Anna Moss
What matters in this world? What is most important?
I think opportunity matters. Every person should be given opportunities, and if they choose not to take them, so be it. From deep within my roots, from JCC preschool to Albert Einstein Academy, to leading services and reading Torah at Adas Kodesh Shel Emeth (AKSE) and Congregation Beth Shalom (CBS), I have absorbed the value of tikkun olam.
And right from the beginning, when I got my start as a teacher at the AKSE and CBS Hebrew Schools in high school, I saw the immense power of one-on-one mentorship. On that very first day, when my mom (the legendary Karen Moss) asked me to pull a student out of class to help him with a worksheet, I witnessed a sudden transformation. As soon as we sat down outside the classroom door, the student switched from a “too cool for school” sixth-grader to a bright and fiercely intellectually curious young man, exploding with Hebrew grammar questions that had been bottled up in the classroom. This was the first time I was truly floored by the magic of one-on-one mentorship: in front of his classmates, he had to hide his intelligence, but with me, he could open up a whole new side of himself.
. . .
This is all well and good. One-on-one tutoring is good. One-on-one mentorship is nice.
But how can we make it equitable?
Or, in business-speak, how can we scale it without losing its soul?
. . .
The problem with scalability is this: you can’t really have your cake and eat it, too. Scaling a system inherently loses something of its humanity in the process. There must be some liminal space between the deeply personal, values-driven relationship I have with my students, and the mass-photocopied cookie-cutter spiral-bound “how to teach” curriculum handbooks I was handed in lieu of training at my first test prep tutoring jobs.
Education has scaled through the ages, becoming in many ways more equitable, and yet, the education that the less-privileged versus uber-rich get often looks pretty different once you scratch away at the surface.
Nowadays, we have entire academic programs accessible worldwide for free: video courses and formative quizzes built around cognitive science and academic mastery—yes, I am a Khan Academy fangirl. Khan Academy goes the extra mile by making many parts of their program downloadable and working with nonprofits and schools in parts of the world where internet access isn’t a given, making sure kids with no other quality English-language education can access their programs for free. In hundreds of American schools, too, especially those with large class sizes, kids use Khan Academy and other “smart” mastery-based programs that identify the student’s level and aim to meet the student where they are, differentiating more than could be expected of any single teacher. (Well, classroom teachers are magical with differentiating for a class of 30–40 different kids. Maybe they could do it. But I know I couldn’t.)
Khan Academy and its ilk are incredible resources, and I often assign them as semi-interactive homework myself. It’s obvious why the mass adoption of devices in public and charter schools, largely in order to access such online learning systems, has been lauded as a great move toward equity in education.
And yet.
. . .
Is this the way they teach at the elite private schools?
When the people with all the money in the world make choices for their children, is plunking the kids in front of an AI-selected video playlist the choice they make?
. . .
Last summer, I tried to do my part for a scalable “education equity” solution. As a University of Chicago Metcalf Internship partner, I was able to select a team of college interns interested in education careers and train them to teach group classes. Groups are scalable, right? You can just add more kids without needing more teachers! I then spent a good six months reaching out to potential nonprofit partners, trying to find the right students, who would receive 100% scholarships if they had financial need.
In the end, the kids enjoyed the classes, and they had fun learning.
But…Is this the choice that my wealthiest students make? Of course not.
When money is no object, my students choose one-on-one programs tailored to their specific needs—unless it’s a custom “tutoring pod” program, which is then tailored to their needs and their friends’ needs.
When it came time to think about this summer, I had to sit down and ask myself: Does the world need yet another “equitable” solution that waters down what the wealthy get until it is barely recognizable, for the sake of scalability?
Or: How the heck can we create scalable systems that provide a deep, sustained, one-on-one mentorship relationship—without, like, money?
. . .
It was only the first month, and the news kept rolling in.
Funding cuts.
Budgets slashed.
It felt big, impossible to deal with. But then the headlines started to hit closer to home.
Anti-gang initiative in Camden shuttered.
TRiO college access programs discontinued.
Camden? I live half a mile from Camden. TRiO? I’ve worked with TRiO since COVID.
I have always felt like I “should” fight injustice—it’s how we are raised, and everyone says it. Yet, it has never truly resonated with me. Injustice assumes a right and wrong, black and white, one person or group being wronged by a privileged Other. It is rarely so simple.
