Featured Board: Andrea Foggy-Paxton
Andrea Foggy-Paxton is a Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and serves as Vice-Chair of the National Dropout Prevention Network Board.
Q. What led you to become involved with dropout prevention?
A. I have dedicated my whole career—much of it in youth development—towards helping young people find employment and engagement in their community, and to become leaders. I work at the Gates Foundation, and high school reform is part of the Foundation’s background and history in grant making with the issues of teacher effectiveness and high school non-completion as critical concerns. Life circumstances have an impact and so often it’s a rational reason why students drop out. There are many things affecting young people today.
Q. What do you see your role on the NDPN Board being?
A. I see my role on the Board as bringing the perspective that I have and bringing to this organization my network. Our job is to push how we transform this space; thinking about strategy whether to the Network or to the Board. How do we as a collective body address these issues? Our Board includes those from the student perspective touching thousands of students in their work, to the business or policy perspective. If we can look at how our different roles aggregate us to impact this issue—it’s through our contributions, both intellectually or through our networks.
Q. What is your vision of what the Network can do to improve the educational attainment of all young people?
A. We’re in a really interesting place in education reform where folks are starting to speak louder about this issue—that we cannot rely on the old model of education. We cannot just stand up and lecture students. We need a different way to reach our students and connect them to why they need to learn this. All the elements of dropout prevention are really about good education, that impacts all students. All students are at risk; there’s always a chance a young person could fall off track. And so a good quality education and the elements of dropout prevention are about creating that environment—where there are mentors, where this is a connection to career and college, where there is this relevancy so a student sees how algebra connects to my long-term goals. To me the Network has this unique opportunity to frame this whole dropout prevention issue of how do we transform this education experience so that no child is left out.
People brand dropouts as the kids who are not motivated, who are the problem kids, who are the kids that, no matter what you do, may not make the cut. But the reality is many of these kids are not getting the quality education they need, so by 8th or 9th grade they can’t live up to the expectations, and it’s not really their fault. Nobody has prepared them. It seems that the Network has already adopted all these learning strategies, and it’s still framed in the dropout prevention conversations versus we want high quality education for all students. We also want to have strategies to ensure that the highest risk kids are not left behind.
As we progress, we should think about the impact of the Network, and how we measure success. We have a great audience, and we need take these strategies and implement them, and then see how effective they are.
