Proximate Leadership: The Power of Parents

New Profit’s #InclusiveImpact campaign is a digital dialogue series aimed at expanding on, and creating dialogue around, the concepts that are core to our Inclusive Impact strategy. The phrase “proximity is expertise,” which argues that the people who are most proximate to the problems that we seek to solve have the expertise, knowledge, and talent needed to solve them, is central to this strategy. Here, Alejandro Gibes de Gab, Founder and CEO of Springboard Collaborative, shares the life experiences and deep knowledge of our education system that led to the creation of Springboard Collaborative.

My dad was taken as a political prisoner in the 70s in his native Chile. His crime? Writing and directing Libertad! Libertad!, a play in protest of Pinochet’s dictatorship. (It went over about as well as you would expect.) After years of torture, my father made it out alive. He was luckier than many. Even luckier, he met my mom. My mother is from Puerto Rico, the youngest of 12, and the first in her family to go to college.

Like so many immigrants, my parents came to America at great sacrifice so that their children could have better educational opportunities. Growing up in a home with little money but lots of love, I learned firsthand that parents’ love for their children is indeed the greatest—and most underutilized—natural resource in education.

After graduating from Harvard, I joined Teach for America and became a first-grade teacher in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia. In my students, I saw myself; in their parents, I saw my own. The connection was deeper than even our shared language, culture, and experience of childhood poverty. It was the timeless truth you see in the eyes of any parent: my students’ parents gazed at their children with the same unconditional love, unbridled optimism, and unwavering commitment with which my parents gazed at me. The same eyes with which my sister gazes at my nieces.

As a teacher, I became frustrated that our school system treats low-income parents as liabilities rather than as assets. Why don’t we see in a laid off single mom the very same love, commitment, and potential we so easily recognize in her wealthier counterpart?

Children typically spend 75% of their waking hours outside of the classroom. Amidst school closures, kids are spending 100% of their time outside of school. And yet our education system does shockingly little to capture instructional value from that time.

For more than a century, our society has bet—and bet big—that school improvement could be the solution to the achievement gap. It simply isn’t enough. And the data bears it out: Fourth-grade literacy rates in the U.S. haven’t budged in 25 years—and the achievement gap is widening—despite billions invested in classroom intervention. There’s no going around low-income parents. We must work with them and through them, otherwise educational disparities will widen with every passing day.

I founded Springboard Collaborative to close the literacy gap by bridging the gap between home and school. We coach teachers and low-income parents to help their kids read on grade-level. By training parents and teachers to collaborate, Springboard puts kids on a path that closes the reading achievement gap by fourth grade. In a nation where you can draw a straight line from fourth-grade reading scores to incarceration rates, this changes lives.

To read more about Alejandro and his work with Springboard Collaborative, click here.