And it can be paralyzing. How could I possibly stand against Evil and Injustice to fix the whole world? How could anyone?
Maybe tikkun olam doesn’t need to be about making the world better; maybe that’s where we’re wrong. It’s to make our little communities better. To start and maintain traditions that live past our own lives. To institute neighborhood soup nights that live on. To start an annual neighborhood fair. To make your block the very best block around. To help your school raise money, and help every kid on one street go to college for free.
And so, I rolled up my proverbial sleeves and got to work, right here in Wilmington.
A full-time, weeklong, one-on-one college essay mentorship. Three hours of writing, editing, and individualized guidance per day—mandatory, but because it’s one-on-one, it can work around the student’s work schedule. Each mentor gets just one or two students per weeklong cohort so they can give each student 100% of their focus.
“It’s a crazy idea, right? Tell me what won’t work,” I asked my husband. “I’m getting in over my head again with this new essay mentorship idea, right?”
“Well, how many mentors do you have? How many kids are in the pilot?”
I stopped, counted on my fingers. “Like 120 kids? And, uh, maybe 10 mentors?”
“Start with 10 kids and 3 mentors,” my husband said.
He was, of course, right.
The plan was simple.
Just kidding. The plan was very complicated.
I spent countless nights up until 3 AM after the baby was asleep—the only time I had to work—trying to codify exactly what it was about my one-on-one college essay mentorship and tutoring practice that brought out the best in kids. How do I talk to them to encourage them to have these insights into their own values? How can I train University of Chicago intern mentors—and, down the line, ever-growing circles of volunteers and peer mentors? Can I really make it so watertight that if, a few years down the line, someone else is training a high school kid who wants to help their peers, it will actually work? And at the same time, how can that same watertight curriculum respect the autonomy of the mentor, creating space for each mentor to feel ownership and put their own spin on it?
Essentially, how can I truly scale the magic of one-on-one mentorship, providing severely low-income students with the absolute best—without losing its soul?
This summer’s pilot program with a nonprofit in Wilmington is in full swing, and, so far, it’s been going great. The problem that I will still face, no matter what, is the problem of dilution—the farther the system ripples out from me, the more things will get lost in translation. But if I don’t let it spread, and if I don’t risk that mistranslation by trusting the autonomy of the mentors—with my mentors becoming lead mentors and training new volunteers next year, and those volunteers going on to train more volunteers, and on and on, in ever-spreading ripples—if I don’t let that happen, then hundreds of kids will never get that individual attention.
And, no matter how logistically difficult, we must never, ever settle for “good enough” when it comes to equity.
And so, as we move toward the reflective season of the High Holy Days, I leave you with a series of questions:
- What do people pay you to do?
You know–your job. Doctor? Web designer? Consultant? This one is a warmup question.
- How can you do it for free, with maximum impact?
Think outside the box here.
Doctors: Patients can benefit, but also pre-med students, teens interested in nursing, or even young kids who could have careers in medicine if they had a stronger STEM background. If you’re not up for an international Doctors Without Borders trip, what about volunteering to run an after-school club at a VoTech healthcare school or helping connect students with summer internships?
Web designers and consultants: Could you connect with your local Small Business Development Center and offer to build basic websites or do free consulting for a handful of new woman- or minority-owned businesses each year? Does someone at your synagogue volunteer with a nonprofit that could use improved SEO?
- Who will introduce you?
OK, this one isn’t very philosophical or deep, but it’s important. If you email someone you’ve never met and offer something for free, most people will assume it is a scam. A personal introduction will go far in getting your foot in the door.
Tikkun olam means valuing ourselves and what we have to contribute to the world. Tikkun olam means looking at what the wealthiest give their children, and figuring out a way to scale it—without falling prey to the temptation of replacing the human connections along the way with AI. (AI is a great tool—but do the wealthiest families totally stop their tutoring sessions because they prefer to send their kids to ChatGPT? You answer that one.)
Tikkun olam means giving young people the very best—full stop.
To learn how you can support Mind the Test Tutoring and Anna’s other projects, visit www.mindthetest.com/nonprofits or email anna@mindthetest.com. With funding for stipends, we can train the high school seniors who have benefited from the program this summer to give back as peer mentors next year. Providing stipends for peer tutors can make this a viable summer job for bright, low-income kids.
