Friday, August 17, 2007

Marc Sternberg, ’91, presented an inspiring commencement address challenging the graduates of the Class of 2007 to continue public service and love what they choose to do. Marc is founder and principal of the Bronx Lab School and holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard. The full text of his speech is below:

Head Master Betts and Trustees, members of the faculty, parents and families, graduates of the Class of 2007, I am honored to be here to celebrate you. How is it that 16 years have passed since I sat where you sit now? … A scrawny Jewish kid fresh off 13 years of Episcopalian day school; basking in the reflected glow of the many medals and awards won by my closest friends; [a young, inquisitive mind wondering who on earth planned graduation in a room without air-conditioning. Note to Board of Trustees – accelerate capital improvement plans for Chapel of the Good Shepherd. It’s still really hot in here.]

Graduates, it’s a great thing you’ve done, and tonight we rejoice in your achievement. Before we get to you, though, let’s first recognize that group of people sitting behind you. Episcopal is blessed with a gifted faculty. Having spent seven years in post-secondary school I still consider my tenth grade Latin class, Catullus and Horace with Ted Mazurek, my all-time favorite. I, like you, learned how to learn from these fine folks. Twenty years later, I’m grateful.

Let’s take a moment to recognize and thank our teachers.

By the way, Coach Dupe threatened a two-mile time trial tomorrow at dawn if I failed to acknowledge teacher excellence. Make good with former cross country coach…check.

When Head Master Betts first invited me to speak at your commencement, she asked that I share my story with you, emphasizing my commitment to public service, how I came to found and be the principal of the Bronx Lab School, a high school almost identical in size to this one in arguably the nation’s most blighted community. I am eager to share this story with you, both because I’m proud of it, and – as Conan O’Brien quipped at my graduate school commencement – it’s a huge rush to stand in front of a thousand people and talk about yourself.

Before I tell my story, though, I have a question for our graduates. It is about how you plan to make tonight worthwhile. I work in a part of the world where seven in ten young people of color don’t make it to a night like this. So I ask: where do you go from here? How will you honor the education you’ve received? What is your path to happiness?

My story is about service, about helping others achieve. But really it is about doing something that is hard, doing something that others before me have failed at, doing something that every day challenges me – and loving it.

I’ve learned a few things since my senior year of high school, and I want to share them. Know what you love to do – and do it. Know that if you are determined to find happiness you are sure to encounter failure along the way. But don’t be surprised by failure, and don’t be discouraged by it either. Understand that failure is a marker on the road to happiness. It’s how you know you’re getting somewhere – and doing something worthwhile.

So how did I get started doing what I do? It was my junior year of college, time to pick a path. As my friends were starting to make choices – law school, med school, jobs in consulting and banking – I was torturing myself. I had been a camp counselor for years – I had done tons of community service. But where did this leave me? I wondered, can you be a professional camp counselor? If so, how could that justify four years of college tuition?

And then I had a breakthrough – I realized I already knew what my strengths were and what made me happy. I was already working with kids – and I was good at it. I was already planning events in my community – and I was good at that too. I thought, why should my career and my passion be mutually exclusive? That’s when I had this idea that I could teach. In the fall of my senior year, I applied to Teach For America and was accepted.

My first year of teaching started with a whimper. I was assigned to teach the eight grade in a middle school in the South Bronx. I rode the subway to school, forty five minutes on the train from Manhattan. My stop was Simpson Street. Each day I walked down stairs to the sound of crack vials crunching beneath my feet. I can’t make this stuff up. This was a rough neighborhood. My classroom? A picture of deprivation. The chalkboard was cracked in half. Paint fell from the ceiling. We literally had no textbooks. My students were in their last year of middle school but were reading at a 4th or 5th grade level. My job? To get them ready for high school.

I can sum up my first year in one word: spitballs. It was chaos. I was flying blind. I was a first-year teacher with no guidance and no clue. My day was like this: I was out the door at 6:45 am, home at 6pm, two bowls of cereal for dinner, two hours of lesson planning, a few minutes of Seinfeld if I was lucky, and back at it the next day. All the while living out of a basement apartment in lower Harlem, with three bedrooms and four roommates.

It wasn’t until just before Thanksgiving that I caught a break. One day after school, two pain-in-the-butt kids showed up in my classroom – two tough kids, kids who were real problems for me, low achievers, poorly motivated, with no real connection to me or to school – or so I thought. They asked me if I knew how to play chess. I invited them back the next day. That night I ran out and bought a chess set, and met the kids the following afternoon. And I started teaching them, teaching them how to play chess. By the end of January, more than half the 8th grade boys in the school – 40 kids, all from low-income African American or Latino families – were showing up in my classroom every day after school to learn how to play chess. I got 50 chess sets from a community group. We formed a chess team. I named the team the Community School 66 Fighting Knights. By April, the kids were beating me. In May, we were the best middle school chess team in the Bronx. In June, we won a citywide rookie-team championship.

My first year of teaching came to an end, and I was hooked. I had discovered what I loved to do. More than a decade later I’m still doing it.

The next fall I applied for grants, raised $150,000, and took my students to Princeton, my alma mater, for a 3-week residential summer program. I was fired up. The Andrew Mellon Foundation was our lead sponsor; our student and their parents were motivated; we got all sorts of great press. And I went to Central Jersey and had the hardest, longest, hottest month of my life. We had kids wetting beds, staff members quitting, students going home because they were homesick – things got ugly. I limped into school in September. But the next summer was better. Much better. A few kids were still homesick, but at least we knew how to handle it. And most of the kids – and staff – had a summer swimming, hiking and learning that they would never forget.

