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Raising the bar to provide quality education
After cofounding a nonprofit to establish academy schools for low-income children in London, England, Jennifer Moses (MBA 1989) is working to provide quality education for disadvantaged children in California. She and her husband, Ron Beller, cofounded the nonprofit Caliber Schools to achieve that goal. In this interview she talks about the value and challenges of providing opportunities for all students.
“I had a wonderful career at Goldman Sachs, so when I was 40 I was able to say that I’d had enough. I had enough [money] to move on and do other things.
“I was living in London at the time. With some other people in the financial sector we started a charity called ARK—Absolute Return for Kids—and one of the things we did was start a network of academy schools, which were government schools that were intended to serve low-income children. We have 32 schools there [now].
“Five years ago, my husband and I—he’d been involved from the beginning at ARK—we moved to California and decided we wanted to help children in our backyard there. We serve a population of low-income, mostly minority children, whose choices are public schools that rank in the absolute bottom of all schools in California. Our goal is to give these children the academic and social/emotional experiences they need to be able to go to and get through a competitive four-year college.
“Every type of skill you would find in a business, you would find in this is well. I don’t think I would have had those skills without HBS. First of all, this is a business. You can’t just have a great idea. You’ve got to be able to operate on a budget; you’ve got to run facilities; you’ve got to hire/recruit people, train them, [and] keep them engaged. So those are all straight out of the HBS playbook.
“I’m super excited about it; it’s early days. It’s a very innovative model, but mostly we are setting the bar high because these kids deserve the same things that our own kids do.”
(Published March 2015)
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