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Content
MENTORSHIP AS A MEANS TO INCREASE
THE SOCIAL CAPITAL OF URBAN YOUTH

by

Michael A. Seelig

__________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

December 2011

Copyright 2011 Michael A. Seelig

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation could not have been written without the support my loving
wife, Kelly, who had to share attention with this project during our first year of
marriage. Your patience and understanding are unmatched, but are only a small part
of why I love you.
My chair, Dr. Crew, helped me see an idea through from its infancy and has
helped instill in me a belief that thinking bigger and not getting pulled into the vortex
of convention is essential to making a difference in the world.
Dr. Dwyer, is a true visionary, but he is first and foremost a great teacher. He
always took the time to teach, even when other matters were pressing. His command
of theory is truly grounded and the Ed School is a better place with him in it.
Dr. Garcia, taught me that being a leader is about having a vision and
knowing what you want to create, that living is about staying true to your guiding
principles, and why USC football is inexplicably linked to happiness and excellence.
William, Nicole, Colleen, Sarah, Simi, Kari, Dennie, Tina, Chase and San
Juanita: You are all amazing for doing what you do each day. You are the unsung
heroes of urban America.
Markus Kienscherf has been a friend and a teacher since Newcastle and his
sharing of ideas with me over the years has always made me want to know more and
push my intellectual limits to levels I am constantly surprised to find.

iii
Suzanne Steinseifer-Ripley gave me my first job in education and is both an
amazing principal and inspiration. Thank you for always giving me the freedom to
create, teaching me how to navigate the waters of a school district and showing me
that leadership is about more than just having a good idea.
My mother and father have supported me throughout my life and on multiple
coasts and continents. No matter how bizarre or whimsical my ambitions might have
been, you will always be my greatest teachers.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii
List of Tables v
Abbreviations vi
Abstract vii
Chapter I: Introduction 1
Chapter II: Literature Review 17
Chapter III: Methodology 64
Chapter IV: Research Findings 77
Chapter V: Discussion and Reflections 124
References 161

v
LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: Cases 66
Table 3.2: Sample Data Matrix 73
Table 4.1: Establishing Mentor / Mentee Relationships 79
Table 4.2: Operations and Procedures 90
Table 4.3: Curriculum 101
Table 4.4: Objectives and Measures of Effectiveness 109
Table 4.5: Funding 114
Table 4.6: Sustainability, Growth and Transferability 117
Table 5.1: Comparison of Level I and Level II Mentoring Programs 126

vi
ABBREVIATIONS

EMO External Mentoring Organization
LAUSD Los Angeles Unified School District
P21 Partnership for 21
st
century skills
SCT Social capital theory
SLT Social learning theory

vii
ABSTRACT

Mentoring programs provide students with access to social capital and benefit
them in emotional, social, academic and professional ways. Providing students an
edge in these areas is integral to their success and ability to compete in the global
economy of the 21stst century. Utilizing a theoretical foundation of social learning
theory and social capital theory, this project aims to understand existing ways that
schools and external mentoring organizations are currently providing mentoring
opportunities to urban youth in an effort to design a framework to be implemented
and utilized by a large urban school district in a continuous fashion that would make
mentorship a permanent and sustainable component of high school education.

1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

In 2007 Bill Gates, former President and CEO of Microsoft, lobbied the
United States Congress to increase the annual number of H1B skilled-worker visas
available to foreign workers. Microsoft is an American company, but the people
they employ are increasingly from countries other than the United States. This is
because they cannot find the caliber and quantity of personnel stateside necessary to
keep Microsoft at the cutting edge of technological development (NPR, 2008, p. 67).
This concern—and its potential consequences—have been echoed by business
leaders from a multitude of industries. Paul Otellini, President and CEO of Intel
Corporation, in a recent interview with MIT’s Technology Review states:
As a country the issue is: are we going to be prepared for the industries of the
21
st
century, which are fundamentally knowledge-based industries? The
alternative is to go back to the 19
th
century industries and get back to
[manufacturing] steel and those kinds of things, but then you have to do it at
costs that are comparable with the lowest costs in the world. That would
require a reset of the standard of living, and most Americans are not willing
to do that. If you want to maintain our standard of living, you need to adapt
the workforce for the jobs of the future (Rotman, 2010, p. 34).

Otellini’s understanding of the future economy is predicated on an understanding of
existing economic trends. Virtually all unskilled labor in the 21
st
century will
become either automated or outsourced to other countries. (Jukes, 2010; Wagner,
2008) Thus, the need to elevate the learning and capabilities of American children

2
is not a call for a few or merely the middle third, but for all people who hope to have
any job at all in the United States in the coming years.
To achieve these higher functions, children must become accustomed to
utilizing higher-level operations, often referred to as 21
st
century skills—critical
thinking and problem-solving, collaboration across networks and leaning by
influence, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, effective oral
and written communication, accessing and analyzing information, curiosity and
imagination—which will permit them to be knowledge-workers capable of winning
the jobs in the global job market.
However, many children, specifically urban youth, struggle to meet academic
standards despite a myriad of efforts to reform education. The Nation at Risk report
(The National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) was the first report
attempting to make America aware that our school system was in jeopardy. Since
that time, the pressures upon the educational system to improve its ability to mitigate
socio-cultural trends and influences have increased dramatically. Yet, as recently as
April 2010, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported unemployment figures at
almost 50% in the fourth quarter of 2009 for 16-19 year olds labeled as “Black.”
This figure is nearly double the number for whites of the same age group. Hispanics
of the same age group suffered unemployment rates above 35% (Edwards & Hertel-
Fernandez, 2010). An earlier report by the EPI states that even with equal amounts
of education, in this case the high school diploma, urban children of African-
American and Hispanic ethnicities fair far worse than their white counterparts.

3
Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and Economy program at the EPI,
stated in his March 2010 address to the Congressional Black Caucus, “Although the
City of Chicago did not have an unemployment rate double the national rate in 2007,
African Americans in the city did” (Austin, 2010, p. 2). Such reports indicate there
is a disparity between the opportunities available to white Americans and those
provided to African Americans and Latinos, especially in urban areas.
It will be argued that the locus of this problem lies in the lack of access urban
children have to social capital, a concept developed and utilized in the work of
authors Alain Bourdieu and Ricardo Stanton-Salazar. They state that relationships
are the most important factor in learning and growing into a successful, economically
productive adult (Bourdieu, 1986). And while underprivileged children have
relationships deemed valuable within their communities, or cultural capital, these
relationships rarely provide them with the social capital—skills, networks,
procedures and customs—needed to find professional inspiration, the motivation to
learn, guidance into the right careers or down the right life paths (Stanton-Salazar,
1997). Social capital emerges as the product of possessing relationships, not merely
teachers who stand before a classroom and “teach,” but an interpersonal relationship
with a mentor willing to personalize learning and provide guidance in accordance
with the needs of an individual. Children who possess social capital are in a unique
position to transmit a currency previously unavailable or even known to them. These
individuals who can provide social capital are referred to as institutional agents by
Stanton Salazar, and can perform a myriad of functions from negotiating

4
introductions and agreements between parties (i.e. networking) to promoting and
guiding effective decision making (Stanton-Salazar, 2010).
The benefits of social capital are seen in a multitude of places, namely in the
motivation it can build in a child, the informal networks it can provide and the
dialogic manner of teaching and learning that it can inspire, resulting in an increased
sense of self-worth and an awareness of previously unknown potentials. As Stanton-
Salazar states:
Mounting evidence shows that those who identify an important non-parental
adult in their lives tend to report better psychological well-being, more
rewarding relationships with parents and others, academic success, higher
school completion, better employment experiences, and fewer problems with
peers (Stanton-Salazar, 2010, p. 7).

Stanton-Salazar’s findings create a base from which any number of additional skills
needed to prepare a teenager for the professional world can be built. These positive
characteristics are seen frequently in middle-class neighborhoods where parents can
increase the social capital they provide to their own children through their informal
networks or capacity to provide their children with new experiences. However, in
lower socio-economic households, the ability to increase these networks is
oftentimes absent, as is the ability to generate a strong base of positive role models
for children and teens.
Albert Bandura states, through social learning theory, that learning occurs as
a social process of continued observance of modeled behavior with the recognition
of positive and negative consequences attached to the behaviors. Sporadic
encounters with a high status figure do not produce the social capital needed for a

5
child to advance. Thus, a support structure of mentorship is necessary as a constant
presence in the life of the child and is a logical precursor to any expectation for a
child who has the discipline to learn and be successful in a schooling environment.
To consider this information in light of the economic outlook offered by Bill
Gates and Paul Otellini, these urban students, especially teenagers, need access to
social capital if they are to elevate their abilities and prepare themselves for the
global job market of the 21
st
century. The ability to succeed is the direct product of
having inspiring, motivating role models and mentors in their teenage lives without
whom, educational and professional success is virtually impossible.
The most accessible means of bring teenagers into contact with inspiring
adults with whom they would otherwise not be able to connect, is through mentoring.
Several schools and organizations have attempted to help provide mentorship for at-
risk urban youth. Their efforts, while laudable, are isolated and episodic. They fall
short of being able to create the desired effect of changing the lives of urban youth,
en masse, and in a systemic fashion. They provide services and opportunities for
mentorship, typically as “one-off,” discontinuous relationships without a sustainable
infrastructure. Moreover, mentorship program possess different objectives and
measures of success. For some organizations keeping children and teens out of
gangs is the high watermark while, for others, seeing high school students gain
acceptance into four-year colleges is the definition of success. All these objectives
however, are valuable, but will need to be assessed more closely for a model to be
designed that will work in a large urban school district.

6
This project will assess ways various programs, along with their procedures,
bringing social capital to urban teenagers in the form of inspiring mentor
relationships. This investigations attempts to better understand the complexities of
operating such organizations and programs as components of a large, urban,
secondary school system. This project will culminate in the development of a
framework for implementing a continuous, embedded, sustainable system for
providing mentoring relationships for every child in their schools to bolster their
access to social capital. The framework will be designed to be sustainable and
continuous and treat mentoring as an embedded, integral part of the public education
experience.
Statement of the Problem
Teenagers in urban high schools suffer from a lack of social capital that can
inspire them to learn, provide them with informal networks and guide them into the
adult world of post-secondary education and work. At present, various schools,
programs, and organizations attempt to provide inspiring mentors to urban youth, yet
there exists little consistency or ability for such efforts to be implemented in a
continuous, sustainable way in an urban school district that ensures such mentorship
and access to social capital is a primary, ongoing component of a child’s high school
education.

7
Research Questions
1. What types of mentoring programs currently exist in both External
Mentoring Organizations (EMOs) and Schools, and how do they operate
to provide social capital to children?
2. What are the characteristics of mentorship programs that make them most
successful and sustainable?
3. What barriers do / would mentorship programs encounter in the public
school sector?
4. What would a design for an urban school district look like that could
assist in overcoming these barriers and provide mentorship to all urban
youth?
Purpose of the Study
This study has two purposes. The first is to describe and analyze programs
that currently attempt to bring social capital to at-risk urban teenagers. The study
will specify the strategies and procedures they utilize to optimize the ability of such
programs to support student achievement both academically and professionally. The
second purpose is to use the findings to create a framework that makes mentor
programs more effective and sustainable in urban school settings.
Overview of the Method
The project uses qualitative research methods to generate grounded theory
about mentor programs.

8
This research proceeded as follows:
1. Literature review. The literature review draws upon six areas / fields: 1)
urban youth; 2) 21
st
century skills and learning needs; 3) social learning
theory (SLT); 4) social capital theory (SCT); 5) mentoring; 6)
organizational behavior. The section on urban youth discusses the nature
of the children who are the focus of the efforts of the organizations being
studied herein and why SLT and SCT are the appropriate theories to
utilize in seeking a system to change teenagers’ lives and abilities to
learn. While SLT, via Bandura and others, establishes that people learn
socially, SCT, via Bourdieu and Stanton Salazar, explains the way that
social environment operates on a cultural level to learn in an appropriate
way that permits growth to the individual in ways deemed permissible
and favorable by society. The section on mentoring discusses the ways
mentoring programs operate to bring social capital to youth. The final
section organizational behavior creates a foundation for how the unique
organization of a school operates and how a framework for implementing
protocols for bringing social capital into urban schools as a primary
curriculum component would be most likely to succeed given any school
systems’ unique parameters and limitations.
2. Identification of organizations. Pertinent schools and organizations were
identified through online investigations and through referrals of people
from outside the organization but familiar with mentoring. The two types

9
of organizations used in this study are Schools and External Mentoring
Organizations.
3. Selection of the sample. Eight organizations were identified for
investigation because their work was systemic and ongoing rather than
episodic and dependent upon the will of individuals or children to seek
them out.
4. Data collection. Data was collected in three ways: interviews, incidental
communication, and document analysis. Initial and follow-up interviews
were conducted with key members of the organizations selected for the
sample. Initial interviews were informal conversational interviews aimed
and developing a general understanding of how the organization operated
and worked to bring mentors to children. Data was analyzed continuously
throughout the data collection process and coded using open coding and
the design of a matrix. Follow-up interviews were standardized open-
ended interviews designed to extract specific information that could be
compared with data from other cases. Incidental communication with
participants and analysis of documents obtained from organizations were
also utilized to collect relevant data.
5. Data analysis. A constant comparative approach was used to analyze all
data and guide the investigation process. Categories and subcategories of
data were created based on initial findings that guided the design of a data
matrix. The matrix then informed the data collection process, specifically

10
the follow-up interviews, which aimed specifically to complete the
categories of the data matrix. The completed data matrix was then mined
using constant comparison to identify themes and patterns in the data that
contributed to the answering of the research questions and the design of a
model for a school district-based mentoring program at the secondary
level.
6. Reporting of findings and writing of the narrative: Each research
questions was answered in turn, culminating in question four that uses the
findings to build a sustainable framework for bringing mentoring to a
large urban district as a core component of secondary curriculum.
Organizations Selected
Organization A (School). This charter school utilizes an informal network of
community-based professionals to create mentorship and internship opportunities for
their students, most of whom are from low socio-economic families. This school
resides on a campus in Hawthorne, California, near LAX. Their strategic location
permits them the opportunity to have partnerships with companies such as Northrop
Grumman, Raytheon, USC, UCLA and Chevron. These partnerships enable
internship opportunities where students can gain first-hand experience in corporate
and professional settings without having to travel more than a few miles from their
neighborhood. Curriculum in the school focuses on STEM (Science, technology,
engineering and math) with the assumption that these are the highest need careers
and provide the most accessible route to successful futures for the students while

11
simultaneously providing human resources to companies who otherwise cannot fill
their positions or must look beyond the United States for talent.
Organization B (School). This San Diego county school utilizes mentors as a
means of learning job specific skills as well as preparing for college through a non-
standard curriculum that utilizes project-based learning and technology. All students
participate in a two to three week internship where they apply their skills to a work
environment.
Organization C (School). This national school network operates both charter
and traditional public schools, several of which operate in Los Angeles. Students
obtain a semester or year-long internship that becomes the epicenter of their learning.
Advised by a teacher with an 18:1 ratio, students spend two days each week in their
woprk setting, while the other three days they learn standards in a manner that relates
them to their internship.
Organization D (School). D is located in coastal Orange County in a very
wealthy part of the county. The high school has an enrollment of approximately
2,400 students, over 65% of which are white. The API of the school is above 800
and the median household income is over $160,000(U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).
Their mentorship program, which consists of meetings and job shadows, aims to give
students a glimpse of possible futures and careers utilizing their internal networks of
high-status professionals from within the community.
Organization E (EMO). E is organization, based in San Rafael, California,
who works to identify mentors in the community and pair them with children in an

12
attempt to motivate and prepare teenagers to apply to colleges and scholarships and
follow through with enrollment and graduation.
Organization F (EMO). F is Los Angeles-based organization that refers to
itself as a “college access organization” that matches mentors with low-income
children who want to be the first in their families to attend college.
Organization G (EMO). G is a Los Angeles-based organization that partners
with select schools in Los Angeles to provide after school programs, field trips and
events sponsored by partner companies such as Disney. This organization matches
teams of mentors with middle school children in various schools throughout Los
Angeles Unified School District and is the largest mentoring organization in Los
Angeles. With a ratio of three of intentionally diverse adults mentors to a group of
twelve middle school children, mentoring occurs in a group setting. The program
takes place from 3pm-5pm one day a week, either a Monday, Wednesday or
Thursday, at the middle school the children attend.
Organization H (EMO). H is Los Angeles-based organization that matches
middle and high school students with community volunteers and corporate
employees. They possess extensive relationships with companies who pay the
organization bring kids to their worksites and communities to allows their employees
to act as mentors while still maintaining a challenging work schedule. Events
typically take place during the school / workday.

13
Significance of the Study
This study presents not only the types of mentoring programs available to
help bring social capital to youth, but discusses how they operate and makes
recommendations for how to begin building a mentoring program in a large urban
district. Presently, mentoring is only seen in select schools and organizations and
each system is different. There has not been a comparative study performed with the
intention of looking broadly at mentoring in an attempt to apply it to a public school
setting on a large scale.
Limitations
Since the focus of this study is on organizational practices and behaviors, the
perspective of the children will not be included in this study.
A second limitation exists in the time constraints placed on this project.
Grounded theory requires multiple visits to the field until data categories have
become saturated (Creswell, 1998). However, each trip to the field reveals new
information that can create a new subcategory or dynamic by which to view
information that may not have been obtained by other organizations. Thus, dozens
of trips to the field could be required to reach a true saturation point, which the time
frame of this project, as well as the reliance upon the goodwill and aid of
participants, will not fully permit.
Delimitations
Consistent with the second limitation above, the study will be restricted to
more broad efforts of the organization and not investigate deeply into ways that a

14
mentoring relationship operates on a psychological level, or the minute-to-minute
experience of a mentoring session.
Definition of Terms
21
st
century skills: As defined by Tony Wagner in The Global Achievement
Gap, they include but are not limited to: Critical thinking and problem solving;
Collaboration across networks; agility and adaptability; initiative and
entrepreneurialism; effective oral and written communication; accessing and
analyzing information; curiosity and imagination.
Apprenticeship: A relationship built around a specific job or series of job-
related tasks with the intent to transmit a specific body of work-related knowledge to
a person attempting to become a specialist in that field or job. These skills can
include hard skills as well as soft-skills. Unless this term is used expressly by
another source in this study, apprenticeship will be considered a type of mentorship,
akin to internship.
Cultural Capital: Culture-specific knowledge that is useful in a microcosm
or neighborhood, but does not provide the opportunity for a person to be accepted or
to grant admission into mainstream professional life.
Dialogic: Communication executed through dialogue, specifically, but as an
interdependent exchange where one source thoughtfully modifies the other.
External Mentoring Organizations (EMOs): Independent organizations or
foundations that work as partners with schools or in an effort to join children with
mentors, but are not schools in and of themselves.

15
Guidance: Advice from an adult perspective that professes knowledge of the
professional, mainstream world of work and life a child will likely not have
experienced.
Hard Skills: Physical, technical, observable skills that can be learned through
traditional means of teaching (i.e. pipefitting, brick-laying, typing).
Informal Networks: Connections and knowledge of people who possess
social capital and the means to provide an opportunity for another as a result.
Institutional Agent: Those societal actors who act to maintain the advantages
of other actors and groups who share similar attributes, high-status positions and
social backgrounds (e.g., executive members of a corporation; the leadership of
upper middle-class associations; upper middle-class high school students) (Stanton-
Salazar, 2010).
Internship: A type of mentoring focusing on higher-level skills with a special
focus on career and job preparedness.
Job-Specific Training: Training and guidance in specific work that will
enable a person to begin a job already possessing knowledge of the work required of
him or her.
Mentee: The person being mentored.
Mentorship: The act of purposefully guiding, advising and setting a positive
example of thoughtful and ethical decision-making with an emphasis on long-term
benefits rather than immediate gratification. For the purposes of this study,

16
Internships and Apprenticeships are treated as types of mentorship programs. More
discussion on the rational behind this consolidation can be found in chapter five.
Social Capital: Informal and formal networks of people to assist, aide and
guide with advanced knowledge of professions, trades, technologies and society.
While these relationships are first provided to students typically through parents,
they can also be provided through mentoring and can manifest through the
possession and acquisition of specific, highly sought after bodies of knowledge.
Soft Skills: Skills that are not always immediately observable. They include
but are not limited to creativity, influence, ability to work with a team, confidence,
attitude, work ethic, and flexibility.

