Executive Director, Mike Zink, interviewed by City & State NY

If there was one thing you’d like every teacher, educator, public official to know, what would it be?

That it is far better to believe in someone and risk being wrong than to not believe in them and be right. I think that’s true and important both at the individual and the system level.

Educational systems and programs too often fail to recognize people’s immense capacity for growth. That growth can come from people genuinely learning new skills, or it can come from people ending up in a position where they’re able to use the skills they already have that weren’t evident before. The problem is, students are always getting screened out of programs and opportunities based on what they did before, which is a massive barrier for people with lived experience of foster care, whose records often don’t reflect what they’re really capable of.

Restricting students based on past academic performance or conformity to a particular educational or life arc is a pervasive problem for the students we serve, and in general. Federal financial aid policies (including the age limit on ETV and the Return of Title IV funds policy) separate deserving students from funding and can even put people into debt collections. And federal and state financial aid limits on GPA and academic progress mean that students who are struggling with life circumstances that make school harder now have to go through an onerous appeals process to keep their financial aid or leave college altogether. System designers looking to make sure that aid is used properly can often veer into doing harm to the very students they're trying to help. This is a shortcoming not just of implementation, but of philosophy and mindset.

At the Table refuses to turn away students based on their age, GPA, or academic history, and that's different from a lot of orgs in our space. We will probably never have a 90% graduation rate, but our students average a B- every semester and we’re already seeing results that indicate that the graduation rate for our students is much higher than those for college students with foster care experience generally. Among our college graduates are some students who have had really unconventional paths to success - people who came back from academic probation or dismissal, people whose guidance counselors or college advisors were telling them that maybe college wasn’t for them, and in one case a student who actually managed to start college without having officially graduated high school. Those are the stories we want to be able to tell if we are going to be an organization that’s really making a difference around college outcomes as opposed to aligning with a small subset of students that we think is going to do the best.

How about funders -- what are ways philanthropy can make a meaningful difference in this space?

The current system of achievement-gated college support programs comes from a desire to please funders and compete for money. There's such a strong incentive to want to report extremely strong top-end #s ("my program has a 90% graduation rate!") and a lot of orgs feel pressure to exclude the people who are most in need of extra support. 

As a society, I think we need to shift from obsessing over building more stuff for "high-achieving low income students" to thinking about how we can fund durable educational programs and institutions that engage and serve everyone in the community that they're focusing on. Sophisticated funders can make a real difference by making targeted investments in programs that deeply serve their whole community and don’t cherry-pick students with the fewest hurdles to overcome.

Read here for the full interview: https://www.cityandstateny.com/nyn-media/2024/04/providing-educational-support-during-and-after-foster-care/395940/?oref=csny-homepage-noscript-river.