Corporate Contributions to Education - Part I

This Is The First In A Series On Corporate Contributions To Education,
Interviewing Leaders Who Have Changed The Face Of Education In Our Nation

Daniel Rose, CEO, Rose Associates
Focuses on Harlem Educational Activities Fund
by Joan Baum, Ph.D.

So what does a super-dynamic, impassioned, articulate humanitarian from a well known philanthropic family do when he becomes Chairman Emeritus, after having founded and funded a significant venture for educational reform? If he’s Daniel Rose, of Rose Associates, Inc., he’s “bursting with pride” at having a distinguished new team to whom he has passed the torch—Chair Stephen L. Gessner and Vice Chair Fern J. Khan—but he continues to talk about the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, Inc (HEAF) with so much energy and fervor that it’s clear that he’ll be stoking the flame constantly to ensure that it’s always burning bright.

Metaphors naturally describe the activities that intrigue Dan Rose, a visionary who instinctively invokes his own similes and metaphors to describe HEAF, an after-school, weekend and summer program. Noting that it’s the smallest of the rocket models at Cape Kennedy that makes it to the moon, he analogizes that reach to the success of HEAF, a relatively small operation in the world of private and public funding of educational initiatives for disadvantaged minorities. Pause (only a slight one). Dan Rose is overflowing with enthusiasm. His family has always been involved in supporting culture and the arts and HEAF, he says, is his way of continuing this tradition and also of giving back. A Yale man, he expresses a great commitment to public education, noting that the 1937 graduating class of The City College went on to produce three Nobelists—and that at a time when students were largely from immigrant communities, living in tough neighborhoods and finding themselves in overcrowded classrooms. Of course, Rose is a realist: He knows that the areas HEAF serves—Central Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx—are rife with conditions that all too easily breed negative peer pressure, poor self-esteem, and low aspirations and expectations that inevitably produce low achievement. HEAF’s mission is the direct opposite.

To the mother of a HEAF student in his office some years ago, for whom he had just purchased a bonsai, he spoke of the difference between the small tree whose limited growth was conditioned by its narrow root system, and the giant Sequoia, whose reach to the sky was due to its rich and supportive external conditions. He spoke of HEAF providing that kind of environment so that her child would grow to full potential. The son went on to the Bronx H.S. of Science and eventually to the Albert Einstein Medical School where he is completing his residency in pediatrics. Other students recount similar stories on video at HEAF’s website—a Yale sophomore, whose Dominican mother didn’t know about the university, a Columbia Journalism major whom HEAF coaxed out of shyness, and so on.

So what is it that sets HEAF apart? Research and development. Beginning 15 years ago with an experiment to see what truly worked, HEAF wound up concentrating on “being effective at the margin.” First HEAF took under its wing the lowest-ranking public school in the city and five years later moved it from having only 9 percent of its students at grade level to 2/3rds. Then HEAF turned its attention to a minority school with 100 percent at or above grade level but whose students were not successful in getting into the city’s premier public high schools. HEAF tutoring and counseling turned that around, and the school went on to generate the number-one student chess players in the country. Still, with success at both ends, “the sad reality” was that students from the low-scoring school did not continue to achieve after graduation. The other finding was that students from the high-achieving school would have produced successes regardless of HEAF. Thus was born The Margin, the HEAF niche—“the best use of limited resources”—working with motivated children who might not make it without HEAF but who, with HEAF support, most likely would.

“Focus on what you can do” may be a kind of “triage,” but HEAF has proved that raising expectations and therefore performance can be done. Rose is still joyously recovering from a visit he just made with 12 students to visit Federal Judge Robert Katzman in his chambers at the U.S. Federal District Thurgood Marshall Courthouse. The kids tried on the judge’s robes and listened in rapt attention to career possibilities. No one could have been more thrilled, however, than Dan Rose.#

See www.heaf.org.