hill, director and advisor to Forum for Democracy and Education, and on the Board of The Coalition of Essential Schools.Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and headstart teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. In 1985 she founded Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school in which more than 90% of the entering students went on to college, mostly to 4-year schools. During this period she founded a local Coalition center, which networked approximately fifty small Coalition-style K-12 schools in the city.