17
CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW

There are six primary bodies of work that will influence this study: 1) Urban
youth identity and needs; 2) 21
st
century skills and learning needs; 3) Social learning
theory (SLT); 4) Social capital theory (SCT); 5) Mentoring; and 6) Organizational
behavior and change.
Urban Youth: Identity and Needs
Kati Haycock has stated that after fifteen years of research, one of her
greatest unanswered questions stands as whether the American people [will] ever
care enough about schools filled with poor black and brown children to invest in
them the resources necessary to get these young people to high levels of
achievement…” (Haycock, 2001, p. 140). This statement raises a critical question:
Who are these children?
In their book Small schools and urban youth, authors Gilberto Conchas and
Louie Rodriguez paint a brief, albeit, sad depiction of the typical child reared in an
American city:
In the students’ home environments, the parents most likely work two or
more jobs and live below the poverty line or are members of the working
poor. The parents most likely work in jobs that are unstable and fail to
provide adequate health benefits (For example, one in three Latino children
does not have health insurance) (Conchas & Rodriguez, 2008, p. xiv).

18
They continue to elaborate on how these initial conditions merely set the child on a
trajectory that brings them into frequent altercations with law enforcement and being
exposed to drugs. And when unable to get a job by traditional means, these children
are more likely to make money in ways that are oftentimes illegal (Conchas &
Rodriguez, 2008).
Children growing up in urban America suffer from a host of plights that are
oftentimes unrecognizable until they manifest through violence. For example, the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that on average, sixteen people aged 10 to
24 were murdered each day in 2007 and that 32% of students nationwide reported
being in a physical fight in 2009. Six percent of high school students reported
bringing a gun, knife or club to school in just a 30-day period prior to the CDC’s
survey (Centers for Disease Control, 2010, p. 2). The CDC states the chief risk
factors that make children susceptible to becoming one of these statistics are stated
as: “poverty in the community,” “poor family functioning,” “association with
delinquent peers” and “poor grades in school.” These factors are prevalent in
America’s urban communities and are a way of life for many teenagers in America’s
inner cities (Centers for Disease Control, 2010).
Conchas and Rodriguez continue to state, “To walk down the street, many
high school students quickly learn the code of the streets for mere survival”
(Conchas & Rodriguez, 2008, p. xv). These codes to which the authors refer,
typically manifest in language, signals, clothing and colors, are the very cultural
capital we see in great quantities with urban youth. However, this cultural capital,

19
very different from the social capital that will be discussed in the following section,
cannot be exchanged for education, better jobs or acceptance into a cultural
mainstream (Emphasis added) (Blossfield & Shavit, 1993).
The authors connect this idea to social capital and the function of positive
models as professed by Albert Bandura. They write that “Positive role models are
few and far between, with today’s social policies, support for after-school programs
and community initiatives has been virtually annihilated” (Conchas & Rodriguez,
2008, p. xv). This is largely due to parents working multiple jobs or family members
being absent for a myriad of other reasons.
The lack of role models is arguably the root of all the future manifestations of
troubled urban youth. This argument is highlighted in a study by Jonathan Crane, a
University of Illinois sociologist, who looked at the effects of having different levels
of high status individuals present in a society. Malcolm Gladwell elaborates
extensively on the study in his book The Tipping Point. In his discussion of the ways
in which good communities can seemingly go “bad” Gladwell cites the convincing
conclusions found by Crane’s study on the effects of role models in a community.
Crane finds that the flight of professionals and “high status” community members
(professionals, managers, teachers, whom the census bureau has defined as “high
status”) who were once present in the community for children to see, emulate, talk
to, listen to and aspire to someday be, has a dramatic effect on how children from
that community will suffer in terms of professional potential. Gladwell writes that
“for black school children, for example, as the percentage of high-status workers

20
falls just 2.2 percentage points – from 5.6 percent to 3.4 percent – drop-out rates
more than double. At the same tipping point, the rates of childbearing for teenaged
girls… nearly double.” (J. Crane, 1991; Gladwell, 2002, p. 13).
In the conclusion to his study, Crane states that “The theory suggests that if
we knew how to improve the “quality” of particular types of neighborhoods, such
efforts could be very effective in reducing the incidence of social problems” (J.
Crane, 1991, p. 1251). Crane’s study focuses on people and their status as a
reflection of their education, life achievements and ability to act as role models. His
conclusions for improving the neighborhoods could be interpreted as meaning better
parks, better schools and a better community center. But the heart of each of these
endeavors is not simply a construction project, but people—people to build and
operate them and be present for children. More high status individuals in the lives of
children will make children better, smarter and more professionally capable.
Gladwell reflects to a more conclusive statement on the importance of role models,
stating: “at the Tipping Point schools can lose control of their students, and family
life can disintegrate all at once” (Gladwell, 2002).
This need for mentors and inspirational figures is expressed in Wilson and
Corbett’s 2001 book Listening to Urban Kids. Their extensive and in-depth
interviewing of children in the Philadelphia public schools paints a picture of
children with a deep desire to both learn and have boundaries put in place for them
by adults with the ability to do it—namely teachers—who are the very well-trained
and well-educated teachers identified as the “high status” figures by the Census

21
Bureau and found to be absent in Crane’s study. Wilson and Corbett conclude that
students want to be in classrooms where teachers “stayed on” students; “controlled
behavior;” “ went out of their way to provide help;” “explained things until ‘the light
bulb went on’ for the entire class;” “provided a variety of activities through which to
learn;” and “understood student’s situations and factored that into their lessons.”
(Wilson & Corbett, 2001, p. 64)
Wilson and Corbett’s interviews paint a different image of what many people
assume about urban youth. The children help people understand the urgency and
importance of having people around them to provide not only a disciplined school
day, but a disciplined life and the guidance to move to the next level.
The lack of role models and positive mentors for urban youth is further
addressed by Pedro Noguera in his book The Trouble with Black Boys. Focusing
specifically on African American urban youth, he states, “Throughout the United
States, Black males are more likely that any other group in American society to be
punished… labeled and categorized for special education and to experience
educational failure (Noguera, 2008, p. xvii). Noguerra goes on to state that local
governance of schools creates greater inequities in terms of management, financing
and eliciting community participation. Noguerra writes that “low income
communities often encounter obstacles in enlisting and sustaining the involvement of
parents and a diverse cross-section of community members…”(Noguera, 2008, p.
193). These problems that stem from a myriad of reasons result in urban areas “such

22
as Oakland, where poverty is concentrated and poor people are socially
isolated”(Noguera, 2008, p. 193).
The lack of mentors, role models, family members and high status
community members is implicit in the recommendations of the EPI. In a November
2009 briefing, Algernon Austin, a sociologist with the EPI who specializes in race
relations, states that for urban teenagers, specifically African Americans, closing the
achievement gap lies in providing “pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs,”
in addition to being educated in the labor market (Austin, 2010). Fundamentally, the
capacity to become familiar with a job or the workplace and learn how to navigate
the professional world in an effort to find gainful employment is critical to the
transition from high school into adult life. And this ability is one of the chief
outcomes and benefits seen to emerge from possessing social capital. Ricardo
Stanton-Salazar, who will be discussed in more depth in the next section, argues in
his Social capital framework, the greater the student’s homespun attitudes and
behaviors, the greater possibility there is of him or her developing the proper
institutional behaviors and norms that allow him to be successful in school and
beyond (Stanton-Salazar, 1997, p. 2).
While this view of urban youth is popularly held, there are researchers, such
as Ruby Payne, who feel that the problem cannot be changed by an intervention due
to an underlying “culture of poverty” that permeates their identies (Payne, 1996).
Her view, that poor children have a natural preference for the cultural capital, as
opposed to the more universal social capital, is one that is highly controversial, but

23
that has been challenged by the sheer success of Americans such as President, Bill
Clinton, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotamayor,
as well as millions of others who have emerged from poverty to achieve great things.
Payne is perhaps the most visible and vocal example of how urban youth are
mischaracterized and how curriculum continues to be shaped in a way that will not
permit poor children the opportunities to escape their conditions. The picture painted
by others such as Conchas and Rodriguez, Wilson and Corbett, as well as the actual
success stories of popular figures in American culture, demonstrate that what
children need is not to be handled and sculpted into the molds of the dominant
culture, but shown, through positive role models and mentors, what is possible in
life.
This brief survey of urban youth demonstrates the problems that these
children face in their communities and in daily life. The organizations researched in
this study all aim to overcome these very problems not through the heavy hand of
authority and attempting to sculpt children in a militaristic style of control, but
through positive encouragement to grow in the direction of inspiring people they see
as their mentors.
Summary
The challenges facing urban youth are great. Among the chief problems they
face are broken homes, a lack of access to positive role models, and inspiring, “high
status” figures they can look up to and emulate. In the case of such a lacking,
students emulate the only people around them who themselves lack the social capital

24
to gain access to privilege and the capacity to fulfill their dreams. The call for
increased access to positive role models is sounded by many people, including the
Economic Policy Institute’s call for apprenticeship programs to help children learn
skills needed to move into the societal mainstream and be successful in the 21
st

century, keeping America’s economy healthy and vibrant.
21
st
Century Learning Needs and Institutional Obstacles
Many authors and experts in education have called for a new type of learning
to prepare children for the 21
st
century world of work. Richard Murnane and David
Levy are at the beginning of this dialogue, publishing in 1996, Teaching the New
Basic Skills: Principles for educating children to thrive in a changing economy.
They cite statistics to support the argument that a high school diploma is no longer a
ticket to the middle class as it was in the 1950s and 1960’s. As early as 1983, they
state, as a result of an increase in imports, the manufacturing sector in the US was
rapidly downsizing and a high school diploma earned a thirty-year-old man
approximately $23,000 a year. By 1993, just ten years later, they write, a 30-year-
old man with a high school diploma merely earned $20,000 (in 1993 dollars)
(Murnane & Levy, 1996). They continue to argue that the “economy is changing
much faster than the schools have improved. Many people -- including roughly half
of recent graduates -- have an education that is no longer in demand” (Murnane &
Levy, 1996, p. 4). This largely economic-based view of learning calls for an
alignment of industry’s needs and schools’ efforts.

25
The authors’ solution to this problem is to tailor education towards what they
call the “new basic skills” consisting of better math, problem-solving and reading
levels, soft-skills, and, additionally basic computer proficiency (Murnane & Levy,
1996). The awareness of the rise of “soft skills” is one upon which later authors on
this issue build. The awareness of soft skills is rather ironically timed, as the federal
legislation that follows just a few years later, No Child Left Behind, completely
ignores soft skills in favor of those skills that are verifiable on high-stakes,
standardized testing, scored by a machine.
One of the most notable people to continue the argument for soft skills is
Tony Wagner of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Writing in The Global
Achievement Gap in 2008, twelve years after Murnane and Levy, he offers a more
contemporary view of how industry perceives this problem and simultaneously
informs a generation of progress from Murnane and Levy’s position in 1996.
Wagner captures conversations with several twenty-first century business
leaders who share his frustration with the status quo of learning and talk at length
about their needs as leaders of industry. For example, Anne Marie Neal, a Vice
President as Cisco Systems states that one of the biggest problems facing
corporations lies with the personnel who enter the world of work with the mentality
that there are right and wrong answers. She states in Wagner’s book that “We need
to be curious versus thinking ‘I know the right answer.’ Yesterday’s solution doesn’t
solve tomorrow’s problem” (Wagner, 2008, p. 17). Neal goes on to state that
schools need to let children be much more curious instead of learning to pass tests.

26
She says, “They need to learn the inquiry process…Problems change and so
approaches to problems need to change… We’re getting [from students] what we
measure, but we’re measuring the wrong things” (Wagner, 2008, p. 17).
Wagner recognizes that the old world of school merely needed to teach pre-
established procedures and memorization. The new world of school, however, needs
to teach children how to understand a problem well enough to create a new
procedure. Wagner offers seven clear skills that high school students need to
possess as they enter the 21
st
century. They are: Critical thinking and problem-
solving; Collaboration across networks and leaning by influence; Agility and
adaptability; Initiative and entrepreneurialism; Effective oral and written
communication; Accessing and analyzing information; Curiosity and imagination
(Wagner, 2008).
There is a great deal of overlap between Wagner’s 21
st
century skills and the
“new basic skills” of Murnane and Levy. Wagner’s skills possess a bit more depth,
explanation and detail and absorb the ideas of Murnane and Levy.
Wagner further relates the manifestations and utility of these skills through
Rob Gordon, a retired army Colonel and former director of the American Politics
Program at West Point. He states in Wagner’s book that “Critical thinking skills
include the ability to apply abstract knowledge to solve a problem and to develop
and execute a solution.” He continues to express his heartfelt need for children to
develop “the ability to think broadly and deeply. It means using a framework for
problem identification – assumptions and facts, acquiring information, viewing

27
alternate solutions” (Wagner, 2008, p. 22). Consistent with Murnane and Levy’s
observations, Gordon states that skills need to be improved to focus more on critical
thinking, problem solving and analysis. While this view may be clear to many in
industry, there is frustration that it is not equaled in recognition by the leaders in
education. When it comes time to reform education, the movement is distinctly in a
direction away from what leaders say is necessary for a vibrant future economy and,
instead, towards “better” standardized tests and other metrics that merely give the
impression of hard results.
This problem is highlighted in an article by Donald Gratz who criticizes a
pay-for-performance pilot program attempted in Denver that used test scores as its
indicator for teacher performance. He observes the ways such programs that focus
on hard, quantifiable results, force schools to give the impression of having
“achieved,” without necessarily improving their school and, potentially, harming
children. He writes that “High stakes tests have caused curricula to narrow,
emphasizing only what will be measured, and cutting science, history, art music, and
other valuable subjects. And inordinate pressure has been put on children not to
learn, but to perform”(Gratz, 2005, p. 580). This “stressing” of the system to
perform, rather than teach and learn, has generated a great deal of misunderstanding
about education. As Diane Ravitch points out, these strategies “produce fear and
obedience among educators; it often [generates] higher test scores. But it [has]
nothing to do with education” (Ravitch, 2010, p. 16). But answers for how this is to
be resolved are in short supply – hence, the direction of this project in attempting to

28
design a framework that could use social capital as a means to provide continuous,
demonstrated progress towards college preparedness and 21
st
century skills.
The distinction between clear, knowable objectives and objectives asking
children to design and create with a much more open rubric is discussed by David
Labaree as the hard skill / soft skill dichotomy. It is unclear whether he is borrowing
his terminology from Murnane and Levy, but his conception of “soft skills” is
consistent with Murnane, Levy and Wagner. Labaree argues that the ability to
produce verifiable research on the acquisition of soft skills is tremendously
challenging. And unfortunately, for educators aiming to embrace the very “soft
skills” necessary for success in the 21
st
century workplace, the research informing
the best practices for doing this is itself, soft. As Labaree writes: “Disciplines seen as
producing hard knowledge are those that are most successful in establishing the
rhetorical claim that their research findings are verifiable, definitive and
cumulative”(Labaree, 2004, p. 63). Naturally, researchers want to produce results
that are “verifiable, definitive and cumulative,” as research that does not meet those
descriptions is less likely to be utilized in the attempts to create an accountability
system for public education.
Murnane and Levy discuss this predicament as it applies to the auto industry.
They provide the example of an assembly line worker in 1916 whose job it was to
attach wheels to a Model T. To assess his performance, Murnane and Levy explain,
one merely had to see if the wheel was securely attached and if the worker was

29
keeping pace with the assembly line. They contrast this worker with one of today’s
assembly line workers at a Honda plant in the 1990s. They write:
The person who installs the wheel here must also monitor the quality of the
installation, move over to help other employees when they have trouble, work
in groups to solve production problems, and constantly suggest ways to
improve assembly line performance[…] But in the Honda plant today, a
supervisor finds it much harder to rate workers than did a supervisor in a
traditional Ford plant. Many of the most important activities are now
products of group interactions, not of repetitive actions by individuals. The
group activities depend on taking initiative and applying skills (Murnane &
Levy, 1996, pp. 12-13).

The point the authors raise here is that soft-skills are the key to a successful assembly
line in today’s world of work, not the monotonous, repetitious, mindless work of the
assembly lines of the industrial revolution. And these jobs, once thought to be
accessible to people with only a high school diploma, are now thought to be too
complex and highly skilled to be performed by someone without higher levels of
ability and training. But, even industry has a difficult time assessing who is working
effectively and who is not simply because the collaborative nature of the work is
defined by the ability of people to use soft-skills. And those skills are difficult to
measure. While industry begins to rely on these soft-skills, there is reluctance in the
education community to embrace them due to their lack of clarity of performance.
This disconnect is damaging to America’s industries.
Amongst the leading voices for 21
st
century skills is the Partnership for 21
st

Century Skills (P21) (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009). The organization
provides guidance to policymakers and educators alike for shifting curriculum
towards 21
st
century skills and supporting the cause for change. One of the

30
partnerships’ recent publications, designed for policymakers, shows a simple contrast
between the needs and expectations of the 20
th
century and those of the 21
st
century.
Where the 20
th
century worker likely had one or two jobs and had to demonstrate
mastery of a single field, the worker of the 21
st
century will likely have 10-15 jobs
and be flexible and adaptable enough to transition fields and knowledge bases
(Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2008). Thus, the 20the century teaching model
of “subject matter mastery” is insufficient for the 21
st
century worker who will need
to integrate the 21
st
century skills, such as “agility and adaptability,” “initiative,” and
“critical thinking” in order to be relevant in the global job market of the 21
st
century
(Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2008, p. 8).
The assessment models, P21 contends, must change too. The standardized
tests of the 20
th
century simply aimed for factual mastery, but the 21
st
century exams
need to be “Authentic, structured, iterative demonstrations of student understanding”
(Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2008, p. 8).
The movement for 21
st
century skills has its detractors as well. In a 2009
article from Edweek.org, author Stephen Sawchuck wrote that “Unless states that
sign on to the movement ensure that all students are also taught a body of explicit,
well-sequenced content, a focus on skills will not help students develop higher-order
critical thinking abilities” (Sawchuck, 2009). These criticisms are certainly
warranted, but they demonstrate a short-sighted view of what 21
st
century skills truly
aim to do. P21 and supporters of the movement do not seek to supplant a foundation
of content knowledge, they want it to emerge through a process of application. For

31
example, history teaches content, such as dates and facts of the civil war. Rather
than memorizing a timeline from the textbook, 21
st
century skills might create a
framework for debating how northern and southern narratives conflict to create a
complex historical picture. Such debate leads to an understanding not of mere dates
and facts, but of how history is written and a resulting commentary on politics.
This type of learning generates what educators Christine Bennett and James
A Banks refer to as “transformative academic knowledge.” Bennett sites multiple
examples of authors, from Howard Zinn to Ronald Takaki, who offer texts to aid in
not mere acquisition of knowledge, but tools to perform “ideological and content
analysis” in effort of helping students obtain a higher form of learning (Bennett,
2001, p. 177).
In a February 2009 Op-ed, the Boston Globe warned against an anticipated
shift in Massachusetts curriculum towards 21
st
century skills. They state that ten
years ago after Connecticut made a similar shift in curriculum “from an emphasis on
content knowledge to the ‘how to’ methods favored by the 21st-century skills
movement” and that the result was that “test scores plummeted.” They state that
Connecticut officials acknowledged the error and are presently “reintroducing
methods favored in Massachusetts” (Editorial, 2009 A12).
Such a criticism of 21
st
century hardly addresses the school’s ability to
transform learning or a nation’s economy, but merely, the ability to meet objective
scores on tests. It completely ignores the fact that the tests were established on the
assumption that learning did, in fact, emphasize “content” knowledge over “how to”

32
knowledge. Naturally, when No Child Left Behind was instituted shortly after
Connecticut’s shift towards 21
st
century skills, they had to change curriculums to
teach to a test, regardless of its utility, to demonstrate to a changing department of
education that they were in fact, teaching. The argument for teaching 21
st
century
skills is not that they will raise test scores on tests that assess content knowledge any
more than they will make children grow taller—for neither are the focus of the
teaching in a 21
st
century curriculum. Were state assessments revamped to be more
authentic and consistent with the teaching objectives, which the Partnership for 21
st

century skills states is necessary, the test results would certainly have told a different
story. The assessments need to test students’ ability to design, build, think critically
and problem solve—the actual a capacities children need in the workplace today—
not merely a recalling of critical dates in American history, which is what a 19
th
or
20
th
century worker needed in order to claim mastery of a single field.
Few educators would argue that a strong foundation of knowledge is not
essential for higher order thinking and functioning. And 21
st
century skills do not
aim to throw out content knowledge learning all together. They aim to elevate
existing learning limitations by removing pieces of an existing curriculum solely
focused on content knowledge and teach the new skills as a function of the content
knowledge, not merely leave the knowledge in store for purposes of trivia.
Evidence of the necessity of this shift and the dangers of placing too much
emphasis on content knowledge emerges from the country perceived as America’s
greatest economic competitor: China. While the Chinese curriculum has

33
traditionally focused solely on content, they lack the ability innovate and create and
are changing their curriculum to focus more on critical thinking. Former USC
Lecturer, Randy Pollock wrote in the LA Times in May of 2009 of his
disappointment in teaching Chinese MBA students who are highly educated and well
trained, but lack originality. He tells the tale of his students, comprised of middle
managers in Chinese companies, who were quick to latch on to the presumed wants
of a client, but unable to think in innovative ways. He writes that “Students
frequently posited that copying is a superior business strategy to inventing and
innovating” (Pollock, 2009). He cites several encounters in his classroom as
examples in support of the popular criticism of “China’s Talent Shortage” (Pollock,
2009).
This idea of a “talent shortage” may seem odd to many Americans, however
it is discussed in a December 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal by Jiang Xueqin,
a highly regarded Chinese Educator and expert on the country’s education system.
He is critical of the Chinese system stating it is essentially a “rote- memorization
system” that produces students with a “lack of social and practical skills, absence of
self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.” Xueqin
states that there a growing consensus that “instead of vaulting the country past the
West, China’s schools are holding it back. They equip everybody with the basic
knowledge to be functional in a socialist economy.” And as the American economy
is one that thrives on innovation, creativity and an acute sensitivity to cultural

34
changes, such learning is really antithetical to what America has always desired for
itself and its people.
Xueqin states that he has “attended meetings where Beijing’s top education
officials endorsed importing “western curricula” and that “China Central
Television’s main evening news program recently reported on Peking University
High School’s curricular reforms to promote individuality and diversity.” He
continues to state that “Reform is on the horizon. This year the Chinese government
released a 10-year plan including greater experimentation [with curriculum.].”
With an emphasis on individuality, as well as diversity, Peking’s new
program is designed to prepare students for studying in American Universities – the
same universities for which American students are being prepared. In this new
model, there is much less emphasis placed on tests, and a greater emphasis is placed
on writing in a coherent manner. Xueqin writes that the movement towards
“concrete life and work skills” requires “being able to identify a problem, break it
down to its constituent parts, analyze it from multiple angles and assemble a solution
in a succinct manner to communicate across cultures and times” (Xueqin, 2010).
These are virtually the very same skills Wagner, Murnane and Levy discuss and that
are desired by the business people interviewed by Wagner.
“To write well,” Xueqin writes, “students need to understand concepts such
as thesis and argument, structure and support, coherence and flow, tone and
audience, diction and syntax – concepts that are barely introduced in Chinese
Schools” (Xueqin, 2010).

