We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ashalah Michelle Wright a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ashalah Michelle, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career
What would you change about the education system? How can we prepare kids for a more fulfilling life and career?
Dr. Gloria Bonilla-Santiago wrote, “Despite your problems–too many low-income residents, too much crime–it is possible to help children in your communities break the cycle of poverty. And all it takes is convincing adults to care and believing that poor kids can take an interest in STEM (the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math education)” (U.S.News, 2011).
Additionally, education is a privilege that a lot of us take for granted. In places with a bad economy, lots of kids are forced to work earlier and drop out of school.
One thing that I would change about the education system would be to create a Bully Free Teacher policy. So often, we focus on children/student behavior. Yet, we never discuss poor behavior exhibited by teachers and/or districts. I was personally blessed to be provided with a support system that cultivated my curiosity and imagination. However, there are a countless number of students without the same support systems. By requiring teachers to abide by this policy, students would be free to be themselves and able to continue to dream out loud without having their teachers, some of the most prized adults in their lives, silencing them. Additionally, this would prepare students to explore different avenues they may have been led to believe were once impossible.
Through my love for S.T.E.M and experience working with local community food banks, my creativity was fostered, and I was encouraged to create my own business, me at the tender age of 12 to start my own business called Cook Me Up A Notch: Cakes, Cookies, and other Culinary Creations. I extended my bakery to become a teaching lab, called Bakeology 101, where my family and I created a S.T.E.M curriculum infused with culinary arts principles to introduce more students to S.T.E.M and S.T.E.M careers. I wanted to solve what I felt was a disadvantage in black and brown communities. During the summers and periodically throughout the school year, I am engaged in teaching these STEAM lessons to students in non-profit organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club of America. The children that we serviced within Greater Giving also received these Bakeology 101 classes free of charge at my home or community churches.
More importantly, I utilized my business as a small gift to impoverished communities which serve a high population of underserved black and brown children. During the summer and occasionally while school is in session, I’ve partnered with numerous organizations teaching S.T.E.M. lessons and culinary skills. Wanting so badly to introduce this concept to my middle school within the public school system brought many hurdles. In 2016, many schools had not built out their STEM programs and were behind the grain of many of the thriving districts and home school cohorts. This was why my mother chose to home school my brother and I during some parts of our educational career. We were able to run businesses as we had real-life STEM experience to integrate into our academic learning. Those experiences introduced us to a world unattainable when learning in the traditional public-school setting. Yet once returning to public school within Fulton County, the transition with understanding how to integrate such home school curriculum with what was accepted on district level was a rocky one. In turn I excelled due to the experiences I had had working and thriving in STEM environments.
Yet, the struggle and stressors of matriculating through certain public-school systems with lack of support and efficient resources has gotten me where I am in today, where obtaining funds for college should have been difficult as a high achieving honor’s student and dual-enrollment graduate, has led me to setup a fundraiser to supplement the lost. See here at ( https://gofund.me/10817897 )
With the challenges that I have faced while trying to help other learners achieve with using culinary arts to incorporating S.T.E.A.M career attainment for black and brown youth, below are strategies for using resources to support education system transformation to help young kids have a great career and thus fulfilling life.
Resources must be distributed equitably to support school turnaround: Additional S.T.E.A.M resources should be distributed to students with the greatest needs. When thinking about equitable distribution of resources, it is important to understand that equitable does not mean equal.
To distribute resources equitably, leaders must collect and analyze school level data beyond per-pupil funding — such as teacher experience levels, teacher turnover rates, as well as student data on demographics, poverty rates, and achievement levels. Using these data, leaders can identify inequities in current resource distribution as well as student achievement gaps. Once these gaps have been identified, leaders can determine how to intentionally allocate staff and other necessary resources either by school-level needs or based on specific performance gaps. (e.g., for specific student groups) to support education system turnaround priorities. We need to equitable support for our qualified teachers to maintain this balance for student equality in education.
Resources should be defined to include more than just funding: Resources include a range of elements beyond just funding, such as staff talent and expertise, staff time, student learning time, and outside services offered by community partners such as my Bakeology 101 program.
Effective resource allocation strategies should consider the quality and variety of existing investments in people and programs — not just the per-pupil quantity of investments — and align those resources with turnaround priorities for a better education system.
Resource priorities should be established through meaningful stakeholder input, and should be tied to goals for improving student performance: Regular reviews of resource allocation data should be conducted to determine the greatest areas of impact and where to make adjustments. When planning education system turnaround efforts, planning teams should be developed with diverse representation of state leaders, including members from fiscal services, and loads of community input from parents, teachers, and students alike.
Stakeholder engagement is an important opportunity to gather feedback and perspectives from multiple stakeholders — teachers, parents, students, community-based partners, and local businesses, for example — about what is working and what is not. Input from these stakeholders provides data beyond test scores to help identify some of the more nuanced challenges and causes of poor school performance.
