Opinion: One Well-Placed Volunteer Can Add 900 Hours to a Student's Learning Time

Today, Sept. 12, marks the 20th anniversary of AmeriCorps, the national service program that has engaged more than 900,000 members to contribute 1.2 billion hours in service across the United States.

 

It has opened the doors of opportunity for low-income students and inspired a generation of teachers from Florida to Washington State. The program’s highest purpose is to renew our nation's public commitment to education, and to empower every citizen to take part.  

 

At Citizen Schools, we rely on AmeriCorps Teaching Fellows to support our expanded learning time programs in public middle schools.  By committing to just two years of service, each Citizen Schools AmeriCorps Teaching Fellow provides 20 low-income middle school students with 900 extra hours of learning.

 

Rigorous independent studies show that the Teaching Fellows help students gain the equivalent of an extra year of academic study, and put students on a path to erase the achievement gap with their middle-income peers.  And that’s not all: they also engage thousands of citizen volunteers — professionals in the fields of law, architecture, engineering and more — to mentor students, providing apprenticeships that bring these challenging and rewarding fields to life.

 

By engaging professional volunteers, AmeriCorps members harness America's greatest renewable resource— our citizen power— and are able to have an outsized effect on the lives of the children they work with.  As Eric argues in his new book, The Opportunity Equation, AmeriCorps members not only introduce students to fields they might not otherwise have access to, and to mentors who make positions in those fields feel attainable, but they also expand the pool of Americans committed to the practice of education.

 

The academic crisis in the United States has a solution: we as a nation must firmly recommit to great primary and secondary education for every citizen.  We must roll up our sleeves and get involved.  We must volunteer, mentor, and contribute.  We must rely on our nation's communitarian spirit to fix an academic system that needs our help.  

 

On this anniversary, we must also encourage Congress to push forward the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009 with broad bipartisan support.  The law called for increasing AmeriCorps to 250,000 positions by 2017.  Sadly, the growth has not materialized. 

 

Support for AmeriCorps cannot be in word only—it must be in action.  The success of our education system and the continued competitiveness of our country depends on it.