35
The need to teach 21
st
century skills in the secondary schools is integral to the
success of America and the future of its economy. The argument for moving
towards a system that will challenge the Chinese system is both anachronistic and
antithetical to the true goals, objectives and spirit of American culture and its system
of values. To continue thriving in the 21
st
century, America has to re-tool its
educational system to equip students with the necessary skills for being successful in
the 21
st
century.
Summary
Industry demands a new set of skills for workers in the 21
st
century and
students must graduate from high school with these skills or find themselves and
their education obsolete. This lack of ability and talent will subsequently hurt
American industry and the economy. A singular challenge for education in the 21
st

century will be to find a way to market and prioritize the learning and acquisition of
soft skills so they can enter the curricular mainstream, rather than be overlooked as
non-essential and left to unofficial and informal means of acquisition. As will be
argued in the following pages on social capital theory, informal means of acquiring
soft skills are not available to all students and end up comprising the division
between high and low socio-economic status children – those who possess the social
capital to learn soft skills, develop emotional intelligence, and move successfully
into adulthood and the world of work—and those who never escape the plight of
urban youth.

36
Social Learning Theory: Learning as a Social Process
Given the needs of the 21
st
century and who urban youth are, social learning
theory (SLT) is a critical way of understanding the unique learning challenges
children face and why a specific context for learning must be present. Social
learning theory provides a foundation for understanding how these contexts operate
to enhance learning for urban children.
SLT traces it origins to the early 20
th
century with social constructivist
psychologist Lev Vygotsky. What would later become SLT and popularized by
Bandura, can be seen in the Vygotsky’s early research where he is placing a unique
emphasis on the effects other humans have on the learning process. He writes: “In all
of the cases we have examined, human behavior is uniquely defined not by the
presence of stimulation but by the new or changed psychological situation that is
created by humans themselves” (as quoted in Wertsch, 1985 p. 26). This passage is
perhaps the most concise introduction to SLT as it is viewed today.
In the early 20
th
century however, this view was less popular than both the
cognitivist and behaviorist theories of learning. The earlier, behaviorist view,
popularized by B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson placed the greatest emphasis on
conditioning behavior through stimulus—such as classical and operant conditioning.
Learners were seen as being little different from animals to be trained through
systems of reward and punishment. Interestingly, Watson, the first student to earn a
Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago, spent his later years as the vice
president of an advertising agency, rather than in a university setting (Mowrer &

37
Klein, 2001, p. 3). By the 1930’s however, behaviorism came under fire as being too
mechanistic and robotic. Early challenges by Edward Tolman, who created the
concept of the cognitive map that learners generate in order to navigate their own
routes towards a specific goal, stated that the behaviors were not robotic, but that
learners direct behaviors in accordance with a desire to obtain a goal and thus must
be motivated accordingly (Mowrer & Klein, 2001).
These views of learning are not mutually exclusive and today more closely
represent the different stages of learning rather than definitive views on how learning
occurs. As Mowrer and Klein write, “These paradigms interact in a number of
learning situations leading to positions that entail a combination of paradigms”
(Mowrer & Klein, 2001, p. 16).
SLT encapsulates these different concepts of learning. It argues that people
learn by observing modeled behavior, storing the observation, then retrieving it for
use in a context that appears similar to the one in which they first witnessed the
behavior. Albert Bandura explains this process:
According to social learning theory, behavior is learned symbolically through
central processing of response information before it is performed. By
observing a model of the desired behavior, an individual forms an idea of
how response components must be combined and sequenced to produce the
new behavior (Bandura, 1977, p. 35).

Bandura here asserts that observation of behavior is essentially the locus of learning.
The learner observes the modeler and mentally stores the observations. Yet, learners
will not simply emulate everything they see. Bandura continues:

38
Social learning theory distinguishes between acquisition and performance
because people do not enact everything they learn. They are more likely to
adopt modeled behavior if it results in outcomes they value than if it has
unrewarding or punishing effects. Observed consequences influence
modeled conduct in much the same way (Bandura, 1977, p. 28).

Bandura’s theory states that while observation of modeled behavior is the
nexus of learning, that those behaviors must yield “positive” outcomes if they are to
be deemed replicable. Because learners are able to understand not only the behavior,
but also its link to a consequence, only behavior linked to positive consequences will
be processed and stored for later retrieval and reproduction. This process is referred
to as abstract modeling (Bandura, 1977). Abstract modeling enables the learner to
use the behavior they have observed and processed as a means to create a new
behavior “with similar characteristics” as a result. These behaviors in a new context
are thus seen as original “even though observers have never seen the model behaving
in these new situations” (Bandura, 1977, p. 41). It is this new behavior that permits
the learner to expand upon the modeled behaviors and to create new processes, ideas
and solutions.
The dynamics of social learning theory are not one-dimensional – for they
exist in a dialectical process that Bandura refers to as reciprocal determinism. In this
manner, the modeler is simultaneously changed by the perception of the learner who
perceives him as a model. The connection to the role of a mentor here is clear. If a
mentor can model behaviors that a learner finds inspiring and motivating out of a
desire to see similar positive consequences (e.g. financial rewards, security and / or
personal success) the student will begin to model those behaviors in his conduct.

39
When hard work and perseverance are coupled with the desire to be successful,
students are seen with the inner motivation to succeed and become more “like” their
model.
Under this new type of teacher, who is not a disciplinarian or task master, but
an inspiring mentor who models behavior as they help the learner understand
material consistent with the wants, needs and talents of a child, the mentor is no
longer a faceless actuary of the system, but now a conduit, to deeper learning of
complex skills through motivated, self-directed learning.
The link between mentoring and social learning theory is popularly
contended in mentoring literature. One such example comes from Linehan (2001)
who found a positive correlation between a work-based mentoring program and the
academic achievement of African American youth. He writes that in social learning
theory, since an emphasis is placed on modeling as a primary means of learning and
attitude development “it is reasonable to expect that an adult mentor can have a
positive effect on a student’s academic behavior and performance in a program
designed to improve academic outcomes”(Linnehan, 2001 p. 311). These
correlations will be discussed in greater depth in the section on mentoring.
The actual neural functions that guide this process stand to confirm that
learning is a dialectical process between individuals with common characteristics. In
her article that discusses the function of the brain’s mirror neurons, Dr. Mary Helen
Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist at USC, states that neurons that have historically
been thought to “mirror” the activities of others in the world, are in fact, doing much

40
more than simply copying the actions of others and reproducing them. Immordino-
Yang writes:
The internalization of another’s goals and actions happens in a culturally
modulated dynamic interaction between minds and is grounded in the
neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses of the learner… Learners
capitalize on their strengths and preferences to internalize and construct
representations of problem domains… (Immordino-Yang, 2008, p. 67).

Confirming Bandura’s social theory on a neural level, she writes that
environment and context matters greatly – and thus, the context, mood and delivery
produced by the modeler matters greatly. Immordino-Yang continues to state that
the “learner’s internalization” of the other’s situation, as it may be “automatic,”
constructs a “representation of another’s situation… on one’s own self in accordance
with cognitive and emotional preferences, memory, cultural knowledge and
neuropsychological predispositions – the ‘smoke’ around mirror neurons”
(Immordino-Yang, 2008, p. 71).
The “smoke” that Immordino-Yang discusses is this very “context” that the
modeler creates through a dialectical bond with the learner. Immordino-Yang’s
findings are thus all the more revolutionary in that they establish a neurological basis
for the social-cognitive framework of learning that has always been predicated upon
learners’ observations of people in social environments.
In a similar view from another frame of reference, Seymour Sarason, an
organizational behavior expert, not only on systems of education, but the ways in
which these institutions succeed or fail to teach, states this process is integral to
igniting the spark that motivates people to learn.

41
We know when we come alive because our individuality is recognized and
supported – that is, when we are not perceived in terms of categories in which
our individuality does not exist and the characteristics of which allow others
to see us as a part of a collection of people to whom homogeneity is
attributed that is unjustified, invalid and makes a mockery of the concept of
individuality (Sarason, 1998, p. 8).

Sarason’s socio-cultural observation supports Immordino-Yang in
recognizing the importance of treating children as individuals who operate within a
cultural framework as opposed to being mere copies, cut from a cloth of sameness.
Thus, social learning is effective in that it creates a positive learning context that
allows a learner to become motivated. Learning environments need to be capable of
creating the relationships if learning is to occur in a more productive way than it
presently does in schools.
Dialogic Learning and Social Context
Bandura’s SLT explains how learning occurs in a social context. However,
one component that it does not explain in depth is the way in which it can empower
and motivate a learner. When a learner is inspired to act of his own volition toward a
desired goal, the learner becomes capable of learning much more deeply and at a
much more rapid rate. To create this connection though, the learning and teaching
must be done in a dialogic manner that does not seek to impress a series of alienating
rules on a child, but to help him grow to his potential.
A popular proponent of dialogic learning is Brazillian educator, Paulo Freire,
who is highly critical of the typical “banking” model of learning. He writes: “A
careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside our outside of

42
the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character” (Freire, 2000, p. 71).
Freire describes the teacher as the “narrator” and the student as the “patient, listening
object.” The teacher simply transmits information to the passive student and, in the
process of narration, the student becomes lifeless. He calls this pervasive
educational problem “narration sickness.” He continues to observe that “The more
meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are”
(Freire, 2000, p. 72).
He argues further that the passive acquisition of data or information is hardly
a rewarding experience and is one in which even most adults are reluctant to partake.
It is only once the exchange becomes two directional, the monologue becomes a
dialogue and the student is permitted to be engaged, that he begins to feel validated,
empowered and capable of engaging with information and problems rather than
passively collecting it. (Freire, 2000) But this engagement, in many situations, is
difficult to attain. For any number of reasons, including the number of students in a
class or the inability of the teacher to make a connection, the typical classroom
setting is one of monologue and narration, or the student “doing work” and
submitting it to a teacher who tells them if it is right or wrong.
Contemporary learning theory, such as SLT and the ideas posed by
Immordino-Yang that recognizes the importance of social factors, is consistent with
Freire’s view. Learning occurs in a social environment as a product of interaction
with others within a cultural context. This context is what Immordino-Yang refers to
as “smoke,” around the mirror-neurons from which behaviors emerge.

43
This “smoke,” or context, as it was earlier hypothesized, is discussed Lev
Vygotsky, the earlier cited Russian, social constructivist psychologist from the early
20
th
century whose work is undeniably a precursor to Bandura’s SLT. Vygotsky
discusses social learning with an emphasis on how a larger cultural environment that
possesses its own rules, customs and mores influence the behaviors of the individuals
within it. Vygotsky argues that culture is a unit that directs the individual. Due to an
inconsistently translated and challengingly accessible archive, Vygotsky herein will
be cited through one of the foremost authorities on Vygotsky’s work, sociologist
James Wertsch. Wertsch relates:
Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two
planes. First it appears on the social plane, and then on the psychological
plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological category, and
then within the child as an intrapsychological category […] We may consider
this position as a law in the full sense of the word, but it goes without saying
that internalization transforms the process itself and changes its structures
and functions. Social relations or relations among people genetically
underlie all higher functions and their relationships (as quoted in Wertsch,
1985, pp. 60-61).

Here, Vygotsky argues that environment shapes the individual through
producing behaviors on an observable “social plane,” which are then internalized by
a child and reproduced later. This concept is a clear influence on Bandura’s critical
theses of SLT. Both views stand to say that if this is how a child learns behavior,
then one of the most important factors in learning are the people from which a child
learns.
Vygotsky argues these learning relationships are critical to the development
of higher learning functions. These “higher functions” can be taken as similar to

44
those necessary functions of the globally competitive 21
st
century learner raised by
Murnane, Levy and Wagner.
Vygotsky states that this transition, from lower to higher functions is central
to advanced development of learning:
At the center of development during the school age is the transition from
lower functions of attention and memory to higher functions of voluntary
attention and logical memory… the intellectualization of functions and their
mastery represent two moments of one and the same process – the transition
to higher psychological functions (as quoted in Wertsch, 1985, p. 26).

Learning occurs through a social context, and learning “higher functions” is
the “center of development.” Thus without the proper environment to guide the
learner into these higher functions, a child will not be capable of generating the self-
directed “voluntary” internal processes needed to build them. The environment and,
most importantly, the people who comprise that environment, are crucial to the
productive development of learning higher functions that permit directed learning to
occur.
A great deal of scholarship has built upon the concept of social learning to
focus on culturally diverse pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching. Authors
such as Christine Bennet, Geneva Gay, J.A. Banks, Ronald Gallimore, E. Paul
Goldenberg and Jerry Lipka have done extensive work on aligning students and
teachers who emerge from similar cultural backgrounds. These fields are important
to the movement of teaching in the traditional narrative manner. However mentoring
does not aim to teach a curriculum that necessitates the recognition of a version of
history or a group’s literary tradition. Mentoring it is about inspiring and showing

45
children a new world to create a space for inspiration to take hold. And while
ethnicity, gender and culture are natural parts of human interaction, the goal of
mentoring is to show children that the world is accessible to anyone able to obtain
the right capital, regardless of ethnicity, gender and race. In this way, learners are
empowered to connect with learning and people and obtain social capital.
Summary
Bandura, Freire and Vygotsky state that learning is social, but the fabric of
the social environment is integral to the type and quality of learning that occurs. The
fabric or the “smoke” to use Immordino-Yang’s terminology, acts as a common bond
through which a learner can find personal connections and thus become motivated to
learn in self-directed ways that permit them to explore and think in the ways needed
to acquire 21
st
century skills.
Social Capital Theory
While several authors have used the term and idea of social capital, the two
major authors dealing with social capital are Pierre Bourdieu and Ricardo Stanton-
Salazar. Each author treats social capital as providing slightly different benefits and
thus, the definition used for the purpose of this project, will be a hybrid of these two
popular conceptions. Restating the definition from chapter one that will be used in
this study, social capital is: Informal and formal networks of people to assist, aide
and guide with advanced knowledge of professions, trades, technologies and society.
While these relationships are first provided to students typically through parents,

46
they can also be provided through mentoring and can manifest through the
possession and acquisition of specific, highly sought-after bodies of knowledge.
The term “social capital” has been traced as far back as 1916 to author Lyda
Judson Hanifan who defines the term in the first sentences of his article, Rural
school community center as being “goodwill, fellowship, mutual sympathy, and
social intercourse among a group of individuals and families who make up a social
unit…” He continues to state that for community-building to occur, “there must be
an accumulation of capital before constructive work can be done” (Hanifan, 1916, p.
130). His very community-centered view of social capital is consistent with the
views held by more modern purveyors of the currency, only he treats it more as a
means to a healthy-functioning community. The more modern views, on the other
hand, tend to treat it as a catalyst for personal advancement. Later put forth by Alain
Bourdieu, he argues that “Children from families with a low level of parental
education are likely to lack those abilities normally transmitted by the family and
valued and rewarded by schools” (Blossfield & Shavit, 1993). Thus, urban youth
who emerge from a low socio-economic environment will face challenges in
acquiring the social capital necessary to be accepted in the mainstream of culture.
In his popular essay The forms of capital Bordieu states the three forms of
capital are economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. Cultural capital, he
states, can be obtained “in the absence of any deliberate inculcation, and therefore,
quite unconsciously” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 245). This is distinctive from social

47
capital, which is comprised of “social obligations (‘connections’), which is
convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital…” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 243).
Bourdieu states this distinction occurred to him as a way to explain the vast
differences in academic achievement by children of different social classes. He
considers these “achievements” as the profits children can obtain within the
“academic market” and how they correlate to the distribution of capital “between the
classes and class fractions” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 243).
Bourdieu’s link between capital and education stands to provide an economic
and social explanation for the outcomes of an applied social learning theory. He
continues to state that “This starting point implies a break with the presuppositions
inherent both in the commonsense view, which sees academic success or failure as
an effect of natural aptitudes…” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 243).
These successes and failures are almost completely due to the capital that
children possess through their immediate environment. Where capital provides
access to networks of growth, children have the capacity to succeed and grow to a
level beyond that of their parents; where the capital is restrictive or not convertible to
economic capital or able to be institutionalized, the children are subject to
reproducing the modeled behaviors and ideals of their immediate surroundings.
Bourdieu captures this in the following passage:
In other words, the share in profits which scarce cultural capital secures in
class-divided societies is based… on the fact that all agents do not have the
economic and cultural means for prolonging their children’s education
beyond the minimum necessary for the reproduction of the labor-power least
valorized at a given moment(Bourdieu, 1986, p. 245).

48
Bourdieu’s understanding of capital as a result of the relationships to which a
child is exposed, is wholly consistent with the notion of cultural context discussed by
Bandura and Vygotsky. Using fairly Marxian language, Bourdieu states that capital
is the sole factor in a child’s ability to rise above being able to sell something more
than his labor. In terms of soft skills, critical thinking skills and the other 21
st

century skills discussed by Wagner, social capital is the key to helping children
acquire the necessary skills to obtain the knowledge-based jobs of the 21
st
century.
Applying Social Capital Theory to Urban Educational Settings
Educator Ricardo Stanton-Salazar uses Bourdieu’s theory as the foundation
of his argument that social capital is essential for anyone hoping to enter the social
mainstream or advance professionally. He elevates the understanding of the
advantages of the theory to include a network or series of contacts that can refer a
person or speak on his or her behalf. He states that these aforementioned
institutional agents are integral to a good start in life. He writes:
Success within schools (or other mainstream institutions), therefore has never
been simply a matter of learning and competently performing technical skills;
rather, and more fundamentally, it has been a matter of learning how to
decode the system. […] it is understood that such decoding requires either an
explicit or implicit understanding that the rules governing social advancement
[…] have much to do with acquiring and exhibiting the dominant Discourse
in social interaction (Stanton-Salazar, 1997, p. 13).