Stakeholder engagement should also include collaboration with union groups, who, if meaningfully included in resource-allocation decisions, can also help garner critical educator support for implementing improvement efforts.
To maximize available resources, the practices of blending funding sources should be utilized when possible: Rather than thinking about resource allocation as a series of disconnected, individual investments, state and community leaders should consider how resources can interact and strengthen one another to support turnaround efforts. For decades, a lack of flexibility in resource allocation prevented states and local education agencies from optimizing efficient and effective spending practices. With the authorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), as well as recent transitions in state allocation policies, many states and LEAs now have greater flexibility in how to utilize once prescriptive and restricted funds. To optimize the use of available funds, states and LEAs can blend resources to consolidate, coordinate, or combine funding streams, even when funds have specific requirements or restrictions. This offers states a valuable opportunity to maximize existing funding to support a broader and more coherent set of school ecosystem turnaround strategies across a wider domain. To sustain and maximize the effectiveness of education system turnaround efforts once they have been launched, leaders should adopt a system wide continuous improvement approach.
Resource Strategies to Support Turnaround Leadership: Leadership must develop and execute data-informed turnaround plans that are customized to local needs to guide and monitor turnaround initiatives and communicate the urgent need for turnaround.
Through structured cycles of data review, leaders can assess the effectiveness of adopted programs and, using a continuous improvement approach, make necessary adjustments to how resources are allocated to maximize effectiveness.
Leaders are central to efforts to communicate about school turnaround, including communicating the rationale for grounding resource allocation decisions for education turnaround through equitably distributing resources; considering resources beyond just funding in resource decisions; establishing resource priorities based on stakeholder input and aligned to student need; and blending, braiding, and layering funds to maximize available resources.
Resource Strategies to Support Talent Development: To develop high-quality staff, districts must prioritize professional learning and must ensure that professional learning efforts are effective.
Research underscores the importance of investing in teacher quality, with effective teachers shown to be the most important school-based factor impacting student achievement. National studies have found that measures of teacher preparation and certification, for example, are strongly correlated with student achievement in both reading and math, even after controlling for student poverty and language status.
Allocating the resource of staff talent: Assign highly qualified staff equitably across schools. With approximately 80 percent of education expenditures spent on staff salaries and benefits nationwide, it is particularly critical to consider not only the quantity of funds dedicated to staff, but also the effectiveness of how those staff are allocated across the district and within schools.
These considerations include ensuring that higher-need schools are provided with highly qualified, experienced teachers whose capabilities match the schools’ needs. Studies consistently show that low-income and minority students have less access to such teachers.
Allocating the resource of teacher time: Expand teacher time for job‑embedded professional learning: Teachers often report that lectures and workshops designed to support their professional growth are disconnected from their daily practice.
Meanwhile, research suggests that professional learning is most likely to enhance teacher knowledge and skills when it is ongoing and grounded in day-to-day teaching practice, also known as “job-embedded” professional learning. For teachers to participate in job-embedded professional learning, an adequate proportion of their contracted time needs to be dedicated to non-instructional time as opposed to active instruction time.
Expanding and enhancing the resource of student learning time: One potential strategy to improve student outcomes, is to expand student learning time. Afterschool and summer programs, for example, can add up to 90 days of learning time beyond the school day and year. Grounded in youth development practices and often delivered by community partners, these programs offer students the opportunity to expand on learning from the school day.
Managed well, these additional hours can include project-based learning, community service, and internships that give practical application to school day lessons and broaden students’ horizons. They also support mastery of academic content directly through tutoring and indirectly through enrichment — such as theatre, science, creative writing, or debate — that embed academic content into engaging activities. With a focus on creativity and collaboration afterschool participants can develop and practice important social and emotional skills — for example, self-management, interpersonal skills, social awareness, and a growth mind-set —that are essential to academic and personal success.
Furthermore, the additional time spent with afterschool educators provides students with greater opportunities to build relationships with supportive adults in the school community. One way to expand student learning time — without compromising teachers’ non-instructional time — is to direct additional funds toward this strategy.
Leveraging community partnerships to offer additional services:
Out-of-school factors such as hunger, inadequate mental or dental care, and home-based stressors can play a significant role in hindering students’ performance and contribute to achievement gaps. By leveraging resources from outside the district, schools can provide a much greater wealth of services to students — and make a significant impact on student outcomes — with the majority of funding and time contributed by external sources. Community Schools’ supports often focus not only on academics, but also on health, social services, and civic engagement. For example, they might provide counselling, medical care, dental services, afterschool programs, and transportation assistance. Research demonstrates that Community Schools can have a positive impact on student outcomes, including attendance, academic achievement, high school graduation rates, and reduced racial and economic achievement gaps.