I spent 3 years in the classroom. Needless to say, I learned a lot – certainly more than my students learned from me. I learned to follow my instincts. I learned that at the end of the day textbooks are overrated. For the first time I learned that it was ok to fail as long as I didn’t give up. The hardest three years of my life had been the best. I decided to stay with education. I was right where I belonged.

Several years and two graduate degrees later – I found myself at another crossroads. I was managing the turnaround of half a dozen public schools, but I was working in an office and I felt like I was 1,000 miles away from the classroom. I needed to be closer to the action. As it happens, at the same time, New York City was starting to experiment with big changes in public education. The new city leadership decided to close several large, failing high schools – and to open in their place two dozen new, small high schools, with 400 students each. I organized a team and tried to imagine what the perfect school would look like. That’s how Bronx Lab School was born.

Now let me fast forward. In September 2004, Bronx Lab School launched with 100 students, 7 faculty members, and a 30-year old Baton Rouge-native at the helm. A few months before school opened we learned that instead of having our own building the school would be housed on the Evander Childs High School campus, a sprawling facility that, at its peak, housed 3,200 students. Evander had a reputation as being – quite simply – the worst high school in the country. It was plagued by violence and high drop out rates. We were going to occupy four classrooms and an office on the fourth floor – that was our school. In late June 2004, I was settling into my new office. It happened to be graduation day for the Evander Childs High School Class of 2004. 1,350 students had entered the school as Evander freshman four years earlier. On that day in June, 241 graduated, roughly 19% of the entering class. 19%. 19% of the Episcopal Class of 2007 gets you alphabetically from Aertker to Cashio.

My reaction: shock. Moral indignation. Why had it taken New York this long to deal with such tremendous failure? With 3 months to go before my school was to open, this was a first hand look at what I was up against, a chilling example of what failure produces. But I was determined to do right by my students. 19% wasn’t an option.

I could talk at great length tonight about how Bronx Lab School works, and how terrific I think it is. I could talk about our students – many of whom are first-generation Americans – children of immigrant families from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Eastern Europe; many of whom live in public housing; many of whom who came to Bronx Lab School never having experienced success in the classroom. I could tell you about our small-group counseling and mentoring sessions, and describe the depth of the four-year relationship between students and their advisors. I could tell you about our unique approach to teaching math and science. I could tell you about our focus on college, right from the first year of high school, and the college visits we take, which bring some of my students out of the Bronx for the first time in their lives. I could talk on and on about this little school in the Bronx – but I’m not going to do that tonight.

Tonight I want to talk about taking on a task despite the likelihood of failure and the many who have failed before. I want to talk about realizing a vision even though there was no blueprint to follow, even though the establishment expected me to fail because of my age and because my relative inexperience and because I dramatically underestimated the depth of my students’ poverty. I want to talk about creating a vision and going for it.

My vision? To build a school that takes the high school graduation rate in the Bronx, which is around 35%, and turns that number on its head. To create a place where we all take it personally if our kids don’t succeed. So we went out and recruited students with this message: you’re going to work hard and you’re going to go to college. Fast forward 4 years: my school, now at full capacity with 400 students, is the Bronx. My students represent every zip code in the borough. 70% are from single parent households. 80% will be first-generation college enrollees. 90% of our families live below the federal poverty level. 99% are students of color. And 90% of our rising senior class will graduate in four years.

Now, you can throw yourself into this work at the beginning of your career – but it’s important to remember that the door is never closed to public service. You can do it at any time.

Which brings me to David Zielinski. My junior year at Episcopal, August 1990, I showed up for my first period American History class on the first day of school. Word had gotten around that there was a new teacher at Episcopal – and he was really tall. 18 years later, David Zielinski has been a teacher, an advisor, a coach, and for the last four years the head of the upper school. David has done it all. And he’s still really tall.

Just as you are graduating tonight, so is Mr. Z. Tonight David leaves arguably the finest secondary school in the state to be the founding principal of Baton Rouge Lab, a small, new public high school to be housed on the other side of town – the Istrouma high school campus – that will seek to be for the public school students of Baton Rouge what Episcopal has been for us.

Four years from now, when many of you are graduating from college, David will preside over his first graduating class at Baton Rouge Lab. I can promise you that he’s not doing this because it will be easy. His school is the first of its kind here in Baton Rouge, and let’s just say he’s doing a lot of swimming upstream. Why has he taken on this challenge at this stage of his career? Because he has a passion for public service, an enduring belief that every child deserves a world class education. I can tell you from experience: David needs your support to make this work, and I hope he can count on you just as he has over the last 18 years.

So what does my story tell you? That it’s possible to grow into yourself. That it’s possible to find what you love to do even if there isn’t a model out there for you to follow. That fancy degrees like the one you’re earning tonight shouldn’t be a reason to rule out public service – quite the contrary. That it’s important to wake up every day and love what you do, and that the more daunting the task the greater the love.

Tonight I want you to consider what it means to pursue a calling. My journey has led me from Woodland Ridge Blvd to the Bronx. I found my calling in a broken down classroom in the hands of some of the most remarkable middle schoolers you’d ever want to meet. Who knows where you’ll find your calling? Who knows who will be there to show you the way? Who knows what adventures await, what remarkable opportunities you too will have to fall flat on your face and get back up again?

I’m going to go now. I’ve got school on Monday, and I’m sure something will happen that will disappoint me, and something will happen that will delight me. What’s most important is that I cannot wait for Monday, whatever it may bring.

Thank you for the privilege of being here tonight and congratulations.