Stanton-Salazar’s argument addresses the unspoken rules of operation that
govern our society’s organizations. These “rules,” oftentimes so subtle they are only
recognized by the subconscious, are learned in ways for which curriculum and lesson
planning oftentimes cannot account. He continues to discuss the ways in which

49
guidance can be sought: “Access to such support depends not only on good relations
with people capable of providing such support, but also on a built-up trust and often,
on certain obligations that bind one to the other”(Stanton-Salazar, 1997, p. 13).
Stanton-Salazar also recognizes the scarcity of these human resources for under
privileged youth. This scarcity raises a need for a system that can aid in the delivery
of social capital on a mass scale.
Social Learning and Social Capital Theory’s Effects on Motivation and
Learning
A great deal of research on the issue of motivation has been done with results
that confirm the intrinsic motivational effects of social learning theory and the
importance of social capital. Harackiewicz, Barron, Tauer, and Elliot (2002)
conducted a study where they looked at the performance of students whom they
grouped into three categories: Those wanting to learn the material out of a simple
desire to want to learn (Mastery goal) students wanting to get the best grades
(performance goals) and students who simply did not want to fail (performance
avoidance). Performance goals, which the authors define as “a focus on attaining
favorable judgments of competence relative to others,” are what students possess
when they are taking a course that they know is necessary for their continued
advancement (Mayer, 2008, p. 518). They are motivated by showing they are good
students and should be accepted into the roles in which they hope to fulfill. Mastery
goals, where students want to fully understand the content, are established by
students with a love for learning and deep intellectual curiosity. Students who have

50
mastery goals or performance goals will far outperform students who are simply
learning to pass a test or get a score that is good enough to get by (Harackiewicz,
Barron, Tauer, & Elliot, 2002).
Harackiewicz, et al., however, found additional benefits to performance in
that students who possessed mastery or performance goals were more likely to find
enjoyment in classes lectures and the actual execution of their assignments – making
their learning more engaged and self propelled. The authors conclude that when a
student possess one of these two types of goals, that they will do better
(Harackiewicz, et al., 2002). The challenge to educators lies in how to instill in
students a goal-oriented sense motivation that drives them to compete and succeed.
SLT would argue the desire to perform comes from having been inspired to want to
do better through modeled behavior. (Mayer, 2008, p. 519).
The results of this study pose the best possible scenario for learning in an
environment that needs to do two distinct things: foster an environment of helping
children find that thing about which they are motivated and passionate and, secondly,
provide ancillary and secondary skill sets, the mastery of which children understand
to be relevant and integral to their overall success. For even these fundamental
causes must have an underlying assumption that there is a reason to want to do
better.
Wagner discusses how this drive manifests in the presence of positive
relationships. The model schools he identifies in his research have the greatest
successes with students who go on to elite colleges and score high on standardized

51
tests despite a non-traditional home environment. These children benefit from
schools that deliver three distinct features: people, learning that connects to real life
and learning that is hands-on. He describes these features:
Students… are not only well known by their teachers but are in advisory
groups with a teacher who meets with them several times a week and
becomes a kind of extended family. Students also work on projects with
mentors outside of school. Second, opportunities to explore their questions
and interests are a driving force for learning. Third, learning is hands-on and
more personalized… with the result that students perform real-world tasks
and produce public products that reflect who they are – what they believe and
care about (Wagner, 2008, p. 258).

According to Wagner, these features of schooling make learning relevant,
develop students who possess mastery and performance goals and possess a drive
that comes from within.
The issue of motivation is furthered by Wagner, who cites Michael Jung, an
expert in corporate staffing. Jung argues that there are three primary reasons why
anyone learns. He states:
There is push, which is a need, threat or risk, but this is now a less plausible
or credible motivating force [in the industrialized countries] than it has been,
even for the disadvantaged. There’s transfer of habits – habits shaped by
social norms and traditional routines. But this too is becoming weaker now,
because of the erosion of traditional authority and social values. That leaves
only pull – interest, desire, passion (Wagner, 2008, p. 205).

Jung’s argument supports the idea of motivation being the most critical part of
learning. Students cannot be pushed or coerced into learning beyond a very basic
level of competency. If higher functions are to be obtained, they must emerge
through motivated, self-directed “desire” or “passion.” Wagner explains that it is the

52
third of these motivational forces, “interest, desire and passion” that sees most young
people responding to best, both in school and the workplace (Wagner, 2008, p. 205).
This view of learning today is seen in various modalities, one of note being
Challenge-based learning, or CBL, where students, focus on a specific problem or
objective they want to achieve, and set-off on a journey of exploration that motivates
them to think and work. CBL, an educational endeavor established by Apple, Inc., is
a program that aims to help students create a project with a challenge to be met. The
challenge triggers the intrinsic motivation that allows deep and complex problem
solving to occur. The report on CBL describes the process:
Students struggled and wrestled with a meaningful challenge, letting them
choose their own path to understanding within a clearly global issue like
sustainability, global warming, or war, and ultimately allowing them to come
up with both questions and answers as they directed the course of their own
learning (New Media New Media Consortium, 2010).

The success of this project exceeded most expectations and were of a nature that
moved students towards the very 21
st
century skills needs in the workplace. The
New Media Consortium reports that:
When asked about students’ mastery of the content, all the teachers (100%)
felt that students had either mastered the content or gained other valuable
skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration, or global and community
engagement. In general, students learned more than was expected, and most
students mastered the content (New Media Consortium, 2010, p. 28).

CBL demonstrates the ways in which learning can proceed in unprecedented
ways when children are internally motivated to complete a task. CBL is similar in
many respects to project-based learning, inspired by John Dewey, the often-cited
father of the constructivist view of learning, who spent his career arguing that

53
children “learn by doing.” In this view of learning, the role of the teacher is
distanced to that of a guide who can provide the guidance and assistance and be the
continuous reminder of inspiration the child.
Summary
Social capital provides children with the ability to advance and improve their
lives. While Bourdieu sees social capital as the development of capital beyond that
of one’s own labor, Stanton-Salazar sees it for the networks and “ladders” that
permits upward mobility through the acquisition of a new skill set. These networks
and the exposure to new ideas permit children to find interests and reasons to learn
that manifest themselves in new forms of motivation and can help a child learn in the
accelerated, self-directed ways needed for the acquisition of the complex skill sets
required by for the 21
st
century world of work.
Organizational Behavior and Change in the Educational Setting
Attempts to reform education have been made for decades, yet many experts
argue that they fail for too many obvious reasons. Seymour Sarason writes in his
book The culture of the school and the problem of change:
For certain purposes… it may be fruitful to consider these systems [parents,
finance boards, politicians and schools of education] as independent but
interacting, but if your aim is to understand why schools do or do not change,
the usual concept of a school system can be an effective barrier because it
restricts the scope of what you will look at and consider (Sarason, 1996, p.
10).

This depiction of the system raises concerns about the typical approaches to
school reform that come from business and industry. For nearly all reforms aim to

54
focus on changes within the system itself including but not limited to: more testing,
higher standards, more teacher training, exit exams, state standards, national core
standards, pay for performance, firing teachers, class offerings, fewer classes, charter
schools or bussing. And no criticism of these types of reforms is more apt than
Sarason’s, who states in his book The predictable failure of education reform that
“Although it is understandable why such proposals [for reform] get made – reflecting
as they do an intractability to the bulk of autonomous school districts to demonstrate
improvement – they are examples of two things: missing the point and ignoring the
obvious” (Sarason, 1990, p. 6). Sarason contends that school reforms simply aim too
low in their attempts to change schools. To fundamentally improve education, the
change must happen in a larger context than the school or district.
Edgar Schein, an expert in organizational reform, captures the problems of
failed reform by recounting the typical phases through which reform passes. He
states that intentional organizational change occurs on three different levels. The
first level is artifacts, the second is espoused beliefs and values and the third is basic
underlying assumptions (Schein, 2004). The first level, artifacts, is commonly
witnessed in the school setting as T-shirts, slogans, banners or uniforms. In certain
cases, these artifacts will cause people to change their behaviors, or rather, what
Schein refers to as “espoused beliefs and values.” In rare cases, however, the
behaviors will lead to a changing of the “basic” or “underlying” assumptions of the
culture, held individually by the people who comprise it.

55
The challenge in reforming any organization on a sustainable level lies in
changing the basic assumptions and beliefs that guide its decisions and ethos. As
Schein writes:
The human mind needs cognitive stability; therefore any challenge or
questioning of a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness. In
this sense, the shared basic assumptions that make up the culture of a group
can be thought of at both the individual and the group level as psychological
cognitive defense mechanisms that permit the group to continue to function.
(Schein, 2004, p. 32).

As Schein argues, the organization must transform itself at its foundations
and potentially in the broader society, if it is to make any real, lasting changes to the
work it does. Yet this change is the most difficult to make – for, as Schein states,
these basic assumptions are akin to a group’s DNA (Schein, 2004, p. 44).
Sarason, in accord with Schein’s conception of changing artifacts, states that
changes in schools are always “cosmetic and not fundamental” (Sarason, 1990, p. 5).
This is typically as far as most schools are able to change due to the unique
challenges they face that do not exist in most corporate environments. As Peter
Senge, an expert in organizational learning states, “Schools face a unique set of
pressures these days, unknown to any other kind of organization” (Senge, et al., 2000
p. 9). In Schools that Learn, Senge argues that schools are stuck in a feedback loop
of antiquated thinking. He questions: “Do we really want to re-create the schools we
remember from our own childhoods? Do we want to stop the flow of change and
create stagnant pools of schooling because that’s what educators were molded to fit
into?” (Senge, et al., 2000). Naturally, the answer to this question is a resounding

56
No. But escaping the grasps of tradition and habit are challenging in an organization
that has not witnessed many alternatives to its deeply ingrained modes of operation.
The school system of the future needs to escape this process of recycling its
habitual self and open its doors and minds to new possibilities. Senge states that this
change occurs through an organization’s commitment to becoming a learning
organization constantly aware of new ideas, approaches and changes in the
atmosphere, not only of their school, but the unique contexts in which its sits and by
which it is influenced. Senge refers to this as systems thinking and it sits at the
cornerstone of his conception of the learning organization, an idea which
underscores Senge’s overall approach to reform (Senge, et al., 2000). An
organization that learns, in contrast to an organization that becomes addicted to its
own habitual nature, is the organization capable of evolving. In a time of rapid
change, an organization that cannot learn to re-center its focus or new ways of
operating is doomed to fail or, at the very least, be mediocre (Senge, et al., 2000).
However, simply stating that school must become a learning organization is
insufficient. Many great leaders have tried to turn schools around, but the varied
interests of multiple parties, from boards, to community members to teachers, do not
permit any real change to take hold. However, one way that schools are beginning to
change is through a different model of organizational change known as disruptive
innovation.
This innovative approach comes from authors Clayton Christensen, Michael
Horn and Curtis Johnson, who argue in their book, Disrupting Class, that innovative

57
products and strategies disrupt the course of action in an organic fashion, slowly
transforming the way business is done. They argue that schools have “crammed the
new technologies into existing structures rather than allowing the disruptive
technology to take root in a new model and allow that to grow and change how they
operate” (Christensen, Horn, & Johnson, 2008, p. 12). This “cramming” is
emblematic of the attempts to change an organization from the top down through
effortful manipulation of the existing infrastructure. These are the artifacts placed
into the school that never fully transform the beliefs or underlying assumptions about
the organization. Christensen, et. al, argue that the most important factor in change
or creating a paradigm shift, is ultimately predicated upon whether it makes the lives
of those using it easier – not more complex by adding another step to a process, or
another piece to an already tightly packed curriculum or organization.
The authors cite an example of how “cramming” computers into the
classroom has not created a more student-centric learning environment because
teachers simply use them to “marginally improve the way they already teach”
(Christensen, et al., 2008, p. 73). The authors provide an example of this with
selected math activities and software such as “Franklin Learns Math or “Math
Rabbit. They state that “While these games are popular with children, they do not
supplant traditional teaching; instead, teachers use them to supplement and reinforce
the existing teaching model. As such, computers add cost while failing to
revolutionize the classroom experience”(Christensen, et al., 2008, p. 82).

58
The question thus remains: how can this change be created or spurred along
by the leader of an organization? Christensen et al. argue that for a technology to
truly take hold and create a paradigm shift, it must do so organically – in a way that
teachers would look at it and see its possibilities for improving their instruction – not
merely adding to the heap. When this improvement is noticeable, the technology
will take over and create a paradigm shift in the way online databases have done for
research, airplanes did for transcontinental travel, and online trading had done for
stock brokers. Christensen offers a solution in the design of innovative charter
schools arguing that the most effective technologies are not those that are forced
upon an organization, but those that catch on because of their sensibility, ease of use,
and overall ability to improve the ease with which work is done. These technologies
essentially “disrupt” the basic fabric of the existing modus operandi and usurp the
status quo by their viral impact in and on an organization.
The idea of a school being large and resistant to change, however, is not one
that makes it immune to disruptive technology. Charter schools are certainly faster
and more streamlined and not mired by layers of bureaucracy or heavy risk
management departments, but they do limit access to children, have selective
enrollments, present serious problems to the discussion of equity and are not always
going to be present in areas of the highest need. They occasionally provide a
laboratory for experimenting with new ideas, but are only a temporary repair, not the
cure needed to improve education for all.

59
Summary
To consider these views of organizational change, the organization must be
one that can learn and adapt to new ways of working, with leadership being capable
of implementing not simply new things, but disruptive innovations that can
organically alter the daily operation of a school and the learning of students. But, as
Sarason points out, schools are not the open systems the public believes they are.
Thus, for a school to learn beyond its habitual nature and to be able to teach in ways
it has not formerly done, its doors will have to open and its relationships will have to
grow into the community at large.
Mentoring as a Means to Creating Social Capital
Social learning theory best captures the ways in which learning occurs, while
social capital theory provides a context in which children can grow and excel.
Mentoring is a means by which urban children can be brought into contact with those
people from whom they can learn and obtain social capital. Mentoring can take
many shapes and forms. Aubrey and Cohen, in their management book Working
Wisdom (1995) list the five primary jobs of mentors. The first is accompanying,
where a person joins another on a journey. The second is sowing, where a mentor
plants a seed or message in the mind of the mentee or learner. The third is
catalyzing, where a mentor acts as a new element in a system that accelerates
performance and output. The fourth is showing, where the mentor essentially models
behaviors and actions to be emulated by the mentee. The fifth is harvesting, where

60
the mentor aids and encourages the mentee through the challenges of creating or
bringing a dream to life (Aubrey & Cohen, 1995, p. 23).
Mentoring in the educational context has a variety of uses. In many instances
it helps to build the self-esteem of a child, while in others, it can be to guide a mature
student through a transition to a career or college.
Mentoring’s connection to social learning and social capital is frequently
referred to. One example comes from Linnehan’s 2001 study that focused on the
effects of a work-based mentoring program on African American students’ academic
performance.
The presumed beneficial effect of the mentor–student relationship is based on
the principles of social learning theory. Consistent with this theory,
interaction with the mentor not only may create and/or change student
attitudes and beliefs but may influence student behavior (Linnehan, 2001, p.
311).

Findings of the study include a positive correlation between students
participating in a work-based mentoring program and academic performance
(Linnehan, 2001, p. 321).
The success of mentoring programs has been reiterated in numerous studies
focusing on various aspects of mentoring. Sharon Beier, et al. in a study published in
2000 in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine demonstrates that
students who had a mentor showed a decrease in 4 of 5 “risk behaviors” (Beier,
Rosenfeld, Spitalny, Zansky, & Bontempo, 2000).

61
Mentoring is also beneficial to higher level students. Soucy & Larose (2000), in a
study focusing on how well teenagers adjusted to college life, found that mentor
support was a reliable predictor of success in college (Soucy & Larose, 2000).
Popular media, as well, has hailed the successes of mentoring programs in
aiding academic achievement. The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted the
success of a Chicago school, Urban Prep, whose South Shore Campus had mentors
available to students all times of day and night to help them with academic, personal
and emotional issues (Banchero, 2010). Anecdotal evidence from the boys attending
the school demonstrates the way these mentors instill a sense of pride and conviction
in the boys to motivate them to strive for top colleges and scholarships.
Schools are additionally using mentoring to teach advanced skills in the
STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields. The ACE Mentor
program is one such organization who facilitates mentoring opportunities between
students and companies working in STEM fields and is “increasingly being seen as
one potentially effective model for reaching the Obama administration’s goal of
getting more youths into science, technology, engineering and mathematics…”
(Abdul-alim, 2011, p. 1).
Mentoring is gaining popularity in both public and private schools, however
its occurrence is episodic and always unique to a specific school, organization or
campus. While these cases present opportunities to learn about how these programs
function, they do not operate on a scale that can help bring social capital to the
populations of urban children who need it most.

62
The research demonstrates that mentoring has the power to create two distinct
outcomes: helping students make better social decisions resulting in a decrease in
risk behaviors, and to helping to motivate them to learn at accelerated rate through
real-world contexts for experiential learning.
Mentoring is an effective method of bringing social capital to urban youth to
give them an advantage in the 21
st
century job market. Because many urban youth
come from backgrounds that lack support from adults, mentoring provides them the
opportunity to generate a sense of confidence and the inspiration to focus on bigger
goals. Only with these components in place, can productive, high-level learning
occur. Mentoring contains the necessary components that, when paired with
traditional curriculum, creates a synergistic effect and can propel children to great
success. At present, however, the literature on mentoring programs does not provide
scholars and educators the ability to understand how to implement a mentoring
program on a large scale in a systematic way.
Summary
Mentoring provides an opportunity for children, to come into contact with
others who can show or model various behaviors for them that help them learn.
Popular, as well as scientific evidence, exists supporting the connection between
mentorship and learning as having effects ranging from children becoming motivated
to go to college to reducing certain behaviors that are seen as putting them or others
at risk. There exists a clear connection between mentoring as a means of bringing
social capital to children while improving academic and social well-being.

63
Conclusion to the Review of Literature
The six parts of this literature review explain the ways in which learning
occurs in a social context, why embracing this learning is crucial as America
progresses through the 21
st
century, and provides an apparatus through mentoring,
for teaching children in this social manner to help them grow and be competitive in
the global job market. Additionally, it discusses the challenges that currently exist in
schools and the current limitations these institutions experience.
Absent from the literature is a coherent understanding of how the mentoring
programs that bring social capital to children, can be created in schools on a mass
scale and how the schools themselves need to be approached or infused with the
capacities to permit for these changes to take hold and thrive. It is this gap in the
literature this research aims to bridge. By studying a number of organizations
currently working with or in schools, this research performs a study to help bring
together all these elements in a clear and consistent manner. The result is a means of
bringing social capital to urban students through mentoring as an embedded
component of their secondary schooling and not merely as an episodic component
they may or may not have the luck to encounter.

64
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY

Statement of the Problem
Teenagers in urban high schools suffer from a lack of social capital that can
inspire them to learn, provide them with informal networks and guide them into the
adult world of post-secondary education and work. At present, various schools,
programs and organizations attempt to provide inspiring mentors to urban youth, yet
there exists little consistency or ability for such efforts to be implemented in a
continuous, sustainable way in an urban school district that ensures such mentorship
and access to social capital is a primary, ongoing component part of a child’s high
school education.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to analyze existing mentoring programs in an
effort to design a framework that will allow urban schools to bring social capital to
all children in a sustainable way.
Research Questions
1. What types of mentoring programs currently exist in both External
Mentoring Organizations (EMOs) and Schools, and how do they operate
to provide social capital to children?
2. What are the characteristics of mentorship programs that make them most
successful and sustainable?

65
3. What barriers do / would mentorship programs encounter in the public
school sector?
4. What would a design for an urban school district look like that could
assist in overcoming these barriers and provide mentorship to all urban
youth?
Methodology
This is a qualitative study building a grounded theory about the ways
mentoring programs can operate in schools to create social capital for urban youth.
Sampling Strategy
Relevant organizations were identified through online investigations and
word-of-mouth referrals. The online searches began with Google searches for
mentoring organizations in Los Angeles, since southern California is the region in
which this study was conducted. The referrals came from educators who have
experience with mentoring programs. Ten organizations were initially identified.
After further online investigation, two organizations were not included because they
did not have established, systematic relationships with schools. Their mentoring was
episodic and, while they were helping children, study of the organizations would not
have aided in an understanding of how to create a sustainable relationship between a
school and an organization or in the development of a substantial in-house system.
The cases for this study are represented in Table 3.1.

66
Table 3.1
Cases
Organization Location
Type of
Organization Basic Organization of Mentoring
A Hawthorne, CA School Internship during final months of Junior
year.
B San Diego, CA School Internship during final months of Junior
year.
C Nationwide School Bi-weekly internship around which all
other curriculum is designed.
D Orange County, CA School Elective class that includes job
shadowing and monthly meetings.
E San Rafael, CA EMO Monthly meetings to help students apply
for college and scholarships.
F Los Angeles, CA EMO Partnerships with LAUSD Schools and
after school programs.
G Los Angeles, CA EMO Groups during after school programs
with LAUSD partner schools.
H Los Angeles, CA EMO Employees of Companies who partner
with organization that matched them
with schools and students.

These cases were initially thought to be similar and easily comparable, and
chosen through theoretical sampling—a strategy used to identify cases thought to
help a researcher form the best theory (Creswell, 1998, p. 57). Early consideration,
however, showed them to be vastly different in their organization and operation. To
compare them, open coding and constant comparison were used. These methods of
comparison will be discussed in greater depth in the “data analysis” section.