Community Schools offer an opportunity to provide more comprehensive services for students by diversifying funding sources, including support from the private sector. Provisions of these additional services are a valuable asset in instructional transformation by supporting the whole child and ensuring that students receive the services they need to be ready to learn.
Conclusion: As states face mounting pressure to improve outcomes at low-performing schools during a period of increasingly constrained budgets, they must embrace new strategies for maximizing existing resources. This includes strategies for ensuring that limited resources are directed to programs with the greatest impact for students, and to students with the greatest needs. It may also require that some state, community leaders and key stakeholders like myself rethink how they conceive of the available resources and how those resources are distributed to support school turnaround.
Finally, my pursuit is to keep learning and gain knowledge in areas that would support me in bringing change to my community. Women, black and brown people are underrepresented in S.T.E.M fields and almost non-existent in communities across the globe. No matter what age I may be, I will continue to show up as a leader in my community to champion for positive change across the entire education system. Further, to ensure that all kids no matter their backgrounds, get to benefit from education. This pursuit leads me to college in the Fall at Hampton University where I will study Business Economics with a minors in Leadership and Finance.
Reference:
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/stem-education/2011/12/19/stem-and-urban-schools-opportunities-to-escape-povertys-cycle-
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Ashalah Wright is an 18 year old, Black business owner from Atlanta, Ga. Ashalah began her journey with a simple dream, at the age of 12, of becoming a pastry chef specializing in diverse pastries from all around the world. Ashalah cultivated that dream to ownership and thrived as a celebrity pastry chef , the creator of Cook Me Up A Notch: Cookies, Cakes, and Other Culinary Creations, an online bakery, and Bakeology 101 S.T.E.A.M educational program founded in Februay 2016. She is also an 4x published author, youth empowerment leader, and Bakeologist. In her pursuits of becoming, she began to notice that many kids had the need, as she did, to be inspired to dream in S.T.E.A.M as well. Her community outreach with WE Advocate, led her to greater pursuits in the community in hopes of introducing more Black and Brown students to Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, and Math careers in a fun way. Ashalah is now a graduate of Langston Hughes High School where she also completed her Associates Degree in Business Administration. She will to attend Hampton University majoring in Business Economics with minors in Leadership and Finance.
Follow her journey on all social media @cookmeupanotch
and support her business at www.cookmeupanotch.com
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Running a business during a world-wide pandemic is hard, but running a business while going to school full-time and grieving the lost of a loved one is even harder. My resilience speaks to that. COVID-19 took a surprising hit on the world that no one was ready for. Its impact plagued the world and left us with displaced fear, anxiety, and worry that lead many people to burden the hardship all on their own. Business for me had to take a slight back seat to redefining what business would look like now that we were confined to our homes and during life 100 %. Living in a home with a mother, whom is a teacher, and my brother who is a middle schooler, plus myself whom was weathering college course work without the support most would receive on campus, was beyond difficult. It caused us to seat more with ourselves, figuring it out the best we could. Losing my grandmother just a year before the outbreak, was still heavy on my heart. This coupled with the fears of returning back to school for myself, my mother, and brother lead me to anxiety and depression. I knew I needed support in handling what was now our new reality so I requested mental health therapy for myself. Therapy helped me to live in the present moment, and focus on the things that I was able to control. What I was able to control were my own emotions, my academic progress, and my ability to know pivot my business to focus more on my online baking classes and leaning modules. I healed and I keep pushing forward to honor the goals and my gifts that God had given to me. Now I have graduated high school with honors at a 3.8 GPA also earning my Associates Degree in Business Administration. Most importantly, I am happier and healthier than I’ve ever been. I am ready to conquer the next phase of my life.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
I meet me cofounder and business partner at birth. This woman has shown me nothing but undeniable support and strength. Starting my business at the age of 12 was no easy feat to convince her of. She was finishing her doctoral degree and very overwhelmed with it all, she stated she could not take on another thing. Parenting, business ownership, community work, ballet for me, and my brother’s participation in sports. Two years prior I had begged and begged to sell my baked goods. She had said no, not right now. She had taught me to cook savory meals by age 8 so she no longer had to watch me in the kitchen as much. I sort of went behind her back and started packing pastries that I had baked into my lunch bag. They were so well received at my school, I started taking orders. One day, I have a big order for Valentine’s Day where I had created an order form and collected money for pre-orders. I had no choice but to tell my mother because I needed a ride to the grocery store. I was 12 years old and was ready to start my own business. My mom questioned why would students and teachers trust her with their money. I then had to tell her that for the past year I’ve been testing my recipes out by distributing them at my school. She looked at me and said, “you’re really serious about this, huh?” I shook my head yes and we’ve been rocking together ever since creating more products and writing books. I love her so much for believing in me.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.cookmeupanotch.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/cookmeupanotch
- Facebook: facebook.com/cookmeupanotch
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amichellewright/
- Twitter: twitter.com/cookmeupanotch
- Youtube: Cook Me Up A Notch