PROJECT OPPORTUNITY

A Successful Experiment in Changing Lives and Transforming Schools

A Program That Will Work Today

by Christopher B. Sanford

Introduction and Summary

    After a hiatus of over forty years, I met recently with some graduates of an almost-forgotten educational program in Charlotte NC and rediscovered the extent to which this program had changed its participants.  I am now working with some of those graduates to do a follow-up and compile information on the program's participants, many of whom have kept in close touch with each other over the years.  Here is what I can tell you now:

    In 1964 the Ford Foundation funded an amazing program in a ghetto school in Charlotte, North Carolina.  It was aptly named Project Opportunity.

The program

    The vast majority of students enrolled in the Project did attend a four-year college -- and did well. The program was amazing in the way it changed so many lives and an entire community.  Perhaps even more amazing is that, given the incredible success of the program, it was not immediately extended, expanded, and replicated.  This document is an effort to remedy that fault -- to bring the program's accomplishments before leaders and the public (even at this late date), with the hope that a program like Project Opportunity, retaining its original strengths and applying several additional lessons learned, might be again implemented in underperforming schools.

    What was Project Opportunity? It consisted of a single counselor, placed in a ghetto school, with the mandate to select the most promising seventh graders and to work with them for six years to prepare them for admission to, and success in, four-year colleges.  For six years, a new group of seventh graders would be added annually, and then the Project would wind down for five more years until each group had graduated.  And what did the Project accomplish?

The vast majority of students enrolled in the Project did attend a four-year college -- and did well.  They have had successful careers, some as doctors and lawyers, some in business and social services.

    The remainder graduated from high school and, at the very least, attended a local community college.

    Because the Project maintained an open-door policy  -- with the possibility of a student getting into the Project as late as the eighth or even ninth grade -- many non-Project students, striving to get into the program, changed their attitude toward educational achievement and significantly improved their academic performance.

    Similarly, siblings of Project students also did far better in school than they might otherwise have done. 

    Recent conversations with Project students -- now in their 50s -- reveal that their own attitudes toward education have been passed on to their children, resulting in a broader understanding of the world and a greater appreciation of their own and other cultures.

     In summary, then, the Project influenced actual participants, their schoolmates, their siblings, and (years later) their children.

I.History

    In the early 1960s, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) made a commitment to sponsor an education improvement project, and the Ford Foundation agreed to fund it.  As carried out, the program involved eleven participating colleges and universities across the south, from Virginia to Louisiana. Each participating college made a two-part commitment: to identify and work with a local disadvantaged school, and to offer scholarships to successful graduates of any of the participating schools.  At each location, a board or committee composed of representatives of both the participating college and the local school system hired a counselor and supervised the Project.

    Some months after the Project was initiated -- with counselors already hired by at least several of the participating schools -- SACS hired a project coordinator, who regularly visited all the centers, maintained communication with all the counselors and institutions, and arranged annual conferences where counselors shared ideas and experiences and were offered new ideas and insights.

II.Project Opportunity in Charlotte

    Davidson College agreed to participate in the program and in early 1964 began working with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System to identify a school.  They chose Irwin Junior High School and Second Ward High School, both all-black schools in the poorest part of Charlotte.  (Students finishing ninth grade at Irwin would normally be assigned to several senior high schools depending on geography, but it was agreed that, to maintain the continuity of the Project, all Project students would go on to Second Ward.)

     After I had been with the Project a year or so, I became curious as to the pre-Project prospects of the students I was working with.  Looking at drop-out rates and graduation rates for Irwin and Second Ward, here's what I found for a typical cohort: 

Students entering 7th grade at Irwin250

Completing 9th grade at Irwin 230

Entering 10th grade at 2nd Ward    200

Graduating     100

Beginning post-HS education     10

at a 4-year college 3-4

                      completing BA or BS    1-2

    Historically, then, fewer than 4% of Irwin's 7th graders were likely to enter any post-secondary education, and fewer than 1% would complete college.

    But I didn't know any of this when I started work in the fall of 1964, a few months after completing a tour of duty with the Peace Corps in Bangkok, Thailand.. I knew that I had been hired  to prepare disadvantaged youngsters for college --  but I had been given few guidelines as to how to do this.  One requirement was that we would administer a standardized aptitude test as an instrument for selecting Project participants. 