67
Data Collection
Data were collected in three ways: initial and follow-up interviews, document
analysis, and incidental communication.
Initial interviews. Initial interviews were arranged via email with key
representatives of the selected organizations. The interviewees had knowledge of
both management and operations within their organization. Interviews were
conducted both in person and by phone and lasted approximately 45-60 minutes
each. Notes were taken during the interviews on a legal pad and a laptop computer.
A voice recorder was not used in order to encourage free speaking on the part of the
interviewee.
The initial interviews were “informal conversational interviews.” Creswell
states that establishing a good rapport between interviewer and interviewee is
essential to successful interviewing (Creswell, 1998). Patton, additionally, states that
such “conversational interviews” are best to “pursue information in whatever
direction appears to be appropriate, depending on what emerges from observing a
particular setting or from talking with one or more individuals from that setting”
(Patton, 2002, p. 342).
A four-to-six question interview guide based upon the unique characteristics
and goals of the organization, was also prepared prior to the interview to permit
transition to a standardized open-ended interview in the case that a strong rapport
between interviewer and interviewee did not manifest. Such open-ended questions
provided respondents an opportunity to talk at length about their organization and

68
relate personal stories of their experiences with mentoring and running a mentoring
organization.
In most interviews, the interview guide was used to direct the interview
process, even when rapport was strong. The prewritten questions served as probes
for the interview where the respondents were permitted to use their own words to tell
their stories. Upon completion of the interview, respondents were notified that they
would be contacted in several weeks to arrange a follow-up interview. Initial data
were analyzed immediately in order to guide the follow-up interviews. This process
of early analysis, recommended by Miles and Huberman, will be discussed in greater
detail in the analysis section.
Follow-up interviews. The follow-up interviews were much more structured
and consisted of direct questions designed to complete the data set that was created
after analysis of data obtained through the initial interviews. The data were arranged
in a matrix of six categories or topics and multiple subcategories, created from the
unique organizational characteristics identified in the preliminary interviews. The
follow-up interviews aimed directly at completing the matrix and obtaining
information about how characteristics of some organizations were relevant or
manifest in the others. All follow-up interviews were conducted by phone.
Incidental communication. Additional communication, often via email or
phone, was necessary with some subjects to add to or clarify the information
gathered in the follow-up interviews. It must be noted that not all subcategories of
information were relevant to each case, and thus the matrix contains empty spaces.

69
Documents. Subjects were asked to provide any formal documentation that
would add to or clarify the description and understanding of their organization’s
mentoring operations. The documents provided a variety of information from basic
facts and statistics to, in one case, a manual with instructions on how to advise a
student involved in mentoring. Most of the documents, however, were designed for
marketing purposes, were fact-based and added little to the analysis. These
resources provided an opportunity to validate information obtained through the
interviews.
Procedures. Data was collected via a series of visits to the field in what
Creswell refers to as a “zig-zag” approach (Creswell, 1998, p. 57). He describes this
approach as one where the researcher continually alternated between retrieving data
from the field, analyzing it and returning to the field to enable a constant
comparative analysis process. Constant comparison will be discussed in greater
depth in the analysis section below.
Consent and Data Handling
All participants in the interview process were notified both verbally and in
writing that they were voluntarily participating in a research project and that their
identities would be kept confidential. Interestingly, several expressed a desire to
have their organizations named in the study, while several wished to remain
anonymous. All organizations and respondents, however, were made anonymous at
the time of the writing of the report. Respondents were not paid for their time,
however they were sent a thank you card containing a $10 gift card for coffee.

70
Additionally, several respondents requested copies of the final report to be sent to
them upon completion.
All interviews guides, notes and documents received from the organization
were kept in file folders in a locked file cabinet. Digital files were saved on a
password-protected, laptop computer. Digital files were backed up on a portable hard
drive that was also password protected.
Data Analysis
Early analysis. Data analysis began immediately following the first
interview. Miles and Huberman state that early analysis permits the fieldworker to
“cycle back and forth between thinking about the existing data and generating
strategies for collecting new, often better, data” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 50).
This early analysis showed that cases originally thought to be similar, were in fact,
vastly different. While they all contained the common element of mentoring, their
processes and organizational structures were found to need deeper understanding to
make comparison possible.
One such example was in the discovery that mentoring was interpreted as
meaning very different things depending on the organization. For some
organizations mentoring was a “big brothers / sisters” type of program that permitted
urban teenagers to have someone to talk to once or twice a month. Other
organizations saw mentoring as a work-site based internship that occurred for two
straight weeks from 9am to 5pm, where students learned about an industry or used
their skills to help grow a business. To be able to compare both of these types of

71
organizations despite their vastly different aims, differentiation had to be drawn
between programs focusing on social well-being and those focusing on students’
professional ambitions.
Open coding. Data was constantly analyzed in order to identify common
elements and to create topics for comparison. This process is referred to as open
coding, by Corbin and Strauss, and permits the natural emergence of categories for
organizing data (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). The process operates in a similar fashion
to most different systems design, a sampling strategy popularized in comparative
politics, that permits the comparison of complex organizations—typically
governments, that operate in vastly different ways as long as they contain a common
objective (Peters, 1998).
Whether the organization was a school that uses mentoring as a component of
its curriculum, or an organization that exists independent of schools, this design
views both types of organizations as doing the same work of connecting students to
inspiring mentors as a means to grow emotionally, socially, intellectually and
ultimately, professionally.
Constant comparison. Constant comparison was used throughout the
research process to analyze data. The method involves “taking information from
data collection and comparing it to emerging categories” (Creswell, 1998, p. 57).
Glaser and Strauss describe this process as “joint coding and analysis” stating that it
permits a more systematic generation of theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 102).

72
One example of how this was conducted in this study began with the
realization that a category called “Mentor recruitment” could not be used for all the
cases. During the interview process, it became clear that some organizations operate
by having companies approach them for assistance in mentoring youth, while other
schools do not recruit at all, but leave the students in charge of applying or reaching
out to mentors who will allow them to come to their workplace and observe and
participate in their day-to-day professional life. These distinctions made a category
strictly titled “mentor recruitment,” retreat from its assumptions that recruitment is
always necessary. The category was ultimately titled “Establishing Mentor / Mentee
Relationships” with subcategories that explored the different ways in which mentors
were matched with students.
The six categories that were ultimately created are: 1) Establishing Mentor
/Mentee relationships; 2) Operations and Procedures; 3) Funding; 4) Curriculum; 5)
Objectives and Measures of Effectiveness; 6) Sustainability, Growth and
Transferability.
As data was more closely analyzed via constant comparison, subcategories
emerged that deepened understanding of the data and increased the ability to explain
the phenomena. This process permitted the creation of the data matrix with its six
definitive categories, each category representing “a unit of information composed of
events, happenings and instances” (Creswell, 1998, p. 56).
One example of how the subcategories were created comes from the
“Operations and Procedures” category. Initially, one subcategory was “What is the

73
schedule for meetings and their duration?” Responses found several participants
explaining and justifying their schedule. That “extra” information, found to be very
valuable, was then placed into a new subcategory called “What are the benefits of
this scheduling” which became a question asked directly in the follow-up interviews
with the other organizations who had not already offered that information.
The completion of the first round of interviews showed each case to have
data in some or none of the fields. The second round of interviews then attempted to
complete the matrix by asking specific questions in the areas where there was little
or no data in the matrix. The design of the matrix can be seen in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2
Sample Data Matrix
-Category-
Org. A Org. B Org. C Org. D Org. E Org. F Org. H Org. G
Subcategory
Subcategory
Subcategory
Subcategory
Subcategory

74
With a completed matrix, constant comparison again was used to look
horizontally and vertically across the matrix at the different responses received from
each of the organizations. This analysis allowed determinations to be made about the
most popular actions and procedures, and what was unique to each case. Patterns
and anomalies relevant to the research questions were identified and are reported in
chapter five.
On the horizontal axis, data was scanned for both repetition, and uniqueness.
Repetition signified saturation of a subcategory with a single best or popular practice
(Strauss & Corbin, 1990). If a subcategory was not saturated, analysis looked for
practices that were seen to be unique to an organization and that would be relevant
and effective in a school setting. These findings were then placed on one of four lists
that corresponded to the four research questions. Each list was then reviewed and
data was grouped and presented in the write up in the relevant section of chapter
five.
Beyond coding and constant comparison, an additional means of analysis was
necessary for this research. As this research aimed to generate a theoretical model
for bringing mentoring to a large urban school district, a necessary component of the
research lies in understanding how this processes would operate in a urban, public
school. However, investigations of how large urban high schools operate, were not a
component of this project. Thus, the personal impressions of the researcher and his
experience in multiple southern California public high schools, is an essential
component for generating a grounded theory. Wolcott states that in order to truly

75
interpret data, occasionally the researcher must connect it with his personal
experience (Wolcott, 1994). This type of analysis is typically found in ethnography
and requires “interpretation of the culture-sharing group” as a step in transforming
data (Creswell, 1998). Despite this being a grounded theory study, true analysis of
the data required consideration of how it fit within the context of a school and for
that, the researcher’s personal experience and knowledge of schools, districts,
teaching and children, are essential to the process of theory generation.
Assumptions
This study makes several assumptions. First, it assumes that the interviewees
possess in-depth knowledge about the inner-workings of their organizations. Such
description and detail are critical to understanding how their organizations operate
and how those practices will translate into a new school district-based mentoring
model. Secondly, the study assumes that the practices that permit mentoring
organizations and charter schools to run successful mentoring programs are
transferable to a public school system.
Internal and External Validity
Internal Validity
Internal validity, in this study, aims to establish a reliable connection between
the efforts being made on the part of the mentoring organization and the actual
effects they are thought to have in helping the students involved in obtaining social
capital. In this study, internal validity is established by evidence produced within the
study itself in a category titled “Objectives and Measures of Effectiveness” that asks

76
participants questions expressly designed to gauge the effects of the mentoring as
well as the way in which they have been observed.
External Validity
External validity, in this study, aims to establish whether the findings of the
individual organizations can be reliably generalized, in this case, into the theory
generated. This is established through guidance and assistance of the key members
advising this research, as well as members of the organizations being researched,
who presently work or have worked extensively in school settings and can provide
valuable feedback about the feasibility of mentoring practices as they apply to public
schools.
Writing of the Report
The narrative report begins with a presentation of the six data categories in
table form, highlighting in narrative, the critical discoveries made. Chapter five
explores the key findings of the study, then responds to each of the research
questions in turn. The response to the final research question will be the theory of
how to implement mentoring in a large urban school district, grounded in the
findings of the preceding inquiry.

77
CHAPTER IV
RESEARCH FINDINGS

This chapter presents the data collected in this study through interviews,
incidental communication and documents from the eight cases investigated in this
study. The interviews were conducted to generate data about the nature of each
organization’s mentor program, focusing on six categories, referred to hear as
“topics.” The topics are: 1) Establishing mentor / mentee relationships; 2)
Developing operations and procedures; 3) Curriculum; 4) Objectives and measures
of effectiveness 5) Funding; 6) Sustainability, growth and transferability. As the
interviews progressed, a number of subcategories were developed for each main
category that allows for a more fine-grained understanding of how each different
organization operated and viewed its work.
These data are summarized and displayed in six tables: one for each of their
major topics. To allow an easy comparison of the similarities and differences among
the organizations, the tables are formed with columns for each case and with rows
for each of the topic-related subcategories.
Topic One: Establishing Mentor / Mentee Relationships
Subjects had a great deal to say about the topic of establishing mentor /
mentee relationships and preliminary analysis generated 13 subcategories that allow
comparison across the cases. The first subcategory, “Who are your mentors?” shows
the varied types of individuals who become mentors. The next three categories:

78
“What do mentors get out of mentoring?” “What do companies get out of having
their employees mentor?” and “Does your organization benefit from a corporate
culture or ethos of giving?” show some of the motivations that drive mentors to work
with children.
The next subcategories explore how the organizations are similar and
different in their means to recruit, prepare and maintain their mentor staffs and what
issues develop in actually running the programs: “How are mentors most often
recruited or secured?” “What challenges exist in your efforts to secure mentors?”
“What do you do when you have more students than mentors?” “What challenges
exist in keeping mentors on-board?” “What training do you provide to your
mentors?” “What is the average length of time a mentor continues to mentor before
quitting?” and “How are mentors matched with students?” The data show some
basic ways the organizations troubleshoot and overcome challenges. These data
begin to reveal a deeper understanding of what keeps mentors engaged and makes
programs more successful.
Finally, there were portions of the interviews that were important but not
directly comparable across sites. It was necessary to add a subcategory, “Other,” to
display these points. Similarly, analysis of the documents collected in the study also
produced idiosyncratic points worth capturing and are displayed in the subcategory
“Unique information from documents.” It was apparent that these categories are
helpful for each of the main topics and were subsequently added to each table.

79
Table 4.1
Establishing Mentor / Mentee Relationships
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Who are
your
mentors?
Members of local
businesses, and
companies.

Individuals
working in specific
fields and
companies who
have relationships
with the school.
Members of local
businesses, and
companies.

Individuals
working in
specific fields and
companies who
have relationships
with the school.
Members of local
businesses and
people identified
through a school
database.

If no mentor
exists previous,
students will cold-
call businesses.

Mentors are
always sought for
professional
knowledge and
professional
standing.
Community
members working
in professional
positions of
interest to
students in the
high school.
Local members of
the community
who seek to
volunteer.

High population
of white women,
stay-at-home-
moms who have a
desire to help the
community and
struggling
children.
Members of
companies and
organizations who
have allowed the
organization to
come and “pitch”
the employees.
Three categories
of mentors:
- Teachers,
- Business
people
- College
students.

This variety
helps with
recruiting from a
wider base, adds
to the dynamics
and people the
children are able
to see and
encounter and
diversifies the
"group" of
mentor
capabilities.
Worksite and
community based.

Work-based
volunteers are
employees from
businesses in area.

Community-based
volunteers are
community
members, often
affiliated with an
organization like a
church who wants
to mentor.

College students
are less reliable
and not sought.

“Young
professionals who
hate their jobs.“

80
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What do
mentors get
out of this
experience?
Corporations
recognize they
are training next
generation of
STEM employees
to bolster tech
industry with
American talent.

Companies state
an inability to fill
existing openings
due to a lack of
talent.
Mentors feel
they've done a
social good.

"They have a
give-back sort of
attitude."

"Adults lack
many of the
[technical] skills
kids do and they
feel like they
really get
something out of
the internship."

Many workers
fear that there will
be a shortage of
people to continue
their work upon
retirement and
want to take the
initiative to train
people to pass the
legacy / work to.
People want to
give back to
community.
Take part in and
give back to their
community.

Mentors also have
the Ability to
network with other
mentors in
community through
the school
functions and
increase their own
businesses.
Mentors are
mostly middle-
aged, wealthy
and have time to
give to
community.
Part of corporate
culture.
Part of corporate
culture.
Satisfy a sense of
altruism and a
desire to “give
back”

Some mentors had a
mentor of their own
who helped them
when they were
young, or, they
wish they did and
want to provide the
opportunity to
someone else.

81
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What do
companies
get out of
having their
employees
mentor?
“Did you know…
technology is
obsolete as soon as
it arrives on the
shelf?”

The companies
want to plant the
seed of interest in
kids so they enter
the field.
Connections to
kids who are
potential future
employees, who
could be guided
into the industry.

Some are
frustrated with
caliber of college
graduates coming
into their field and
want to train their
own.

Some are
connected to kids
and want to guide
them.

Smaller businesses
get “free
employees” to
work on projects.

Popular especially
during the
economic
downturn with
smaller
companies.

“Economically it’s
a plus" for
businesses.
Corporate
adoptions act as a
morale booster
with respect to the
company being
engaged in
community service
or outreach.

People like to
know the company
they work for or
buy from is
involved in good
work.

Also “allows a
manager to see
who their natural
leaders are” and
who takes the
opportunity to
mentor.

Much of the
curriculum
requires people to
be a leader, extend
themselves and
“demonstrate who
the superstars are.”

82
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Does your
organization
benefit from
a corporate
culture or
ethos of
giving?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Not directly.

Mentoring is by
individuals, not by
company.
No. Yes. Yes.. Yes.
How are
mentors most
often
recruited or
secured?
Corporate
connection
through executive
director's industry
contacts.

School is in a
desirable position
geographically,
near businesses
that surround
LAX.

Many members
of its board who
are well
connected in their
respective
industries.
Data base of
existing mentors.

Students research
their own
mentors.

Corporate
partnerships and
connections
provide leads.
Students can
access a database
of companies and
individuals who
mentored in the
past.

If no one in the
database does the
work the student
is interested in,
students will
make cold calls.
Mentors from
community
approach school.

Students seek out
connections
through family
friends and
community
connections.

Cold Calling.

Local networks of
families and friends
and alumni of
school.

Community-based
networks or local
businesses and
friends of students
and their parents.
Mentors learn
about the
opportunity
through word of
mouth,
volunteer and
are paired with
students.
Corporate
partnerships and
presentations to
companies
(Ernst and
Young, Capital
Group, NBC
Universal) as
well as word of
mouth.

Many
corporations and
companies have
an ethos of
public service
and giving back
to their
community and
encourage such
efforts on the
part of their
staff.
Corporate
adoptions
program -
Corporate
adoptions are
when company
leadership grants
company-wide
permission and
endorses the
organization’s
program for
employees to take
the necessary
time to
participate as a
mentor.

Word of mouth.
Word of mouth.

Corporate
connections /
worksite.

Ads on
volunteermatch.com
and craigslist.

83
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What
challenges
exist in your
efforts to
secure
mentors?
“The economy.”
Everyone is
running a tight
ship right now

It’s a big
responsibility for
a mentor to take a
student under
their wing right
now.

Money and
transportation –
students have to
find a way to get
to their
internships.

Ensuring
mentoring is
valuable and not
just a job making
copies or
stapling.
With emphasis
on career / job,
students
sometimes
realize they are
not as interested
in field / job as
the thought they
were and now
they're
committed for
the semester or
year.
“We don't have a
lot of trouble.
We'd like more
business partners
with dedicated
time.”
Few challenges
because program is
well established

Always have direct
referrals through
community.

Recommendations
to go to chamber of
commerce

Parents or mentors
are biggest source
of mentors.
Mentors join
without too much
trouble.
Expansion to
Marin and
Sonoma
counties has
doubled number
of students in
last year – they
need twice as
many mentors.

Getting the
timing right for
matching
mentors with
mentees.

“Basic
recruiting in
new
communities
without the
[reputation] and
word of mouth
we have in
established
areas.”
Not always
successful
especially in a
down economy
where the worker
is being stretched
to do more in the
office.
Mentoring can
take time.
Reaching a large
enough audience
with outreach

Once they're in the
door, people are
interested.

“The retention rate
is good once they're
in. It’s getting them
to take the first
steps [that’s the
challenge].”

The organization
has no advertising
budget.

84
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What do you
do when you
have more
students than
mentors?
Break students
into cohorts / use
a group model.
Tends not to be
an issue.

If it is, they will
divide class into
halves and have
mentors double-
up. Also use the
semester one and
two plan so
mentors can be
shared while still
maintaining a
one-to-one ratio.

Sometimes you
may have two
people with one
mentor at a
single
organization.
Continue
working with
community to
find more.

“We haven't
really hit a true
saturation point."

Providence, RI is
challenging
because a lot of
orgs are looking
for mentors.

Some kids have
to work hard to
find a mentor.
Has not occurred.

If students choose
career fields that
cannot be
accommodated -
they are asked to
change focus or go
and find a mentor
to bring them in.
Use groups
when you can't
find enough
mentors

“Its great to be
expanding, but
it's challenging,
especially in
new areas.”
Frequently
happens –
especially with
“college” and
“business”
mentors who are
hard to recruit.
But the teachers
are consistent and
always there.

“They'll usually
come through to
help out in the
end.”
Use site partners as
much as possible /
tailor students
working with to
number on mentors
available to
minimize wait list.

Let someone start
late - but “cap [the
number of] kids at
mentor level.”

85
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What
challenges exist
in keeping
mentors on
board?
Front loading
students and
mentors and
ensuring the student
knows how to act
appropriately and
properly.

Ensuring autonomy
on the part of the
student so they
don’t have to be
watched over
constantly.
Making sure there's
a good fit with
respect to desires of
mentor and
organization and
the interests of the
students in the
business-the wrong
fit can create a very
different
relationship.

A poor match can
ruin it for future
efforts and they'll
take a year off
which turns into
leaving the
program.
Biggest challenges
exist when mentors
have a problem with
a specific mentee.
Sometimes the
mentee may be too
much of a
commitment.

Sometimes they
don’t have real
work for the
mentee. The school
doesn’t want kids
just doing busy
work.

