Episode 37: Lakisha Young on Transforming Education with The Oakland Reach

Nati Rodriguez [1:44] Lakisha, welcome. 

Lakisha Young [1:45] Thank you for having me. 

Nati Rodriguez [1:47] Thank you for being here with us today. So, I’d like to start by just explaining what The Oakland Reach is and its mission.  

Lakisha Young [1:55] We’re a parent-led organization. Our mission is around designing solutions that liberate our communities to pretty much build a life of their own versus one that’s chosen for them – that’s a big deal for us. Our focus on literacy and math proficiency and advancement is really understanding that that’s ground zero for our children to be able to have the kind of lives, jobs, and careers that they want in the future. 

Nati Rodriguez [2:59] Thank you. And where did this idea come from — to create an organization that’s parent-driven, parent-run, and self-agency around designing their life? 

Lakisha Young [3:10] I think the best way to answer that question is to consider that parents have always formed groups. What inspired me to create an organization for lower-income Black and brown communities? Because we see in privileged communities, where folks may have a Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), that is a group of parents who come together and play a critical leadership role in the schools – that’s a very different story when you think about our lower-income communities and the rights of parents are lower income. So, the impetus of this is a couple things: One is, I grew up in San Francisco – I spent my first eight years of life in the housing projects of Sunnydale. Later on, I went to an elite high school, so I had access to a great education. And then later on, I became a mom, so I have three children — one is in college, one’s heading to college, and one’s heading to high school. The combination of my educational journey – understanding how much education is the equalizer – and becoming a mom that’s trying to keep the generations going to college and living a good life – I think those two worlds together naturally put me in a position to want to build an organization for parents of color focused on increasing education outcomes for their kids. 

Nati Rodriguez [4:45] Thank you for sharing your story and your experience prior to Oakland Reach. And you’ve touched on this a little bit – can you share more about the community that is being served by Oakland Reach? 

Lakisha Young [5:00] Well, Oakland Reach is both local and national. Our local work is our Liberator model, which upskills parents and caregivers to be paid literacy and math tutors. That’s how we were speaking on the panel at this year’s National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) conference – that is focused on the Oakland Unified School District. So that’s all of Oakland, pretty much in all the elementary schools in Oakland, and some of the middle schools. We have now been able to take our model and we’re teaching other cities across the country how to replicate that model. We call it the REACH Way Institute, and we launched that in November. We started the institute locally in Oakland, but since then, we’ve taken it on the road and going city to city. We’re meeting with community partners and district leaders to share the model and teach them how to implement it in their city. So that’s been kind of cool to take it to the national level. 

Nati Rodriguez [6:09] That’s great! I want to circle back to the model, but could you share some of the cities that you’re working with now? 

Lakisha Young [6:16] We had a big event in November with about 10 or 11 different organizations – ranging from Providence, Rhode Island to Montgomery, Alabama, Richmond, California, and Greensville, South Carolina. After that big REACH Way Institute, we started working with individual cities, including Indianapolis.  In February and May, we went down to San Diego, and then in August, we’re going down to Denver. So, just a little bit of everything. Yes, north, south, east, west. 

Nati Rodriguez [7:00] And what makes a city or an organization ready for something like this? 

Lakisha Young [7:05] Great question. This model is a collective leadership approach, requiring collaboration between the system – whether a district or charter management organization –and the community partner. And the reason for that is that this particular model, the Liberator model, upscales parents and caregivers to be paid tutors. They become district employees, and tutor during the school day. So, the research shows that to scale and have impact with high dosage tutoring one of the key components is protected, structured time during the school day. So, when you were trying to make a move like that, you have to have your district and community partners at the table together, because if they’re going to agree to do it, you need to have the buy-in from the district to make the changes right at the site levels to incorporate tutoring during the school day. Oakland Unified School District has already done that, and they have what they call like a foundational skills block. That’s a time where kids are able to get those extra, what we call tiered support during that time. So, the teacher is doing some work with liberators and things of that nature, but that’s all during the school day. 

Nati Rodriguez [8:33] Got it. Yes, and I hear one of the challenges is reworking the schedule to allow for tutoring in the master schedule. 

Lakisha Young [8:41] That’s why, in the beginning, like with an institute, you want your leaders at the table. For example, when we were down in San Diego, they had some great conversations about what does this look like around the schedule. Many of these instructional leaders at the districts – they’ve been teachers and principals – understand what’s required from a master schedule perspective. In San Diego, one of the regional superintendents was reviewing our schedule and smiling, recalling, “Oh, I remember when I was doing something like that when I was running my school.” None of this stuff is brand new, but it’s about aligning and prioritizing for our kids who need these supports more now than ever and ensuring these supports are fully integrated into their academic experience. 

