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Fixes

The Power of Student Peer Leaders

An organization is using the influence that teenagers have on their contemporaries to help more students from low-income families gain college admission and student aid.

Moises Urena, 20, a student at the State University of New York at Albany, was trained as a peer leader by PeerForward.Credit...Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Mr. Bornstein is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

Moises Urena is a junior at the State University of New York at Albany majoring in human development. He spends much of his spare time mentoring other students and plans to pursue a career in higher education administration.

Four years ago, his future was far less clear.

He had no plans for college. During his first two years attending high school in New York, he and his mother experienced periods of homelessness, and his home life was full of stress. He skipped class regularly. In his junior year, however, he became serious about his education. “After I became homeless, I realized the only constant in my life had been school and that’s something I should stick to,” he said.

That year, one of Mr. Urena’s teachers suggested he take part in a three-day summer workshop run by an organization now called PeerForward, which helps students from low-income backgrounds plan for success after high school. At the workshop, Mr. Urena would not only learn how to navigate the process for applying to college, but would be trained as a peer leader with three other students from his high school and teams from about 30 other schools. They would learn how to guide fellow seniors to apply for college or plan for postsecondary vocations.

“My teacher told me to try,” Mr. Urena said. “I thought, ‘Why not?’ It actually changed my life.”

Over the three days, with help from counselors, Mr. Urena selected three schools to apply to; SUNY Albany was his first choice. He wrote a personal essay about how the hardships he’d faced had motivated him to graduate from college. He learned how to apply for financial aid. (Students take note: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the Fafsa, for the 2019-2020 school year opened on Monday).

He also gained confidence from “rap sessions” led by youth facilitators. In those sessions, students spoke candidly about their fears, insecurities and family pressures, as well as their achievements. “It was the first time I ever told people my story of being homeless, growing up with just my mom, struggling not having a father,” Mr. Urena said. “I realized that telling my story could help improve the lives of others.”

He also received a crash course in community organizing: how to build relationships and inspire others through the “public narrative” technique; and how to plan and run a campaign — how to set goals, use data to assess progress, and build momentum, for example.

Back at school, he and his team members led campaigns for the senior class and school. “It changed the whole atmosphere in the school and created this bonding,” Mr. Urena said. That year, according to PeerForward’s data, the class’s Fafsa completion rate jumped to 65 percent from 24 percent (not all students are eligible for federal aid), and the college application rate increased to 95 percent, up from 69 percent.

PeerForward began as an initiative of the organization College Summit, one of the groups selected by President Barack Obama to receive a portion of his Nobel Peace Prize winnings. Over two decades, College Summit had shown it could improve college-entry rates among low-income, minority students; its successes influenced many similarly focused organizations and helped inform education policies. Four years ago, College Summit renamed itself PeerForward and changed its program to focus on youth leadership, the core driver of success in College Summit’s work.

Last year, PeerForward trained and supported high school seniors in 100 schools. With each four-member peer team of seniors recruiting four juniors and working closely with an adviser (a teacher in their school), PeerForward’s 25 employees mobilized 900 people last year. In the schools that PeerForward works with, the ratio of students to college guidance counselors is often 500 to 1 or higher. “If the students aren’t doing this, many are not getting college and career counseling at all,” said Raquel Figueroa, the managing director of implementation for PeerForward.

Keith Frome, a co-founder and chief executive of PeerForward, said, “School reform movements and education innovations almost always lack the component of leveraging the power of peer influence.” But, he added, “the peer effect is like putting in a high speed computer chip. Anything you want to do with kids, if you leverage peer influence, it will go faster and better.”

PeerForward asks students to run campaigns to achieve three goals:

  • Increase the number of students in all grades who have a post-graduation plan of some sort and who can see the connection between college graduation and pursuing a desired career. (Students who make this connection are far more likely to pursue college.)

The question, of course, is this: How effective are peer leaders?

In a 2017 study in which PeerForward schools were compared with matched counterparts, researchers found an increase to 35 percent, from 28 percent, in completing Fafsa forms on time. Based on average federal aid packages, that translated to an additional 1,400 students in schools using PeerForward’s approach who received an estimated $13 million in federal aid. “From a research perspective, it’s a very promising model and one that deserves to be rigorously tested,” said Lindsay C. Page, assistant professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh, who oversaw the research. For the next study, she wants to do a random assignment of schools.