Mentors don't
understand this is a
partnership, not a
helper - so it's an
authentic
partnership.
“Kids that flake and
dishearten the mentor.”
Kids must know they re
representing the program
as well as themselves and
must be committed.

Mentors get tired of
making time in the
schedule and the kid does
not follow through.

Mentors must have the
right attitude or they don't
last. Kids change from
year to year. They have
to have good experiences
with the program.

Mentors must get past the
idea of a "career
mentoring" program – it’s
more that they are
mentoring a young person
in becoming an adult,
college decisions and
emotional and moral
support.

Mentors can help students
look beyond parental
preferences (if both went
to USC, for example)
Students need to be
empowered to find what
works best for them.
For many devoted
mentors, one poor
experience
sometimes ruins
it.

Work
commitments,
can't give the time
to the mentee.

The organization
must work to
make them feel
like a community
and understand
they are not alone
in their
frustrations.
"Retaining mentors
is a monster."

A lot of factors are
out of their control -
extenuating factors
such as bosses
changing schedules,
life changes, babies,
divorces, losing
jobs, etc. College
students, course
change, availability.
Workloads change.

The organization
makes sure they get
out of it what they
want to get out of it.

Work to find
activities that suit
their interests and
desires.

Provide a lot of
help and support to
mentors.

Be sure kids are
seen and respected.
Program is well
structured- mentors /
mentees are in
frequent contact - they
generally don't get
discouraged.

One challenge is when
mentors have a tough
kid who doesn't show
up for mentoring or the
relationship is a poor
match.

There are personal
challenges such as life
changes (kids, job,
moving, and time.)

86
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What
training
do you
provide
to your
mentors?
Schools meets
with advisors to
ensure proposed
internship work
is beneficial to
the students and
is a project they
will learn from.
Guidance is
provided through
the general
expectations of the
program established
at outset.
Organization
provides a
schedule to help
mentors stay on
track with
deadlines for
applications.
30 minutes each
week is dedicated
to checking in with
mentors and
providing an
overview of the
planned curricular
activities.

“We tell mentors:
‘Don't be a
counselor.’"
Very little – they
just participate in
the activities.

When they are one-
on-one, they hang
out casually.

Mentors can office
call if they feel
additional support
is needed.
What is
the
average
length of
time a
mentor
continues
to mentor
before
quitting?
Approximately 7
years average
from the general
mentor pool.

The program
recently changed
schedules to the
three-week full-
time
commitment.
30% of the pool
was lost because
of the
commitment.
One of the earliest
schools has people
who've been on
board for 15 years
– the maximum
length possible.

But it generally
varies greatly. At
least a year -
generally more but
it depends on the
interests of the
kids.

Sometimes a
student may not
want the job even
if the mentor is
there.
Most will be around
5-6 years. “If they
make it past the first
year, they usually
stick around unless
they move, have a
child, get a new
job.”
Varies greatly.
7-8 years for
some, others
much shorter. 3-
4 on average.
A one-year
commitment from a
mentor is a
challenge. "If you
get them for
multiple years,
you're really
lucky."

Average
commitment 2-3
years per mentor.
Excellent retention
rate for the 9-month
process. (A study
found only half
relationships make
it through) but at
Org H 90% last the
duration.

“You need 9-12
months to show an
impact.” Any less
can have a negative
impact on the child.

Most mentors are in
the 1-3 year range.

87
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
How are
mentors
"matched"
with
students?
Relationships are
student initiated
and based upon
interests.
Relationships are
often student
initiated and based
upon interests.
Students initiate
the relationship.

In cases where
students choose
less traditional
jobs or interests
that are
unavailable, for
example a
Marine Biologist
too far inland,
the school will
assess the skills
needed to be
successful in that
area (zoology)
and find a
placement that
will help them
pursue that goal.
Student initiated
through informal
networks,
meetings and
visitations on
campus.
During mentor
interviews the
org identifies
preferences in
age, gender,
student’s college
ambition (2 vs. 4
year colleges);
then interview
students on their
"ideal mentor."

The organization
now uses a
survey that
inquires about
mentor interests,
leisure and
personalities.
Sorting the files
takes a lot of
time.
Mentoring groups
are assigned by
program
administration.

Dynamics are less
important in the 3
mentors to 12 kids
ratio than the one to
one.
Organization hosts
an informal meet
and greet where
they can introduce
themselves to each
other and find
someone they
connect with, to be
a partner for future
events.

88
Table 4.1, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Other “Don't keep
tapping the same
mentors year
after year” - give
them a break to
ensure they stick
with the school.
In addition to
mentors, advisors
of the program
have a high burn-
out rate due to the
workload of
designing
curriculum around
internships as well
as overseeing the
internships.
This style of
recruitment raises a
question about the
financial / tax
incentives for a
manager or
business owner to
offer this to his /
her company.

Unique
information
from
documents
General language
in the document
indicates the
mentoring
program is
designed to be a
fun and enriching
activity.

School states that
its program has
been used as a
model by other
schools across
California (Mentor
Handbook).
Materials provide
transparency about
the aims and
ambitions of the
program.

Glossy and
presented like an
executive
summary, they
indicate a respect
for the time
constraints of
professionals who
might be
mentoring.

89
Topic Two: Operations and Procedures
Topic two, operations and procedures, also contains very rich and detailed
responses. While the first topic focuses expressly on the mentors themselves and
ways to bring them into the organization, category two looks more closely at the way
students are brought into the program.
The first subcategory, “Basic situation of mentoring program,” shows the
organization’s basic structure and how it works to provide mentoring in some
capacity to urban children.
The following subcategories were all created prior to the start of the
interviews: “Who are the children being mentored and / or how do they come to your
attention?” “Precautions taken for child safety location of interaction between
mentor and mentee,” “How does the mentee get to the location of the mentoring?”
“What precautions are taken for liability / insurance purposes?” “How long is the
mentor / mentee relationship?” and “What is the schedule for meetings and their
duration?” These subcategories show procedural information essential to
understanding how the program operates on a very basic level, yet are critical to
being able to ask follow-up questions about the details. The data obtained from these
questions varies greatly and led to the creation of the subcategory “What are the
benefits of this scheduling?”
The last two subcategories: “What is the mentor / mentee ratio?” and “Do
you match mentor / mentee genders?” show additional critical details about how the
organizations operates.

90
Table 4.2
Operations and Procedures
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Basic
situation of
mentoring
program
All students have a
one to two week
internship at the
end of their junior
year of high
school. It is a full-
time internship
lasting for one to
three weeks and a
graduation
requirement.

Schedule was
changed mid-year
(this year) to be
Fridays only for 5
consecutive
weeks.

The change was a
scheduling issue
designed to permit
children time to
focus on college
issues.
Internships take
place at the end
of the Junior year
for duration of
two weeks as a
part of
curriculum and a
requirement to
graduate.
The internship is
the centerpiece
of curriculum for
the entire time a
student is
enrolled in one of
the network’s
schools.

All other
curriculum is
designed around
that unique job
and the students’
related interests.
Two distinct
programs, one a
more traditional
mentoring program
and the other,
“Mentor Mondays”
where students have
monthly lunches
with community
volunteers who
network with one
another in front of
the students. The
former is the focus
of the interview.

They talk about
mentors jobs and
careers and answer
prepared questions
from the students.

Mentorship is
viewed as an
accelerant to
success for students
who are already
college-bound.
Community
volunteers are
matched with
students from
community to
have guidance
for one or two
years for the
college
application and
scholarship
application
process.
Organization
partners with
middle schools in
LAUSD to
establish
relationships with
children and
introduce to them
to a mentor who
will stay with
them and meet
monthly for their
four years of high
school and guide
them into college.
Organization
currently works
in approximately
13 schools of the
LAUSD through
weekly after
school programs
designed to
bolster social
development and
well-being.

Students in these
schools are
asked /
encouraged /
presented the
opportunity to
join the program
through the
school via
presentations
from
organization G.
Two types of
programs: Work
site based and
community
based.

Community-
based programs
take place in the
community after
school (churches
or schools) and
on weekends.

Work site
programs are at
the worksite
starting at lunch
and lasting into
the afternoon.

91
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Who are the
children being
mentored and
how do they
come to your
attention?
All Juniors
participate during
second semester.
All juniors
participate; take
the bus, get a ride
from parents.

Junior teachers act
as advisors and do
site visits.
All students
participate;
teacher is
advisor and
oversees
internship.
Students request
the program but it
is "not available
to all" for the
elective credit.
Students apply
as rising juniors
or seniors. They
must be first in
family to attend
college, and
demonstrate
financial
hardship.
Students are
referred to
schools with
whom the
organization
partners.
Students receive
parent
permission to
participate in the
program after
school.
Relationships
with school or
youth center
partners will refer
children.

Organization H
calls schools to
refer children
based on
perceived needs.

92
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Precautions
taken for
child safety
Background
checks.

DOJ Fingerprint
clearance.
Background
checks.

DOJ Fingerprint
clearance.
Background
checks.

DOJ Fingerprint
clearance.

No home
businesses
allowed.
Mentor gets
fingerprint
clearance and TB
testing per
district
guidelines.
Fingerprints with
DOJ.

Two references.

TB test.
DOJ fingerprint
clearance.

School-based
program helps with
use of credentialed
teachers.

Also child abuse
index screening
through federal
networks.

Ensure during
orientation to screen
informally as you
meet people.

Make sure training is
interactive to permit
the organization to
see people and
exercise recall.

Discuss afterwards
with the
administration and
ask what people said?

Do one-on-one, face-
to-face interviews
with mentors as
additional measures.
Get referrals from
co-workers.

With work-site
programs,
everything is done
at worksite in
group setting and
threats are seen as
minimal in such a
setting.

Organization has
an account with
the DOJ for finger
print clearance.

93
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Location of
interaction
between mentor
and mentee.
At company site. At company site. At company site. At company site.

Occasional
meetings on
school campus,
libraries, coffee,
lunch, school
activities,
shopping, or at
the location of
community
service projects
mentors are
involved with.
Multiple / agreed
upon.

Will meet at
Starbucks, library,
school, or as near
mentee as possible.

Also meet at
organization’s
office, the meeting
needs computers for
researching schools
and college
applications.
Multiple /
agreed upon.
School site after
school.
At job site.
How does the
mentee get to
the location of
the mentoring?
(transportation)
Public
transportation /
rides from
parents.

Training
provided for how
to use public
transportation.
Public transport /
ride from
parents.
Public Transport
/ Training
provided prior to
internship.
Student
responsibility,
will ride with
mentor if
necessary.
It varies.
Organization
facilitates first
meeting through
mentor / student
match day in
summer.

If travel is not
possible for student,
they will meet in
office.

During mentorship,
meetings will be via
public transport.
Provided by
mentor or
organization.
Meetings take
place at school.
Children are
bussed to site of
mentors (office
buildings, etc).

94
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What
precautions
are taken
for liability
/ insurance
purposes?
Students are
covered under
school insurance,
but parents sign
waivers for any
public
transportation
issues.

Agreements are
established
between the
workplace,
mentors and
school prior to the
start of the
internship to
ensure the
environment is
safe and the
student will not be
performing any
operations or
exposed to any
processes that my
be deemed
harmful
(machinery,
certain
laboratories, etc).
General liability for
all students on
campus during
school hours -
which transfers over
to worksite.

During extra / after
hours, additional
coverage must be
bought for those
hours by the school.

Auto insurance not
provided by school.

Screen mentors by
asking them to
come to school and
check it out.

Mentors complete a
"mentor information
form.

Kids interview
mentors.
Organization checks
out premises.

No formal
Background check.
Use the CTE
guidelines for
guidance on
liability and
insurance purposes.

The program may
have to be “sold” to
the district. If so,
explain the
boundaries and ask
how to get done
what you need to do
to accomplish this.

Permit the use of
schools insurance.

Beware of
guidelines in
specific industries
(i.e. machinists)
where children
cannot operate
certain machines
and work at certain
times of day.

No home
businesses.

Perform
background check
on everyone.
Because this
takes place most
often at a work
site, the company
provides an
additional
screening device
for mentors via
general
impressions of
people and word
of mouth around
the office.

Students are
nearly always
with a group.

95
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
How long is the
mentor / mentee
relationship?
Two weeks. Three weeks. One academic
quarter is a basic
commitment. 9-
12 weeks.

With no
internship,
volunteer
experience will
take over, or
another
"experience"
that will move
their academics
forwards.
It lasts for the
academic year.

Assigned in
spring - get
started over the
summer, wraps in
spring before
testing.
One to two years
– the aim to to
get rising juniors
and rising
seniors when
they begin the
college search
process.

Organization is
also beginning a
transition 8th to
9th grade
program which
will hopefully
build-out to a
four-years
relationship.
9 months /
traditional
school year.
Organization is
aiming for
yearlong
program they
feel would be
more effective.
9-month long
program. 3-
months off then 9
months on again
with the same
kids. Some kids
have stayed
around middle
school through
high school,
intermittently.

96
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What is the
schedule for
meetings
and their
duration?
Originally, it was
1-2 weeks,
Monday-Friday,
9am-5pm.

Mid-year, they
switched
May 6 - June 3,
every Friday.

Schedule already
changed – from
the intensive 2-
week program.
Three weeks -
Monday through
Friday - 9am to
5pm (32-40 hours
a week).

Flexible for
certain jobs.

One example -
radio stations have
late hours. There
are overnight trips
with some
organizations.
Tuesday and
Thursday each
week throughout
enrollment.

MWF are "more
traditional"
school days with
classes whose
curriculum is
built around the
internship.
Welcome luncheon
and end of the year
luncheon. Students
pay for mentors’
lunch in meeting
hall at school.

Meet monthly
otherwise.

Total of seven
assignments
including two half-
day job shadows
and five additional
assignments about
the mentorship.

All mentoring takes
place outside school
except for
luncheons.

Will take place at
school library, over
lunch, coffee, while
attending sports
activities.

Going outside
custom is frowned
upon.
Meet a minimum
of once a month.
Most will meet
more like twice
a month to once
a week.
Meetings are
once a month
(twice for the
first 3 months).

Meetings last
four-hours and
take place a
location decided
by mentor and
mentee. Can
include a park,
movie, dinner.

Meetings are
intentionally
unstructured.
Two hours/week
(90 minutes with
kids, 30 minutes
for
administrative
purposes).
Mentorship lasts
for nine months,
with five hours of
meetings per
month.

97
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are the
benefits of this
scheduling?
Students get a
more real
understanding of
the job.

Mentees can
work on a single
project in a given
timeframe.
It allows students
to get into reality
of job, not just see
the fun side
prepared in
advance by the
mentor in
anticipation of the
mentee’s arrival.

Allows them to
"hit a rhythm" with
the job see al
aspects of work.
There are some
“standard” style
curriculum that
kids just need to
get – but these
too will be
integrated.

For example
health / science
and writing
instead of just
“health.”
Class is for
elective credit.

Intended to
bolster capacities
of already
motivated
students headed
for college.
Mentorship is
needed
throughout high
school career to
stay motivated
and be able to
seek help for
difficulties along
the way.
Ongoing work
over time builds
trust and permits
change over time.
What is the
mentor / mentee
ratio
One to One. One to One. One to One. One to One; Boys
go with men,
Girls with
Women.
Optimally one to
one, but groups
when they’re
short mentors.
One to One. 120 kids per
school site.

12 teams with 10
children per
team.

3 mentors/team
(one college, one
business, one
teacher).
One-on-one in
group setting.

98
Table 4.2, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Do you match
mentor / mentee
genders?
When possible. No. When possible. Yes. No male mentors
with female
mentees, but will
match female
mentors with
male mentees.

More women
volunteer than
men.
Yes. No.
How to you
provide
administration /
oversight of
relationships?
Overseen by
Junior Teachers.

Approximately
15-20 students
per teacher
Overseen by
Junior teachers.

Approximately 20-
25:1.

Will conduct a
sight visit and sit
in on the
internship
presentation of
learning on the last
day.
A Teacher /
advisor oversees
15 students
(Mentori
training
manual).
One part-time
teacher is hired to
oversee program.
It is the sole
focus of her
position.
Case workers in
administrative
office.

30-40 cases per
advisor in
central office.
90 mentors at 3
school sites are
overseen by 7
administrative
staff members.

Unique
information
from documents

99
Topic Three: Curriculum
Topic three, curriculum, shows the greatest diversity of responses in any of
the six categories. Each organization has a curriculum that matches its unique goals
and aims. And while cases share common curricular elements, the unique designs
were always driven by the specific objectives of the program.
The first subcategory “Mentorship’s relationship to schooling,” was
generated after the interview process had begun as it was quickly learned that
mentoring was used in varying ways depending upon the aims of the organization.
The following subcategories: “How is the curriculum designed and implemented?”
“Who are you’re your targeted students?” “How do the students come to your
attention?” and “Are you selective with your participants / will you turn students
away?” all aim to understand who the children are that are being mentored and what
unique needs they may have that a mentoring program and its curriculum aim to
provide.
The subcategories: “Are you responsible for or do you contribute to the
generation of any mandated performance assessments?” and “What stresses are
placed on mentoring due to a need to meet the above stated benchmarks?” reveal
information that aids in understanding whether the mentoring process operates in a
pure fashion, or whether it has to compromise its objectives in the name of working
towards an external indicator of success.

100
The final subcategory of this section, “Resources / themes used to mentor,”
shows existing bodies of work that can aid in the development of a mentoring
program.

101
Table 4.3
Curriculum
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Mentorship's
relationship
to schooling.
Mentorship is a
component within
the standard
educational
curriculum.
Mentorship is a
component within
the standard
educational
curriculum.
Mentorship is
the centerpiece
around which all
school
curriculum is
designed.
Mentorship is an
enhancement /
enrichment to
standard
curriculum that
occurs outside
the normal
school day.
Mentorship is an
accompaniment
meant to assist in
the completion of
the standard
curriculum.
Mentorship is an
accompaniment to
standard
education and
curriculum.
Mentorship is an
accompaniment
to standard
education and
curriculum.
Mentorship is an
accompaniment to
standard
education and
curriculum.

102
Table 4.3, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
How is the
curriculum
designed and
implemented?
The curriculum
serves two distinct
purposes: to provide
a glimpse of the
professional world
beyond school and
help students decide
what they want (or
do not want) to move
into professionally.

The school’s charter
places curricular
emphasis on science,
technology,
engineering, and
math, oftentimes
through hybrid-
subject coursework
(i.e. math and
science as a single
class). The
applications learned
in that class then
form the basis of
learning to be used in
the mentoring
process.

Mentoring is
designed to provide
an opportunity for
students to contribute
something from their
unique skill set to a
company through
special project.
Students choose the
internship of interest
to them and will find
a project within that
job to do and
complete it as part of
their presentation of
learning.

Project is oftentimes
a business
development tool to
help the company
utilizing the skills of
the children.
Students choose the
internship of
interest to them and
the remainder of
the standards are
taught and tailored
to that unique
interest and the job.

All academics are
cohesive and
tailored to the
unique curriculum
needed by a student
to complete their
projects.

There are some
“standard” style
curriculum that
kids just need to get
– but these too will
be integrated.
Example health /
science and writing
instead of just
“health.”
Elective class credit
in addition to
regular curriculum
aimed at
developing social
skills, networking,
and learning about
a job of interest as
well as helping to
make
determinations
about what students
do not want to enter
through real-life
experiences.

Two half-day
shadowing
exercises, essays,
culminating project
and report.
Some “loose”
guidance provided.

Mentors trained on
mentor
relationship,
cultural sensitivity,
fin aid, scholarship
process;

During school year
a time line is give
for what to be
working on during
each month;

Workshops offered
once a month to
check up on
deadlines for both
mentors and
mentees and stay
on pace.
The curriculum is designed
around the child, social
development needs, not
merely additional academics
or homework help. It is
premised upon the idea that a
strong sense of self worth is
an essential foundation for
building any additional
skills.

The five six-week phases,
(30 sessions annually) focus
on: Team building and
leadership; Health and
Wellness; Community
service and cultural
diversity; Self-awareness and
Healthy relationships;
Conflict resolution and anger
management.

Each of the five phases takes
six weeks to complete, each
week having a on-hour
session dedicated to an
activity such as building
team towers, journaling and
sharing time with mentors
and peers, scenarios for
conflict resolution, service
learning projects, anger
management, learning how
to read and understand food
nutrition labels, and other
projects and activities.
Activities are
group based and
focus on
teamwork, trust
and self-
confidence.

Social
development
takes precedence
and is seen as a
necessary
precursor to job
readiness.

103
Table 4.3, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Who are
your
targeted
students?
All students in
school during
end of junior
year.
All students in
school during
junior year. Don't
over burden
community all at
once with kids
looking for work.
All high school
students enrolled
in school.
Any student
enrolled in
school who
requests to be a
part of the
program.
Rising juniors and
rising seniors.