Nati Rodriguez [9:40] Yes. The idea of having the parents and community partners in the school district all involved leads to greater success and impact for students.   

Lakisha Young [9:52] The community partners are the parents – those are the folks who have access to the parents. At the smallest partnership level is the district and a community partner that directly supports families – like us. In some cases, we’re doing literacy and math. We started with literacy, but we’ve launched math with the district as well. On the literacy side, we have us, the district, and also what we call a pedagogical partner. The district has a pedagogical partner that does a lot of coaching on the curriculum. The district has its internal literacy coaches, but they will often contract for more capacity with a pedagogical organization that helps to coach and support the tutors as they grow in their craft. That part is key because we had a national research report done by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, and it talks a lot about how tutors’ experience of coaching is key to their growth as Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words (SIPPs) leaders to support kids. 

Nati Rodrigeuz [11:12] Got it. Thank you. Circling back to the tutors—parents and caregivers who are paid and instruct during the school day— how many students are they typically tutoring? Do they tutor their child or other students? What does that look like for them? 

Lakisha Young [11:33] They’re not supposed to have more than six students at a time. That size can vary depending on the school, but it’s recommended to have four, no more than eight. The tutors are in an ideal situation called pull-out, where they are pulling kids out and working with groups throughout the day. They may have a few different groups of kids coming throughout parts of the day in these smaller groups, they may go to the classrooms, pick up those kids, bring them back to their designated area and start doing tier two SIPPS supports with them. 

Nati Rodriguez [12:19] Is this a full-time job or Part-time? Are they doing this every day? 

Lakisha Young [12:27] When we first started partnering with the district, a lot of the tutors were 0.4, which was about 20 hours a week. As we delved into the partnership with them, thought about sustainability and efficacy, a huge part of what we advocated for was to make the roles 0.8. So now they work 30 hours a week and they are eligible for benefits. It becomes like, “this is my job, this is my career.” Because if you’re working super part-time, then you have to get another job things or things of that nature. 

Nati Rodriguez [13:05] And it sounds like another way to support those families.  

Lakisha Young [13:11] I think you asked if they tutor their children. I’m not sure, probably not. Their child may not need to be tutored, or they may be with another liberator – it just depends. We do have tutors who are at the same schools as their kid, but that’s not always the case. 

Nati Rodriguez [14:16] Who’s the ideal candidate? How do they hear about this? How do they become a part of the Liberator model? 

Lakisha Young [14:23] We have both a grassroots approach of recruiting and doing outreach, and then we have a way that we do it with the district. Our grassroots way, which has been a cornerstone to Reach for the past eight years, is going to schools in the mornings where parents drop their kids off, or in the afternoons when they’re picking them up. You will see us in what they call yellow shirts, talking to parents about the crisis. Many of our parents, even though they may be experiencing some challenges around their kids’ reading or math, often feel alone – sometimes you feel like it’s just you – or sometimes you feel like I don’t know what to do, or I’m not getting all the answers or the supports that I need. So, we like to be honest and authentic and acknowledge that we have a crisis in the city and the country. But we also have a solution: we will train you to be a tutor. Sometimes people say, “Oh, this is awesome, but I have a job already.” But oftentimes they may refer someone in their community that they’re connected to the work. Another way we connect with families is through the district’s mass messaging platform. We send these timed messages with the district out to segments of the community. So, it goes out to thousands and thousands of folks, and again, they may say, “Oh, this is a great opportunity for me,” or they may share it with someone else. We have a partnership with the district where we run the recruitment and selection process, and anyone who fully completes an application is guaranteed an interview within a week or two weeks. So, we run a pretty robust and rigorous process. And I think what’s good about that is that when you’re thinking about our community and bringing our communities into – you know – we have a midsize district. It’s a pretty decent size district. For some folks, it can be overwhelming. And so, we want to make sure they have a very early good experience for just interviewing. I schedule my interview, I show up, I’m having this experience, and then if I’m selected, I become a fellow and become a part of the fellowship. We run our fellowship for about six weeks, two nights a week, and they receive a stipend for being in the fellowship. While they’re in the fellowship, they’re doing their onboarding, like their fingerprinting and live scanning. The goal is that by the time they are wrapping up, they are starting to have interviews with the school principal to finalize the hire. But they’re guaranteed a spot if they successfully complete the fellowship and the background checks. 

Nati Rodriguez [17:20] So the final interview process is done at the school site level by the principal? 