Anecdotally, schools using PeerForward’s model, which costs schools $13,500 per year, also report benefits. Eight years ago, the college enrollment rate for Lake Wales High School, in central Florida, was 46 percent. More recently, it has hovered at 80 percent to 85 percent, according to Donna Dunson, the school’s principal. “Now kids come into the school believing that they are heading somewhere,” she said. “And college doesn’t seem so alien for first-generation kids.”

Ms. Dunson is quick to note that the gains come from many efforts, not just the peer leaders. “But it’s critical that students are the ones driving this,” she added. “Then they take the ownership. I know that word is overused, but it fits. If you can create the atmosphere and get out of the way, the kids will take it from there. But you have to set the stage for this to happen.”

Teaching students and educators how to support youth leadership is the core function of PeerForward, Mr. Frome said: “It’s about young people and adults partnering in a deep and equitable way. That has to be learned and taught and coached.”

PeerForward begins its interaction with schools by examining how student leadership resonates with the school’s mission. It then invites schools to identify four rising seniors who teachers believe have the qualities to influence their peers.

Those students attend a summer workshop. When they return to school in the fall, they recruit four juniors. Early in the year, teams meet with a PeerForward coach, and their principal and adviser, to discuss how campaign goals should align with school goals. They assign roles including captain, communications manager, social media manager, data manager, secretary, photographer or videographer, and then start planning campaigns.

PeerForward provides a web-based scoreboard so that teams can track progress, including in Fafsa and college applications by students. PeerForward has a campaign playbook full of ideas for events and activities, broken down into steps. Throughout the year, coaches meet or call with teams and advisers at least once a month, and teams meet with their advisers at least twice a month. There are training camps in the fall and spring to refresh skills.

Students have organized college fairs and job fairs. They bring in school alumni to share college stories. Some have created Fafsa lounges and dances, where the admission ticket is a completed aid form. They have to solve problems and come up with creative incentives. In one school, after parents failed to show up to a Fafsa night, students realized that they needed to provide on-site babysitting. In another school, students persuaded a utility company to offer credits for families that submitted their Fafsa forms by March 1.

After PeerForward began working in two Cincinnati public schools three years ago, Laura Mitchell, the district superintendent, established peer leadership collaboratives in her schools. The student collaboratives are focused not just on college access, but on many areas of concern to students including service learning, career counseling, reducing ninth-grade dropout rates, stopping bullying on social media, embedding more attention to the contributions of African-Americans in the curriculum, promoting leadership opportunities for female students, and advancing a culture of respect for women (a program led by male students). “The young people decide on campaigns they want to drive,” Ms. Mitchell said. “We help them develop a project plan, give them a budget, and pay a stipend for an adult facilitator.”

“When you’re able to tap into young people’s passion, they lean into the experience,” she added. “We want them to be partners — to tell us what they want to see in terms of education.”

“An adult can say to a student, ‘You should go to college’,” Ruby Noboa, a peer leader at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in New York, said. “But if a student says to another student, ‘Knowledge is power. We need higher education so we can overcome our oppression,’ they’re much more likely to listen.”

When problems arise, it’s often because adults have trouble letting students lead, or a principal or adviser is not fully on board. “A big challenge is the belief system,” Ms. Figueroa said. “It’s not in place in a lot of schools that young people can really effect positive change. When you have an adviser or principal who has that belief system, there will be a lot of challenges.”

The idea that schools should do more to build youth leadership seems to be gaining traction. “We’re getting more and more requests to use this methodology for other things, including college persistence,” said Gary Z. Linnen, who went through College Summit’s program as a student and is now PeerForward’s managing director for program, operations and innovation.

“One of the worst lessons that students get from school is that you win by yourself,” Mr. Frome said. “In most aspects of life and work, you win and lose together. Students are not taught to think of everyone’s success — our grade, our school.”

Mr. Linnen added, “What’s most powerful is when someone sees there’s a challenge in their community, and says, ‘It’s not how do I get through this, but how do we get through this.’”

That was the insight that Mr. Urena said changed his life. “Being in PeerForward made me realize that I was a leader,” he said. “I was not in such a happy place before. But I feel very happy now. When I look back on it, the key element for me was finding my passion in helping others and seeing that I can have an impact on others’ lives.”

David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is a co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

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A correction was made on 
Oct. 2, 2018

Because of an editing error, a previous version of this article misspelled the last name of a peer leader at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in New York. It is Noboa, not Nobo.

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