Beginning to look at
8
th
and 9
th
graders to
get them early and
have more time to
help them.
Students must be low
income, first
generation in College,
at least 2.0 GPA, not
involved in gangs or
drugs.

These safeguards are
in place because they
cannot fully prepare
and train their mentor
corps for the high risk
behaviors and
activities they might
be presented with
greater-risk youth.
Middle and high
school kids
belonging to a
school that has
partnered with
the org and
receive parental
permission to
participate in the
program.

Counselor
referral form for
additional needs.
Youth who live in
geographic areas
of service (south
central) 11-22
years old.

Tend to be youth
who could benefit
from a mentor.

They are
generally well
adjusted, just
struggling with an
environment, or
they aren't doing
well behaviorally.
How do
the
students
come to
your
attention?
From within
school.
From within
school.
From within
school.
From within
school.
Organization goes
through counselors
in the high school
they have
partnerships with.

Counselors will
recruit students and
refer them.

Siblings of former
students will also
seek a mentor.

Referrals of friends.
Schools self-
select students.

Organization
presents at
school for kids.
If kids don't join,
org goes to
parents to pitch
them, then to
teachers and
counselors for
referrals.
Partnership
school sites
recommend
students to the
program. Then
the organization
pitches to them.

No forced
involvement.

104
Table 4.3, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Are you
selective
with your
participants
/ will you
turn
students
away?
Lottery system
for school and
all kids required
to complete
internship for
grad
requirements.
Lottery admission
to school.
Open admission -
no selective
admissions at
any schools.

No academic
restrictions.

Lottery comes
into play for
schools that have
a wait list after
assessing dates
of application.
Anyone who
wanted a one on
one mentor could
apply - in the past,
all juniors in a
specific Learning
Community were
required.

This year - all were
accepted into
program. They’ve
never had issues
with kids - mentors
are just front-loaded
with information,
that kids might need
"extra help."

Program attracts
hard-workers and
motivated kids.

Paperwork must be
completed - hoops
jumped through to
apply in the first
place can be a
deterrent.
Yes - they will turn
kids away due to
limited capacity.

Requirements
include being the
first generation to
go to college in US,
Pell grant eligible.

No GPA or
citizenship
requirement.

All students are
interviewed and
must write an essay
and get a teacher
letter of rec.
Title one schools
are one part of
criteria - but kids
must also be on
free/ reduced
lunch.
Try not to turn
kids away -
unless there are
no mentors
around.

If a child is a
walk-in off the
street, they cannot
always be
accommodated
into a program.
They might be
referred to Big
Brothers / Big
Sisters if they're
not attending one
of the schools
with the right
schools.

This is one the
few programs
who will work
with older
teenagers, and
even people into
their early 20s.

105
Table 4.3, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Are you
responsible
for or do you
contribute to
the
generation of
any
mandated
performance
assessments?
Yes – CST /
STAR tests.
CST / STAR
testing; not seen
as critical to the
learning process.

Holistic learning.
Academics are
built into the
internships - all
kids have
individual learning
plan - not just
career skills - but
reading, writing
and math - which
guides the
curriculum
specific to need of
the job.
Happens outside
of school day as
to not steal time
away from tested
subjects.
Tracking of
schools kids
apply to and
follow-up
graduation rates.

Mentor retention
rates indicate
success and
failure. More
qualitative
feedback on
surveys.
Only indirectly. Worksite
programs are
during school
hours during lunch
time - community-
based programs
are during school
as well.

Twice a month
they miss a few
afternoons of
school. Even
though they miss
school, the
motivation will
help them the rest
of the school year.
What
stresses are
placed on
mentoring
due to a need
to meet the
above stated
benchmarks?
Mentoring piece
of curriculum
occurs after the
tests are
completed.
Enables the
mentee to see how
skills are applied
in the world.

Eliminates the
"when are we ever
going to need
this." Which
motivates
students. Raises
level of
engagement.
Most people
have done this
before and are
told of the goals
personally from
the program.
Yes - on college
admission -
mentors know
there is only so
much they can do
and most of it is
on the student
and their
responsibility.
Seen as a means to
help achieve those
benchmarks, not
hinder them.

Schools see the
benefits of after
school program
such as Beyond the
Bell, in LAUSD.
All enrichment and
recreation activities
in LAUSD are seen
as beneficial to
academics as well.
Schools are
hesitant to move
forward with a
program that takes
kids away from
instruction, but
they see the
change in kids self
esteem and realize
it’s positive.

106
Table 4.3, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Resources /
themes used
to mentor
Attend a
leadership
seminar.

Read the seven
habits of highly
effective teens,
by Stephen
Covey.
Students identify
a need in the
business and use
their skills to
produce
something of
value to the
company (i.e.
website for an air
conditioning
company).
Mentor guide /
mentor training -
depends on
school.

A guide to be
downloaded
online for
mentors.

Mentors need to
know this is an
academic
internship.
“Mentor handbook”
provided for mentors
by school.
Mentor binder
provided by
organization.

Information is more
about college
admission process
divided by public /
private and JC; also
provide information
on financial aid and
scholarship process.

Training provided
by authors of
"mentoring across
cultural
relationships" book.
Too much
information can
be damaging to
authenticity of
the experience.

“You don't want
them to become
prescriptive and
like a therapist,
but more of a
role model and a
coach for the
kids.”
“Heroes
journey” It’s an
archetypal
presentation of
coming of age
and growing.
Other
information
about
maintenance
and
facilitation
of
mentoring
program
Junior teachers
act as advisors,
visit sites and
check in on
students.
They all have to
demonstrate
mastery of the
standards, but
they have an
“individualized
way in which to
demonstrate it.”
Process is very
casual.

This school uses
mentoring as an
opportunity to
provide something
extra in the way of a
life experience to
give their students
an upper hand in
addition to the
rigorous
preparedness their
students already
possess.

107
Table 4.3, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Unique
information
from
documents
Internship manual
states that an
internship must
consist of a project
that is: useful to
the mentor and
their organization;
results in a
deliverable; takes
half the intern’s
time (Internship
Manual).
The Mentor
Handbook
outlines many of
the assignments.
It includes
questions to ask
the mentor
during a meeting,
interview
protocols for
learning about
the mentor’s job,
the path followed
for the mentor to
arrive at that
career, as well as
assignments
designed to
inquire about the
mentors
work/life
balance.

108
Topic Four: Objectives and Measures of Effectiveness
Topic four, objectives and measures of effectiveness, reveals how the cases
investigated all work towards a variety of objectives. The first subcategory: “What
are the desired outcomes of your mentoring program?” establishes program goals.
The other two subcategories: “What are your external means of gauging success?”
and “What are your internal means of gauging success?” demonstrate how the
organizations have verifiable results beyond a sense of simply having done good
work. The responses given under this topic provide evidence for the value of such
programs and show how valuable they can be for urban youth.

109
Table 4.4
Objectives and Measures of Effectiveness
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are the
desired
outcomes of
your mentoring
program?
Mentoring at this
school aims to
provide children
with a practical
learning
experience in
which they can
link ideas from
their primary
school-based
curriculum, but
also to give them
an opportunity to
see how offices
operate, meet
people and
become
motivated about
industries by
seeing them
operate from the
inside and
developing and
attaining a real
image of
possibility for
their personal
dreams and
goals.
Students present
their internship
projects to their
mentor(s)
advisors and
peers in a one-
day event near
the end of the
school year in an
event called the
“presentation of
learning.”
Children must
“exhibit”
behaviors
consistent with
the “elements of
design” ias stated
in the mentoring
manual.

It’s about
exhibition of
learning, not just
regurgitation or
presentation. For
example, they
must be able to
argue and debate
their position on
an issue related
to the job.

Students required
to take one
college course to
familiarize
themselves with
that context.
Students learn
about work, but
also face realities
of work. Find
out what they "do
not want to do is
as important as
finding out what
they want to do."
College
graduation (Long
term) College
admission
(immediate) and
overall get
financial aid
through
scholarships.
College
admission and
scholarships.
Social
Development;
Happier children,
better self
confidence and
self-image.
Improved social
skills, better
success in school.

Also track HS
grad rates and
teen pregnancy
rates. All
significant
improvements.

110
Table 4.4, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are your
external means
of gauging
success?
Number of
students
continuing on to
four-year
colleges.
Exit surveys,
interviews with
mentors and kids;
what ways do
you and the
business benefit.

Study began in
2006 to see
college
preparedness, -
kids always say
"internship is the
most powerful
thing they did in
preparing
themselves for
college.
Feedback from
graduates: Math
support needed in
college.
Journal and
reflection
assignments,
speeches and
interaction and
end of year
banquet /
reception for
mentors and
mentees.
Written up in
Marin
independent
journal, various
pieces on org,
volunteer of the
month section.

Collaborate with
other non-profits.
Huckleberry
youth (transition
program.)
Number of
students going to
college.
Verbal feedback
– informal –
organization
works more as a
charity than a
school with a
learning
curriculum.
After nine months
kids will speak,
breakdown in
crying and
hugging; general
skills and self
confidence,
school
performance,
changes in
ambition, self-
assessment
surveys re teacher
relationships, self
esteem; tracking
of HS grad rates,
increases.

111
Table 4.4, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are your
internal means
of gauging
success?
Oral defense and
presentation of
their project
before a panel
including their
mentor.
Graded as Pass /
Fail with a "Pass"
needed to
graduate.
“I thought that’s
what I wanted to
do but now I
know its jus not
for me. So they
know better, and
more
importantly,
more about
themselves for
future decisions
about how they
want to spend
their life.”
Verbal feedback,
qualitative
feedback from
essays by
children as well
as informal
feedback from
mentors.
External
evaluators come
yearly.

Pre/post self -
esteem,
avoidance of
various
behaviors,
violence,
skipping school
"I think it's cool
to skip school"
pre / post"
respectful
relationships with
adults.

Can you handle
your anger
better? What are
ways of dealing
with conflict?
GPAs go up,
attendance
improves.
Distribute surveys
at the end of
every program
year to mentees
for self evaluation
(esteem, attitudes,
about school and
future
relationships with
adults, risk
behaviors).

Mentors surveyed
about own
experience and
changes they see
in their kids.

Informal - kids
make eye contact,
will speak to an
adult.

112
Table 4.4, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Unique
information
from
documents
The internship
manual states that
the internship
must deliver a
project that is
academically
rich; results in
visual drafts; is
presented in
finished form to
mentor and / or
mentor’s bosses
(Internship
Manual).

113
Topic Five: Funding
Topic five, funding, is brief, and inquires about the two most important
aspects of funding: Where does it come from and where does it go? The
subcategories are: “What are the primary sources of funding for the mentoring
program?” and “What are the greatest financial costs?” The organizations here
reveal information about how they support themselves, what is essential to their
business model and what can be trimmed or de-funded.

114
Table 4.5
Funding
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are
the primary
sources of
funding for
the
mentoring
program?
Corporate
partnerships.

Independent
funding from
students.
Corporate
partnerships.

Private donation.

Student
generated funds.
All within basic
funding of the
school.

Funding formula
depends of
whether school is
a charter or
district school.

For charter, it
depends on what
the charter says.
Student’s fund
their own
mentoring
experience.

Mentors treat the
kids to coffee.
Self funded.
Student
generated – time
donated by
mentors.

Private -
partnership with
a local
community
foundation.
Private
philanthropy and
corporate
partnerships with
an ethos for
service.
Partnerships with
private
foundations and
philanthropists.

Mentors are
provided a $300-
$500 stipend for
an academic year
of work.
Companies pay for the
opportunity to partner
with the organization.

Additional funding
comes from;
fundraising,
foundations, and
private grants.
What are
the greatest
financial
costs?
Staffing;
internship site
coordinators
have been
removed and
centralized to
director of
external affairs.
Running
background
checks - entire
program is built
on it ($50 per
mentor with 300
mentors)
transportation for
kids - busses.

Internship
coordinators and
administrative
costs.
Paid coordinator
- supported by
the foundation –
Organization D’s
educational
foundation - Also
a grant at one
time and other by
the school
district.
Administrative
costs.
Overhead /
administration /
personnel /
scholarships
offered to kids
for undergrad
studies.
Pour as much
money into
program itself,
but it’s staffing.
Quality people
must deliver the
program for a
quality program.
Program Staff time
(not office
management or fund
raising) the ratio of
program / admin costs
have to work out
otherwise you look
bad. Overhead must
be below approx 15%.

Costs average
approximately $1,000-
$3,000 per one-on-one
relationship.

115
Table 4.5, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Other points LAUSD currently
receives state
funding for after
school programs.
Beyond the Bell
is the most well
known of these,
yet the district is
hesitant to spend
this money on
outsourcing to
programs, but
rather
demonstrates a
preference to keep
it in-house.
Recent California
law was passed
mandating all
foster children to
have a mentor.
Unique
information
from
documents

116
Topic Six: Sustainability, Growth and Transferability
Topic six, sustainability, growth and transferability, provides insight into
more subtle and personal impressions that the respondents feel are integral to a
program’s ongoing success but may not always be visible on the surface. The first
two subcategories: “How long as your organization been utilizing or facilitating
mentorships?” and “How long and with whom is your longest running partnership /
mentor group?” establishes how long the organizations have been in operation and
how successful and sustainable they are.
The categories that follow: “What are the biggest causes of your having to
cease mentoring in a school or with a group of kids?” “What are the chief reasons
mentors continue to work with your organizations and its kids?” and “What is most
critical to your ongoing success?” collect general responses from the participants
about what they personally feel are the most important characteristics of their
organization’s success and what is essential moving forward.
The next subcategory, “If the superintendent of a large urban district, like LA
Unified, called you tomorrow and said ‘we want every high school student in our
district to have a mentor and we want your organization to make it happen, what are
some things you would do?’” provides ideas and frustrations these participants
already have about how to build a system for a large urban district. The following
subcategory: “What would make working with / in / public schools easier?” shoes
what institutional barriers exist on the school side, as perceived by the organizations
trying to penetrate the school district.

117
Table 4.6
Sustainability, Growth and Transferability
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
How long has
your
organization
been utilizing or
facilitating
mentorships?
This is the first
year they have
had the
internship
program.
Since 1999 –
when the schools
was founded.
Since first school
in 1996.
First class was
1999.
2001 began the
program.
Program began in
1992.
Program began in
2000.
How long and
with whom is
your longest
running
partnership /
mentor group?
Maritime
museum in
research dept,
Qualcomm,
Saulk labs,
Seaworld.

Most are 10-15
year
relationships.

The mentors
believe in the
mission of the
school – as it was
built with their
ideas of a need
for people to fill
their jobs in the
next ten years.
They do not want
to import talent.
LAUSD is
longest
partnership -
services are
being provided at
their schools.

1992 began
relationship with
pilot program at
Horace Mann
Middle school.
The organization
is still there
today.
HBO – have been
partners since
2000.

118
Table 4.6, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are the
biggest causes
of your having
to cease
mentoring in a
school or with a
group of kids?
(i.e. are schools
necessarily
always helpful
and
supportive?)
Amendments made
to program - less
hand-holding with
students, parents and
mentors.

Fewer "festivities"
and galas to celebrate
achievement.
Funding is the chief
cause of the
problems.
Depends on the
kids - not the
mentors.

Hours can increase
if academics are
challenged.

Some schools have
pulled back a day a
week (moved to
Tues / Thurs) to
ensure test prep is
solid.
Never ceased or
suspended
operations.
Began with 30,
now up to 120.
Never ceased
operations, but
became slim at
times - cut back on
staff and programs -
budget cuts.
Funding was the
cause.
In most instances they pull
out because of the difficulty
of implementing a program
at the school.

Also, the organization can't
obtain the college or
business mentors needed.

Track / year-round schools
have scheduling problems
that make it too difficult to
bond or build relationships
with such extended breaks.

School administration does
not always cooperate in
recruiting teachers.

Weak administration could
not get approval on issues.

Thus, organization could
not fulfill the model at a
school and efforts would
sometimes do a disservice.

The organization always
tried to maintain the
number of schools they
were in, but have had to
pull back.

Funding is also an issue that
compounds the above
issues.
Funding.

Companies have
stopped partnering
because of
takeovers, buy-outs,
or an executive
decision to cease
funding the mentor
program.

119
Table 4.6, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What are the chief
reasons mentors
continue to work
with your
organizations and
its kids?
STEM fields are
unable to fill
vacancies in their
companies and
want to take part in
the training of the
next generation of
employees.
Community sees
students as assets to
their organizations
while they are
interning.
Companies and
organizations don't
see it as a job, but
as an opportunity to
have someone with
skill come and help
their business.

Students with
knowledge of how
to design a website
will go in work in a
small business and
design it for them
and, in the process,
learn about
business
development and
what is important to
the company.
Mentors have a
powerful
experience around
an interest they
share and want to
continue.

Most people don't
understand high
school kids and are
impressed when
they find they do -
it’s a satisfying
experience with the
child.
Community
participation.

Mentorship program
has become popular
in the community
and somewhat of a
byword in
conversations with
people commonly
asking things like
“are you doing the
program this year?”

Additionally, events
such as “mentor
Mondays” where all
mentors and
students gather on
campus for lunch,
provide
opportunities for not
only the students to
come armed with
questions about jobs
and industry, but for
professionals to
network as well and
make contacts
through a
preexisting
connection through
the schools program
and a vested interest
in education and
youth development.
An opportunity to
give back - they
have the time,
perspective and
wisdom to give
back and they want
to pass it on to a
young person.
People have a
desire to give back
to community.

Mentors are
sometimes people
who themselves
were the
beneficiaries of
mentoring during
their youth.
It's school-based
and therefore,
safely structured as
any school event.

Students are
provided with all
resources they need.
The organization
even pays for
transportation, etc.

Mentoring has to,
and often does,
touch the mentor’s
heart.

Oftentimes mentors
are former people
of need, they had a
mentor in their life
and saw the value
in it.

Mentoring is often a
part of their
corporate culture.

Mentors can come
from a community
of need and want to
pay it forward. The
experience must be
personal.
The employees buy-
in, the company
buys in and the
resulting experience
is great.

The liaison of the
company who
partners with the
organization is a
director of
community affairs
and she is a fan of
the program.

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Table 4.6, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What is most
critical to your
ongoing success?
The school "has
the benefit of not
stressing
testing."

Emphasis can be
placed on issues
like critical
thinking and
problem solving
and helping
students "build
their own
capacities."
Flexibility within
school system to
accommodate
with standards
and credits to
make the
internship work
with
requirements.

"Redefining what
it means to meet
standards." CCS
could be better or
worse depending
on whether there
is more
presentation
based learning
rather than just
standardized
testing.
Flexibility on part
of administration
as well as the
mentors to tailor
the program
towards the needs
of the students,
not those of the
program. Kids
need to get the
most of it.
Funding - but
also quality staff
who are
committed and
don't get
discouraged.
“There are a lot
of mentoring
organizations.
We must react to
the changes in
our industry and
be proactive.”

For example,
how does a
school-based
program respond
to teacher
layoffs? Do we
up service / align
with feeder
schools?

It’s competitive
to get into the
schools.

Being able to
effectively recruit
and retain
mentors.

“Men are harder
to get at the
outset but they
tend to stay
around longer.”
People’s jobs and
the companies
need policies and
funding that are
favorable for
supporting a
mentoring
program or
partnership.

This will dictate
the quantity of
mentors you have
in your
organization.

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Table 4.6, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
If the
superintendent
of a large urban
district, like LA
Unified, called
you tomorrow
and said "we
want every high
school student in
our district to
have a mentor
and we want
your
organization to
make it happen,
what are some
things you would
do?
“Go back to the
teachers and
ensure they are
preparing
students to create
a resume, make
the necessary
contacts” and are
helping kids to
“build their own
capacities.”
Flexibility is
essential – break
tradition with the
typical modes of
learning and
break out of
habitual
schooling
models.
Program is
effective because
it’s small and the
school is unique
with respect to
their high
socioeconomic
status and
education level
amongst their
parents and
community.
Organization
believes it may
not be possible
due to funding
constraints and
limitations.
“I would need
one million
mentors.”

It works because
it is small and
manageable.

Organization
currently works
with 180 mentors
in a one-on-one
relationship with
students, they
can deliver a
high quality
project because
the loads are
manageable for
the case carriers
and the
management
structure is
relatively flat.

Allows
flexibility and
close, immediate
attention that an
organization of
tens of thousands
of employees
could never
provide.
Recruiting is one
of, if not the
most challenging
part of bringing
consistent,
ongoing
mentoring
relationships to
students in urban
areas.

Even with an
established,
strong financial
backing and 19
years of
experience
partnering with
corporations and
organizations,
maintaining a
constant corps of
mentors is
challenging.
“Mayoral
initiative to
encourage
volunteerism;”
And to get money
with it too.