    Otherwise, I had little to go on beyond my own sense of what preparation young people needed for admission into, and success in, college:  You need to know the three R's.  You need to know something about the world we live in -- history, geography, politics, government -- and western culture -- literature and art and music.  As background for choosing a career, you need to know your community -- stores, businesses, factories, churches.   As disadvantaged blacks, you need to know who you are and how your people got here and what you can do. So what did that mean in terms of setting up a program?  I would find out.

    With input from a board composed of representatives from Davidson College and from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System (including principals James A. Clarke of Irwin and E. E. Waddell of Second Ward), I basically flew by the seat of my pants.  Aside from the guidelines for testing and selecting seventh graders, I was pretty much left on my own to establish procedures for meeting with students, providing individual counseling, interacting with teachers, involving parents, etc.  The total package of "working with" the students to prepare them for college success became multifaceted: 

    Individual and group counseling, to motivate participants toward educational success and to encourage them to think in terms of their own careers and the choices that would lead them to those careers.

   Academic counseling to be sure they enrolled in the courses that would prepare them for college admission. 

    Grouping of Project students for academic classes.

    Home visits and meetings with parents, to be sure parents -- most of whom had not finished high school -- understood and supported the goals their children were being encouraged to set for themselves. 

    Summer school, eventually held on the campus of Davidson College, with students actually living in a college dorm.  (I had not realized at the time how powerful this residential summer-school experience was for the participants.)

    Book discussion groups, originally following the curriculum and methods of the Junior Great Books, and later bringing in other relevant books but employing the same principles of serious discussion of the ideas contained in the books.

    Numerous field trips -- eventually in an activity bus purchased by the Project -- to plays, concerts, sports events, museums, even to factories, professional offices, and churches (including a synagogue, a Quaker meeting, and a Greek Orthodox church).

    The first time, after a month or two on the job, that I saw an interesting cultural activity advertised -- it might have been a play, I don't remember -- I had to learn how to borrow a school-system activity bus (Irwin had none) and how to reserve and pay for tickets.  (For the first year -- remember that this was in the very earliest days of integration -- whenever I inquired about an activity for the group, I felt the need to point out that this was a group of black school-children and to ask for assurance that this would not be a problem.  It never was, and after a while I stopped asking.  And -- in part because the group was always so well mannered -- there never was a problem.)

    I always made sure the kids were prepared for the activity.  I worked up presentations -- all right, "lectures" -- about what it was they were going to see or hear.  (If there was time, and if materials were available, we read or listened to the subject of the performance.  Out of my own pocket I bought a number of LP records to listen to with the kids, so they had some familiarity with the music.)  We talked in great detail about proper manners at plays and concerts (no talking, no getting out of your seat except at intermissions).  We often had debriefings the day after an activity.  (One participant was greatly incensed after one symphony performance: "There were these ladies behind me, and they kept talking all during the music.  They didn't have any manners at all!")

    After a year or more of tediously borrowing a bus, we bought an activity bus out of Project funds.  The school system arranged the purchase for us, even having the bus painted in the school colors of green and white and having "Irwin Junior High School" lettered on the sides.  (A representative from SACS came for a visit shortly thereafter and, after admiring the bus, tactfully suggested that publicity photos be taken only from the back and sides of the bus, not the front -- we had inadvertently bought a Chevrolet bus out of Ford Foundation money.)

    It is interesting -- and vitally important -- to recognize that Project participants initially did not have the same purposes and goals as the Project's leaders and administrators.  Our purpose, of course, was to prepare the youngsters for admission to, and success in, college.  Their purpose was to have a good time by going on field trips and participating in other activities. 

    At the outset, they mostly shared (or would not challenge) the prevailing attitude in the school that it was cool to play hooky, and it was not cool to study or do well on tests or turn in homework.  But because participation in some of the activities was contingent on meeting academic standards, participants (some of them grudgingly at first) began doing their best in school.  The rewards of being a good student now outweighed the rewards of being "cool."

    Within a few months, non-Project students began coming to me to ask how they could participate in all these fun activities.  "Study hard," I told them. "Make good grades, and next year we'll be taking more students into the project."  And a significant number of students began working harder, and some were added into the Project group.  In this way the intellectual attitude of a large part of the school population changed. 

III.Results of the Charlotte Program

    I've been unable to find information about any follow-up being done.  (One Project member (seeking a roster of former Project partipants in order to plan a reunion) inquired of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education; I asked the Ford Foundation and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Project records were all pre-computer-age, probably still existing in cardboard cartons in warehouses somewhere. No current employees have any memory of the Project -- which took place before most of them were born.)  But Project members -- who, during their years together in the Project, developed and have since maintained an intense esprit-de-corps -- are emphatic that they and most of their cohort did in fact go to college, and most graduated.  (They are emphatic also that Project Opportunity changed their lives, leading them to better careers and a broader appreciation of the world around them.) 

