香蕉秀

Mary Walsh鈥檚 conviction that children鈥檚 lives out of school are essential to their academic achievement led her to found City Connects in 2001, which has become one of the nation鈥檚 leading networks for connecting students in high-needs urban schools with the resources required to thrive. Walsh, the Kearns Chair in Urban Education and Innovative Leadership at the Lynch School, just retired from teaching, but will stay on as the executive director of City Connects and the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, which was recently renamed in her honor thanks to an anonymous $10 million donation.

Nobody can take your education from you. My father told me that his greatest gift in coming to this country was a library card. He and my mother both emigrated from British-occupied Ireland, and both had to leave school after the fourth grade to work on the farm. We lived down the street from Boston College, in one of Boston鈥檚 famous three-deckers. Sometimes, in high school, I鈥檇 walk up the hill to do my homework in Bapst Library, and I鈥檇 imagine I was doing real research. From the beginning, I just loved it.

鈥淎lways live on the hyphen.鈥� That鈥檚 what my mentor in graduate school used to say. He was talking about the hyphen between research and practice鈥攁nd how one feeds the other. I thought about that a lot during my early career, when I interviewed and worked with homeless children across Massachusetts. Their individual stories generated new questions that were much more complex and interesting than any single anxiety or depression test could capture. They gave me an acute awareness of what poverty does to the hearts and minds of children.

We have to make the world better child by child, but we have to do it in a systematic way. When we started City Connects, I knew we鈥檇 need to set up a process if we were going to try to determine and address every child鈥檚 needs and strengths. We also needed evidence to prove that what we did was working. Thanks to the late, legendary 香蕉秀 Professor George Madaus, we developed the best database in the country for anonymously keeping track of students鈥� progress. We learned that kids who鈥檇 had City Connects in elementary school did significantly better on standardized tests through the rest of their education, and their high-school dropout rate decreased by half.

Students鈥� lives outside of school impact their learning. There wasn鈥檛 a lot of interest in children鈥檚 lives beyond the classroom when we launched City Connects. The No Child Left Behind legislation had just passed, and schools had a laser-like focus on achievement and standardized tests. The goal was to fully close the achievement gap for poor students and students of color by 2014. When that didn鈥檛 happen, schools began to realize what the real challenges facing students are.

Opportunity expands our sense of what鈥檚 possible. I think of my father, a factory worker who spent his weekends in the library. He was deeply committed to social justice and was so thrilled to read about Catholic social thought. And I think about schools. Schools are the one place in our society that meet almost every child where they are, especially when they see students as whole people and provide them with opportunities for needed services and enrichment. What we鈥檝e seen, over time, are good life outcomes for kids when you give them the right start.

Every student wants and needs to be known. Our work with City Connects can involve anything from getting eyeglasses for kids to finding shelter for their family, but it also helps teachers in schools with three or four hundred students understand what鈥檚 going on with each individual child. We鈥檝e had teachers who come to us and say, 鈥淣ow I feel like I really know my students, and I can empathize with them.鈥� That makes a big difference.

Teaching is an active process of renewing the mind. I鈥檝e gotten so many ideas and insights through my conversations with my students. Every time I walked into the classroom at the start of the semester, I knew I鈥檇 walk out more informed, with a whole new set of questions. That鈥檚 why it鈥檚 important for people who are doing research to teach and practice, and vice versa: it all fits together.聽