The Promise Project
When people ask me why the Goyen Foundation has chosen to focus on supporting students with learning differences, I usually reply that it’s because it’s an equity problem. Simply, students from wealthier families are able to get expensive support (private neuropsychological testing, relentless advocacy, and expensive tutoring ) and students from lower-income families (who are disproportionately Black and Brown) do not have access to these services that are often transformative. When people ask about organizations that are working to ameliorate these inequities, I always tell them about the Promise Project (Promise). In this piece, I’m going to tell you about Promise’s work, and then I’m going to explore what we can learn from it.
Here’s what Promise does:
Promise works with low-income students with learning differences in New York City.
Promise evaluates these students with high-end, comprehensive neuropsychological testing in order to understand the specific nature of the child’s learning differences and identify the services that the child needs at school.
Promise then works with the child’s school to ensure that the appropriate services, interventions, and accommodations are provided to the child.
Meanwhile, Promise helps the child’s family understand their learning challenges and strategies they can use to help at home.
Finally, Promise works with individual schools and teachers to ensure that their instructional and screening practice is aligned with research, so that they are better equipped to identify and support struggling students on their own.
Promise’s model--comprehensive testing with individualized recommendations, relentless follow-through, and general parent and teacher education and training--reflects why supporting students with learning differences in our current system is so hard. It’s not good enough to pull just one lever; you need to simultaneously pull all of them, in an orderly, child-specific sequence.
Comprehensive, private testing without relentless follow-through won’t go anywhere because the schools aren’t required to follow the recommendations generated by the testing. Advocacy without comprehensive testing is also dead on arrival because schools will be able to dismiss it without concrete evidence of learning disability. Likewise, if the teachers and the schools are unequipped to deliver the appropriate interventions, no amount of comprehensive testing and advocacy will arm them with the necessary skills overnight. So, you also need the teacher education portion of Promise’s model.
Promise understands what it takes to get kids the help they need, and they do the necessary, gritty, unglamorous work that it requires. That’s the first reason why I admire Promise so much.
The second reason I admire Promise is more subtle. Promise recognizes that they cannot possibly work with every struggling child in New York City (they currently work with about 250 students per year). They know their current model cannot be scaled, yet they’re unwilling to compromise the quality of their service by simplifying it (as an aside, they’re almost certainly missing out on larger grants and funding opportunities because of this choice).
But in response to this challenge of scalability, Promise has decided to grow its relationship with numerous NYC public schools. They offer training and professional development to learning specialists, teachers, and school leaders. They forge these partnerships on behalf of children they’re working with AND also on behalf of the children they will never work with. Promise treats NYC schools and teachers as allies, not antagonists. These partnerships allow Promise to scale its mission. They also offer the rest of us a model for how to integrate cutting-edge research and current instructional practice. We need more of these partnerships, in New York City and across the country, but in order for them to succeed, they need to be grounded in mutual respect, be responsive to the teacher and school needs, and be grown intentionally.
There are many organizations that are dedicated to transforming and reimagining education, whatever that means. I am skeptical of these organizations, not necessarily because of their vision and values (though sometimes I find those to be out of touch as well), but because they are neglecting children who need help now. They aren’t doing anything to support the teachers who want to learn how to teach reading more effectively now.
Promise is actually doing these things. And in doing them, they are transforming the lives of students with learning differences, they are helping teachers do their jobs more effectively today and tomorrow, and they’re offering schools and other organizations a model for how to bring together instructional practice and research. And I think that’s my final point here--in helping students today, Promise is offering models and insights that we can use tomorrow. Direct service doesn’t just exist in a vacuum; we can choose to learn from it, improve it, and replicate it.