    Because there was little or no formal follow-up (or at least no available reports), conclusions must be somewhat subjective.  The effects of the Project are impossible to prove for another reason as well: Around the fifth year of the Project, integration and forced busing in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System resulted in the Project group being scattered among half a dozen schools.  The Project counselor at the time (I had left after four years) had the almost impossible task of trying to maintain some semblance of a program, given that the participants were no longer grouped together even in the same school, let alone in the same academic classes. 

    And it became impossible also to prove whether the positive outcomes for most of the participants were brought about by the Project -- or simply by integration (which was of course intended to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children).  Interestingly, though, several Project participants -- now in their 50s -- are emphatic that their success in integrated schools was due to their experiences in the Project: the intellectual challenges of book discussion groups, the cultural exposure of the field trips, and other positive influences of the Project.  

IV.What effect did Project Opportunity have?

    It is clear, in the light of the above discussion, that exact numbers are impossible.  Here are some estimates:

    Looking primarily at the first cohort, and to a lesser extent at the second and third, the Project had a dramatic effect on most of its participants -- let's conservatively say 25 of the 30 or so in each cohort.  It seems safe to say that at least 50 other non-Project students were positively, if less dramatically, affected.  Anecdotal accounts suggest that siblings of Project members -- perhaps 50 -- were influenced.  And now children of a new generation are being impacted by the changes in their former Project-member parents.

    I would like to suggest, summing all this up, that Project Opportunity powerfully influenced at least 25 of the nominal 30 members in each cohort. And it may be that another 100 students were influenced significantly, if not quite as powerfully.  This would be the expected pay-off for every year such a program operates.

V.Program costs in a school today

    What would it cost to run a comparable program in any low-performing school today?  A budget with a salary for one energetic counselor, and with enough discretionary funding to pay for field trips, books, and other materials. 

VI. Challenges for a 21st Century program

    In some school systems, busing and other measures attempt to create a racially and economically diverse student body.  In such systems it might be difficult to devise selection criteria that would ensure that project participants are truly at risk and in need of the program.  But some current programs have  criteria such as: 1) neither parent has completed college, or 2) participants must be eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program, or 3) participants must be of a racial or ethnic minority. 

    The Durham School System has maintained more of a neighborhood-schools approach, and there are schools which are predominantly disadvantaged. Here it should be easy to pick the most capable of the most disadvantaged. 

    I look forward to a dialogue with anyone who is interested or concerned, with the goal of discovering ways in which the successful principles of Project Opportunity can be applied in the changed environment of the 21st century.

To explore or dialogue further, please contact:

Christopher B. Sanford

5701 Dedmon Court

Durham NC 27713

(919) 484-2795

ChristopherBSanford@msn.com

    One participant, Michael, told me that he had been at first dismayed when he learned that he was to be assigned to a predominantly white school.  "But then I thought about it," he said.  "I knew that we had learned to use our minds -- particularly in the book discusssion groups -- and I knew I wasn't dumb.  I knew I could compete, and I could make it.  And I did."

    As part of a summer series of career-exploration field trips, I called a local architect office -- A. G. Odell -- and asked if I could bring a group for a tour.  He assigned a young black architect to talk with us and show us around and tell us about what architects do and what training they need.  The group was impressed both with the presentation and with the fact that here was a black man in an exciting profession. 

    But they were amazed when I reminded them recently who our guide had been: Harvey Gantt, later mayor of Charlotte and a candidate for US Senate (before his campaign was sabotaged by Jesse Helms).  (Harvey is now a partner in a prominent Charlotte architectural firm.)

    One student in the first cohort completed post-doctoral work in clinical psychology and has been a clinical psychologist for the past thirty years.

    I am probably overstating my own clarity.  Black History hardly existed as a separate discipline at this time.  But our book discussion did read books that dealt with race issues: especially Black Like Me, by John Griffin, about a white man's experiment in disguising himself as a black man to find out what life was like for black people in pre-civil-rights days.

    This may seem to have been an odd choice, but actually wasn't.  Project participants, though disadvantaged, had for the most part been protected by their parents from an awareness of the worst aspects of segregation, and this book was an eye-opener for many of them.

Historically, fewer than 1% of Irwin's 7th graders were likely to complete college.