 Lakisha Young [17:25] It happens after background checks and all that stuff is done, which is towards the last couple of weeks of the fellowship. The fellowship runs for about six weeks, and they have to formally apply to be an Oakland OUC employee. Sometimes we use ChatGPT to help folks do résumés, and they have to do their live scans and background checks. So, we’re playing a liaison role with them, too. So, while we’re doing the fellowship and the leadership development and pedagogical support, we’re also doing this operational support to track them through to that. The process can take four to five weeks, so it’s typically towards the end of the fellowship where they’re in a position for the principal to have a conversation with them. When they become district employees, that’s their job and there’s no cutoff date unless they decide they don’t want to stay a tutor. But it’s not a short-term setup — that’s not how it’s designed.  

Nati Rodriguez [18:30] That’s fantastic, because I’m sure with more time, students, practice and coaching, they get better.  

Lakisha Young [18:37] That’s the goal – that is the plan. 

Nati Rodriguez [18:39] And what feedback or outcomes have you seen from parents serving as tutors or students that are receiving the tutoring?  

Lakisha Young [18:50] When it comes to our literacy and math Liberators, it’s twofold: I think folks really care about what they’re doing and know it’s changing the life outcomes of this generation. On the flip side, while they are eligible for benefits, their hourly pay is not a lot – it can range between $18 to $19 an hour. And so those are things that we continue to look at and think about – are there creative ways to increase pay, so that this becomes a sustainable job for them living in a high cost of living place like the Bay Area? 

Nati Rodriguez [19:38] How is Oakland Reach funded? 

Lakisha Young [19:42] We are primarily funded by foundations and institutions, with some support from individual donors and a little bit by earned income.  

Nati Rodriguez [19:54] Great. I know The Oakland Reach received a generous gift from Mackenzie Scott a year ago.  I’m curious about the story behind it, and how the funds will be used. And congratulations on receiving that! 

Lakisha Young [20:08] Thanks. It’s interesting because we got this funding before she started Yield Giving, which is when folks were able to apply for the funds. Before you couldn’t apply for funding for Mackenzie – she partnered with Bridge Fan, who had to find you, conduct due diligence without telling you who the donor was. They didn’t guarantee that you were going to get the funding, and so we went through a due diligence, and then about five months later we found out that we received the funding. So that was super exciting. When we were first awarded the funding, because the way Mackenzie funds is that the full amount – 3 million – in our case – is given all at once, rather than as a multi-year grant.  We received this money during the pandemic while building a particular model to serve a lot of our community. As folks started to go in-person, we needed to adapt that model to support the trends of our communities going back into schools.  When you are evolving the DNA of your organization, because we are an organization that met the moment for our communities during the pandemic, that was a two-year experience, that’s a long time, and as our families were going back to in-person, we asked ourselves: how do we keep the secret sauce of what we built with the hub – that was what we were running for two years – to continue to get these literacy gains that we were getting with the hub?  

I share all that background Nati because the first phase of that was really about, who are we going to be now? Prior to the pandemic, we were focusing mostly on policy and advocacy, and we had some policy wins. We were running an advocacy fellowship with our parents and caregivers. But when we built the hub, we 10xed into direct service solutions, and we really liked being in that space, we liked the results that we got, and we liked the influence and control that we had to create the things that we needed for our people. We don’t want to change that – we don’t want to step away from that. And we also understood that we never want our solutions to get ahead of our communities. If our families are going back into schools, how are we adapting and evolving our model to both keep the innovation that we built on the outside while integrating it with the inside, which is how we got to the Liberator model. The hub is where we started hiring literacy peer professionals from our schools, and they got crazy results with our kids given the infrastructure that we set up. So, we were like, could we do this with more folks in our communities – support them to be peer professionals and step into this role? So, I give you that background to say that now that we’ve had some time to go through this metamorphosis of post-pandemic identity, which, as I said, a lot of organizations go through.   

We didn’t talk about this much at NSSA, but the problem that we have in front of us is that we still have so many kids who cannot read and do math at grade level. And the Liberator model—I love that model – it’s doing many positive things at a multi-generational level, and it’s just not enough. We have an outsized number of kids who need deep intervention support with literacy and math. It should be 5% in Oakland; I think it’s about 40%. A huge thing that our hub was built on was bridging technology to our communities – our hub was all virtual.  So, we believe a lot in the ways in which technology can upscale and support learning. Each one of our families had a liaison – someone that was really helping them navigate the hub and get the most out of it. And so, with the Mackenzie dollars, we’re in a position where we’re building a tech platform called inREACH. So, it’s i n lowercase, all caps, REACH. And inREACH is essentially a tech platform that brings the best in class online tutoring providers that we certify – The value is that we match families, we certify the providers, and then we provide a navigator that supports the family. So let me talk about this briefly: how we bring what we “call best in class” is that we’ve built our own in-house certification process. So, for every provider that we demo and spend time with, we run them through a certification and then decide if we want to certify them if they hit the right certification score, and then we invite them to be part of inREACH. So, we’re doing all that work so that our families don’t ever have to say, “If I want to get supplemental support, where do I go? How do I know what’s good for my kid?” So, the parent’s experience looks like this: once you learn about inREACH, which you’ll probably learn about it because we’ll come to your school, and we’ll talk about it; all you got to do is click on a QR code and complete an enrollment form to become an inREACH member. The data you give us allows us to match you to a curated set of providers that’s specifically matched to the needs of your family. Okay, that’s great – that’s fine and dandy. But the value from there is that you’re not, as a parent, immediately going to connect with that provider. Your first step is to schedule a call with your navigator, and your navigator does a couple things with you in that first call. They first help you identify – out of the recommended list – which one you’re going to sign up for, and they support you to sign up. After you sign up, the navigator starts to support you. Our goal is to make sure that our families are successful with supplemental support, not just using them, that’s a different muscle. I can sign you up, but then what happens? So, we’re going to have clearly orchestrated ways in which our navigators support families to make sure that our parents are getting the data that they need around their kids’ progress, that they’re able to give the kind of feedback that they need around the services that they’re receiving. And if the services are great, we’re able to roll that feedback up to the provider. If the services are not good, we want to be able to switch the family to a different provider and get them back on track. So that we’re matching you to exactly what you need, that certification, which is, we’ve done all the grunt work to find the best-in-class folks, and then that navigation support to success is the three key secret sauces of inREACH. And then the tutoring providers run the gamut. Some will be AI tutoring providers; others are live one-on-one. We’ve got a couple of self-guided so when parents are signing up, they will identify the types of tutoring support that they’re comfortable engaging with. So, this is a cool way to expose our families to different types of tutoring, because you’d be surprised what a child is comfortable with in terms of tutoring versus what their parents may be used to and comfortable with. And that’s the interesting AI question.  

Nati Rodriguez [29:01] So, inREACH is outside of the school district, is that what I’m hearing?  

Lakisha Young [29:09] It’s outside the school district, but we have a vision where inREACH is complementary and works as a partner with the district – it allows parents direct access. But when people ask how does it work with the district or not?  So, there’s a part of it that doesn’t work with the district, which is great, because it’s less burden on the district. It’s a lot of work for a district to figure out how to bring edTech providers, how to bring these supplemental supports, get them down to our schools, get everybody using them at a certain fidelity – that’s a lot of work. And we have proof that these providers can go a long way in helping close achievement gaps for our kids. So, we take that lift almost away from the districts by giving it directly to kids and families. The other way that it collaborates with the district is that when you are lower income, and I talk about our Black and brown communities, you are experiencing education from school-to-home. More privileged families experience education from home to school. We need more home to school dynamics because we need families who have the information, the data, and the agency to show up as peers and partners at the school level. And sometimes you have to build that muscle on the outside, so you have better conversations on the inside. So, when people ask the question: how does it intersect or collaborate? Another way that it does that is that a parent who is an inREACH parent is just going to have access to a set of data and information. All these providers are doing assessments with kids. Parents understand how their kid is progressing and what they’re struggling with – they get information that’s agnostic of the system, which allows them to have conversations with the system and their teachers in a different way. And the last thing I’ll add is that 40% number – that’s a heavy burden on everybody. It’s a heavy burden on our systems, schools, teachers, parents, and kids. It’s heavy as a kid to have to be struggling in literacy or math, they hold so much of that. So, another indirect way that inREACH supports and collaborates with the system or a better ecosystem is having kids walk into classrooms who are feeling more confident in their skills – who feel more secure in what they’re learning creates a better school and learning environment for everybody. And what we’re really thinking about is how does inREACH help to build confidence for the whole family around that academic journey that allows them to be a better partner with their child and with the system. So, I know that’s kind of a long answer, but I love it because it’s the thing that keeps on giving. It just hits so many of our challenges, but we’ve also had eight years to study, experience, and build solutions around that. So, getting to this place hits so many areas.  

• • • The Oakland Reach
    • Liberator Model 
    • inREACH
    • SIPPS
    • Literacy 
    • Math