“People need to
show up.”

“If the funding is
there, it can
work.”

Money must
come first, then
the mentors.

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Table 4.6, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
What would
make working
with / in / as
public schools
easier?
Specific
challenges within
the public school
that could go
away.

The big challenge
was regarding
privacy issues
with
fingerprinting.

The caliber of
participant is high
and they're not
worried about
such issues.

School has
“mostly flown
under the radar”
regarding
transportation,
fieldtrips in
parents’ cars, etc.
Less bureaucracy
legal approvals,
red tape in the
system.

The school
system is
difficult.

The east coast is
easier to work
with - more
innovative and
open-minded.
The west coast
tends to be less
proactive than
the east coast and
the schools there.

123
Table 4.6, continued
Organization A Organization B Organization C Organization D Organization E Organization F Organization G Organization H
Unique
information from
documents
Mentor handbook
expresses this is
the 13
th
year of
operation and
strikes an
enthusiastic tone
about continued
success rather
than one pleading
for people to join.

Mentor Manual
presents outline
of entire program
to allow mentors
to see everything
that wil be
required of them
to limit the
“surprises” or
unexpected
constraints on
time.

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CHAPTER V
DISCUSSION AND REFLECTIONS

This study generated rich data about eight organizations that mentor to
provide social capital to urban youth. It revealed a myriad of organizational types
and behaviors that accommodated students of multiple ages and abilities, in settings
that ranged from schools, to office buildings and parks, and saw successes as
measured across multiple metrics, from children heading to college to gaining more
self confidence. The mentoring organizations provided information about specific
practices that were seen to be integral to their success, but also, contributed to an
organic understanding of how mentoring helps urban youth. Analysis and discussion
of these findings are presented here, first in a discussion of how the data provides
answers to the four research questions asked at the start of this study, then through
several reflections and insights into the mentoring process that are highly relevant,
albeit indirectly pertaining to the four questions asked at the outset of this study. This
chapter additionally offers recommendations about future research needed to better
bring social capital to urban youth through mentoring.
Discussion
Discussion of Research Question One
What types of mentoring programs currently exist in both schools and
external mentoring organizations (EMOs), and how do they operate to provide social
capital to children?

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Internal and external sources of mentorship. There are two primary ways
in which organizations can bring mentorship to children: As an internal component
of a school’s curriculum, demonstrated by organizations A,B,C, and D, or via
outsourcing to an agency, exemplified by E,F,G, and H, (EMOs) that plans and
executes the mentoring process. The schools that perform this as an internal
component of their curriculum (A, B, C, and D) focus primarily on skills that will be
most beneficial in the business world. The organizations that partner with schools
(F,G, and H) focus primarily on social and emotional development. For school-
based programs, greater costs fall on the school and the student. When an EMO is
utilized, the relationship is typically funded through philanthropists or corporate
donations.
Level I and level II mentoring. This study revealed that there are two
distinct types of mentoring programs. One focuses on social and emotional
development and the other on college and career preparedness. This distinction is
not formally made in any of the literature reviewed prior to this study. For the
purposes of discussion, these two types of programs will be referred to as “Level I”
programs, which focus more on social and emotional guidance, and “Level II”
programs which focus more on college and career preparedness. The defining
characteristics of each are presented in Table 5.1.

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Table 5.1
Comparison of Level I and Level II Mentoring Programs
Characteristics of Level I Programs Characteristics of Level II Programs
Seen predominantly in organizations
E*, F, G & H;

Typically operate independent of
schools, but work in partnership with
them (EMOs or External Mentoring
Organizations);

Focus on social development and basic
needs;

Mentors do not need any special skills
other than compassion;

Recruit mentors and identify children of
need and act as a “matchmaker”
between mentor and mentee;

Meet weekly or monthly over the course
of a school year;

Provide a curriculum of activities that
help to build trust and social skill;

See school performance, attendance and
behavior as an indicator of their success;

Take place at school or at a location
designated by the program for activities
to take place;

Will aid in the transportation for
students to get to their mentor;
Seen predominantly in organizations A,
B, C & D;

Typically operate as components of
learning within a school (referred to as
schools);

Run by teachers in partnership with a
broad team of mentors who worked with
their students;

Administrators / teachers possess an
understanding of how learning occurs
and how to best support that process
while ensuring standards were met and
benchmarks achieved;

Focus on linking curriculum to a job or
interest of a student in attempt to make
learning relevant;

Require students to seek out mentors
like a job search;

Meet several times a week over the
course of a semester or year, acting as a
co-curricular activity along with
traditional classes;

Meet daily for one to three weeks to
permit students to get an honest feel for
the day-to-day realities of a profession;

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Table 5.1, continued
Characteristics of Level I Programs Characteristics of Level II Programs
Have a single curriculum used for
groups of students;

Accompanying is used as primary means
of mentoring;

Are Scalable;

Address issues such as:
• How to live a healthy life
• How to maintain a positive self-
image
• The importance of having a job
• Making good decisions
• Managing emotions
• Being responsible
• Learning to work with and trust
adults
• Developing study skills
• Coping with a challenging home
life
Will expect students to generate a
product and present their learning to
school and community members;

Aim to help students discover for what
careers their unique talents and abilities
are best suited;

Require visitation to mentor’s actual
work place to allow children to
experience the environment;

Showing is used as primary means of
mentoring;

Tailor a unique curriculum to each
student’s mentoring experience;

Are replicable;

Address issues such as:
• How to apply one’s unique skills
and abilities to the abstract
workplace
• How to prepare a resume
• How to work with managers
• How to self-promote and market
one’s self
• How to decide which careers best
suit the student, or, rather, which
do not

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Subdivisions of level II mentoring. Mentoring through internship is utilized
in schools in two primary ways. The first, as demonstrated in organization C, uses
the internship as the centerpiece of curriculum around which all other learning is
designed and connected. Organizations A, B and D show it to be a
compartmentalized piece of curriculum that comes through an isolated experience at
the end of the year, or through a program that keeps it separated from the primary
curricular needs of the school day (Table 4.2).
The outlier organization: E. Organization E provides level one mentoring,
but stands-out from the other seven organizations because of its unique focus on
college admission and scholarship acquisition. Its primary focus is academic, but not
in the sense of applying learning to a career or work experience in the way
organizations A, B, C, and D do (Table 4.3). Organization E uses an accompanying
method, as opposed to the showing method of other level one programs, to help
students stay on track academically and make decisions to help them be successful in
college. The mentors are mostly non-working volunteers and stay-at-home moms,
who desire to help the community and “give back” but do so without the focus being
on career training. Musing about jobs and possibilities may still consume a
significant part of mentoring in this organization, but with the focus stated as being
on “getting into college” it speaks volumes to the power of mentoring as simply
having an adult in one’s life, and to the power of social capital in the form of a caring
adult.

129
Mentoring as “accompanying” and “showing.” Aubrey and Cohen (1995)
discuss the five functions of mentoring as Accompanying, Sowing, Catalyzing,
Showing, and Harvesting (Aubrey & Cohen, 1995). While these levels all arguably
manifest in some ways during the course of mentoring, accompanying and showing
are the two most prevalent in the programs investigated here. Level one programs
demonstrated an accompanying relationship, who is essentially a “caring person…
present in the learning process.” The “showers” “make knowledge visible and
intellectually understandable… providing leadership or a role model to embody a
skill or activity” (Aubrey & Cohen, 1995, p. 23).
Interning is simply a focused form of mentoring. Organizations A,B,C,
and D, provide level two mentoring and recognize that the jobs of the 21
st
century
are not based on rigid sets of instructions, but about collaboration and working
together to solve a problem. An internship teaches these very skills and is simply a
more focused form of mentorship. Organization B, for example, seeks out mentors
who may work or own a very traditional business, such as a heating and air
conditioning company, but, as the participant responded the student will learn how a
business is run and might help the owner design a website related to their company
(Table 4.3).
Replicable versus scalable programs. Generally, the organizations that had
mentoring programs as a component of their curriculum were replicable. The
intricate programs had a defined limit to how big they could grow due to the
complexity involved in managing them, designing individualized curriculum and the

130
attention to detail needed to ensure their success. The internship model of mentoring
takes a great deal of effort on the part of a few and is limited in its capacity to grow.
In organizations A, B, C, and D a great deal of customization was necessary to
ensure alignment between academics and mentoring. Organization C reported that
academics are “tailored to the unique curriculum needed by a student to complete
their projects” (Table 4.3). Adding three students could mean adding nine to ten
hours of work per week for an advisor who has to visit the individual worksite and
customize curriculum to that students internship field.
Mentoring for social and emotional welfare is different process than
mentoring for career preparedness. The EMOs, (E,F,G and H) on the other hand,
were typically able to take on more mentors and students as long as the growth was
measured and managed (Table 4.2). This was possible because all four EMOs (E,F,G
and H) had a single curriculum they could apply to all the children with whom they
were working (Table 4.3). The “standardized” curriculum is applicable and relevant
to anyone involved with level one mentoring and does not require any customization
or the type of oversight that can take hours in a school setting.
Discussion of Research Question Two
What are the characteristics of mentorship programs that make them most
successful and sustainable?
Low overhead. The cost of operating an internship or mentorship program
varies depending on the makeup of the relationships. In situations where students
seek-out a career mentor, the costs consist largely of transportation and buying

131
lunch. In programs where a team of mentors is used to help younger children, the
costs increase greatly due to group transportation, facilitating the meetings,
providing curriculum and conducting events and activities for mentors and mentees
(Table 4.5). Additionally, low overhead is essential to securing funding and
operating smoothly as donors will overlook organizations that are seen as “top-
heavy” (Table 4.5).
Have a variety of ways to secure mentors. Mentoring organizations can
secure mentors in a variety of ways. Organization C stated that students would “cold
call” if necessary to find a career mentor. Others, such as B and D discussed the
volunteerism of recurring mentors who return year after year (Table 4.1). Other
schools have existing databases of past mentors, place ads on websites such as
mentoring.org and craigslist, or secure partnerships with the public and community
relations departments of large companies who are providing outreach opportunities
to their staff. Each way of attracting mentors has advantages and drawbacks that
make them more applicable to certain mentoring arrangements.
Level II mentorship is not apprenticeship. Level two organizations, A, B,
C, and D, ensured mentoring did not turn into apprenticeship. Organization B stated
the project that comprises the child’s curriculum “is oftentimes a business
development tool to help the company” that the child must develop with his or her
unique skills and ability that requires him to assess the needs of the organization
(Table 4.3). The experience provides students a sense of what a certain profession
feels like and how to bring one’s skills to a business with a mind towards identifying

132
a problem and creating a solution. This is consistent with the needs of 21
st
century
learning, which demonstrate the futility in learning a specific trade that will likely be
obsolete in a few years. Mentoring is about learning to understand the depths of a
field through regular, first-hand experience in order to reach a level that allows an
individual to see how the workplace is connected to a wider system of knowledge
that an individual must always be able to access for success.
Prepare students to leave the campus. Organizations A, and C expressed
concern for “frontloading” children in some capacity to ensure they acted
appropriately in the work place. They both reported providing “training” for
activities such as how to use public transportation, as well as getting waivers from
parents and ensuring students had proper insurance (Tables 4.1, 4.2). These
practices could include anything from basic etiquette and guidance on how to dress
professionally, to “making sure there’s a good fit with respect to desires of
mentors… and the interests of the student” (Table 4.1). Schools were very
concerned to not have students create a problem that might result in a company or
mentor not wanting to participate in mentoring any longer, thus closing-off a
mentoring option for future students.
Demonstration of success across multiple metrics. All organizations had
their own unique barometers for success, ranging from projects and presentations, to
self-surveys, attendance reports and grade point averages as stated by the schools.
The success of mentoring can be gauged in a myriad of ways. Organizations E, F, G,
and H show social development through observable changes in student disposition,

133
success in school, relationships with teachers, high school graduation rates, and
college-going rates. Organizations F and G discussed using surveys as well as verbal
feedback with both mentors and mentees at the culmination of a program asking
mentors about perceived changes in mentees (Table 4.4).
Many participants stated the use of informal confirmation of improvement.
Examples of these include increased eye contact from a child, willingness to speak to
an adult, trust, and mentee’s own statements of being less inclined to “skip school”
and being better equipped to “handle anger.” Organizations B and E report greater
numbers of children going to college, higher graduation rates, more directed efforts
at finding colleges and scholarship opportunities, and finding out what they want to
major in to help them channel their talents and abilities in the most optimal way.
Organizations A, B and C all used a form of projects and presentations for children
to demonstrate their learning from their mentoring or internship experience in a
multitude of ways (Tables 4.3, 4.4).
Mentors view mentoring as an opportunity, not an obligation. There is
general consensus amongst all the organizations that mentoring is an opportunity for
adults to give back to a community or simply have a component of their life where
they can see or feel a change they are making in the world. Organizations B,C,D,E,
and G all reported that mentors wanted to “give back” in some capacity (Table 4.1).
However, mentoring must satisfy more than altruism. Beyond simply doing a
good deed, organizations A,B, and C all stated their mentors expressed a concern for

134
an inability to find adequate people to fill their roles when they retire, or for people
to come into their organizations and contribute to their work (Table 4.1).
On a separate level, companies who partner with mentoring organizations
find benefits from the experience as well. Not only does it help their image in a
community when it’s not always positive to be seen as a big corporation, it also
allows managers to see a different side of their employees, who possesses leadership
qualities and the ability to function in an unfamiliar environment. Organizations G
and H stated that companies felt it was an opportunity to see who unofficial leaders
were and who was willing to go an extra mile at work (Table 4.1).
However, a closer look at the companies involved with EMOs showed that
HBO, Paramount, Warner Brothers and Disney were amongst the longest standing
partners with mentoring organizations. It could be argued implicitly, that these
companies find mentoring useful, not simply because of the outreach it permits and
the good public relations for the company, but that it’s a convenient way for
employees to get in touch with the very people the majority of their products are
targeting—children and teenagers. Mentoring, then, becomes a unique opportunity
in that a company can provide outreach while simultaneously doing market research
that improves their work.
And those working in STEM fields feel they are inspiring and preparing the
next generation who will take over their work or carry on a legacy. A respondent
from organization A stated that companies expressed frustration with the caliber of
college graduates coming into their industries and were often unable to fill all their

135
vacancies as a result. Organization A reported, for example, that “Corporations
recognize they are training the next generation of STEM employees to bolster the
tech industry with American talent” (Table 4.1). Students who can demonstrate
capacities in science, technology, engineering or math have the best opportunities to
find the best mentors and add value to any business of which they became a part.
This is wholly consistent with the findings in chapter one and two, discussing 21
st

century skills in the global workforce, specifically the articles on Bill Gates’ desire
to lobby for more H1B visas so he can import the engineering talent Microsoft needs
to stay globally competitive.
It is also important that the mentoring organizations’ understand whether they
are perceived as a benefit or drain to the mentors and companies with whom they
work. Schools (A, B, C, and D) generally saw themselves as contributing to an
industry, its future, or the businesses that comprise it through the use of free, skilled
workers. EMO’s (E, F, G and H) typically saw their work as being a demand on the
mentors who already have a busy life and are giving to children with little reward.
Additionally, organization H requires companies to pay for costs associated with
mentoring. But as the previous findings demonstrate, there is clearly a benefit to all
involved.
Schools and children who were offering their services as an intern, in
exchange for mentorship, such as organizations A,B, and C, were less affected by the
economic downturn, essentially offering someone the opportunity to have an
employee work for free. But external agencies who were facilitating corporate

136
partnerships and adoptions did report seeing a decline in mentors consistent with
layoffs and tightened operating budgets as companies who were forced to “do more
with less” would be less engaged during hard times.
Pre- established and constantly evolving relationships with the
community. In both schools and EMOs, a need to connect with the community was
critical to their success. Whether having connections with local businesses and
companies or being connected to a community church, it is essential that mentors
realize their impact and feel valued. The organizations in this study had a long track
record of working with the community and a large database of companies and
individuals who could act as mentors, or a director with the ability to create
partnerships with local companies.
Time matters. This theme was expressed more frequently in the
organizations working with level one mentoring than it was with career-focused,
level two, internship-style mentoring. Level one mentoring cannot end prematurely
or be cut short. Numerous respondents echoed the findings of much research that a
mentoring relationship that ceases prematurely does more damage than good, leaving
a child who already lacks adult relationships feeling like one more adult doesn’t want
them. Arbreton, et al., in 1998 argue the longer relationships lasted, the more
positive the effects were for the mentee. But those that ended early actually “harmed
youth" (Arbreton, et al., 1998, p. 7).

137
Discussion of Research Question Three
What barriers do / would mentorship programs encounter in the public school
sector?
Funding. Organization H stated the costs of mentoring are consistent with
those cited in research. Arbreton found the costs at approximately $1000 dollars per
youth for a one on one program and at $400 per youth for a group program
(Arbreton, et al., 1998). The use of funds is largely administrative, but includes
paying for busses, snacks and operational costs involved with mentoring activities.
Recruiting mentors. Finding adults to take part in the program is naturally
challenging. The respondent from organization F discussed how professionals and
college students are challenged to participate due to their schedules, but that
mentoring on school campuses makes the programs easy for teachers who are
already there (Table 4.1). Organization B discussed that areas such as Providence,
RI, have reached a literal “saturation point” with finding mentors in the community
because so many programs in that city are focused on matching children with
mentors. Thus, one-on-one mentoring would face challenges in a large urban
district. Luckily, team and group mentoring, as well as mentor sharing can help
bridge the shortfall of human resources when necessary.
Teachers can also mentor too though, as evidenced by organization F.
Despite the challenges they face by being full-time teachers, seeing students in an
environment other than a classroom can allow for a different relationship to take
place organically. There are obvious limitations with teachers, however, due to the

138
restraints the profession places on them. Social capital is about providing new
pathways and people. To simply have teachers mentoris to short-change children out
of an additional opportunity to obtain socialcapital or be inspired by someone
beyond their conventional circles.
Selective student enrollment limits outreach potential. Mentoring is
currently not available to everyone. Organizations A, B, and C are charter schools
with various procedures for enrolment including applications and lotteries.
Organization D is a school in a prohibitively expensive neighborhood. Organization
H has to group children by school, to make bussing to the mentoring destination
feasible and does not accept single-students who are not affiliated with the selected
schools.
Organizations E, F,and G had specific students they targeted for their
programs – often students with certain minimum GPAs, without gang affiliations or
who were planning to be the first in their family to attend a four-year college.
Curriculum in many cases is designed for a specific need and a child may not be
prepared to begin the work of a given curriculum. Additionally, mentors are not
trained to deal with serious emotional problems, which limits who can mentor and
which children are allowed to participate.
Staffing a program in a traditional school is challenging. Schools have
the ability to work with mentoring organizations or create mentoring opportunities
for children, yet putting the program into motion is complicated due to the traditional
staff and organizational structure of a school. Organizations A, B, C and D all had

139
dedicated people working on the mentoring program, while several EMOs stated
they faced challenges in partnering with a school that was already heavily burdened
with working with a light administrative staff.
Charter schools have the capacity to hire people specifically to oversee the
mentoring process / programs and design their curriculum and schedule to make it a
center-piece of the learning experience. But students in traditional public schools
often must make do with the standardized, scalable curriculum of the EMOs.
Furthermore, an overburdened administration may not have the capacity to push for
the changes needed in areas such as scheduling changes, grading or a credit system
that does not count internship as learning experience.
Schools must see value in teaching social development as a means to
improving academics. Organizations from both EMOs and Schools stated there
must be a desire to emphasize the importance of life skills beyond the standard,
curricular focus on skills needed to improve test scores. Schools need to be
convinced that there is a direct benefit to having children mentored, even if they are
taken away from their studies for a portion of the day, they will return as more
focused and determined students. More progressive schools, such as organization B
place little emphasis on test scores to begin with as they hold a belief in their
model’s ability to more effectively prepare children for college and work.
Administrative oversight. Department of Justice clearance and performing
background checks are costly and time consuming, but a necessary part of the
screening process. The ongoing recruitment effort is an additional strain on

140
administration, which is reported by several EMOs as the greatest cost in running a
program.
Advisors of school-based programs get burned out. The school-based
model is an excellent model for ensuring curriculum aligns with the unique
mentorship situation of the student, however, anecdotal evidence and incidental
communication shows that managing these relationships are very challenging and
generate a high turnover rate of advisors and / or teachers. Such level two programs
operate most easily in a charter setting where hiring guidelines are less stringent and
a credential or formal certification is less critical than in a traditional public school.
Not all schools can provide mentoring equally. Schools in high SES areas
will have their own internal networks by which to generate mentors and may or may
not want an outside partner. Organization D is a sound example of this. Yet poorer
schools will have more challenges and may need a partner. Without assistance in
this process, a mentoring program could simply become an extension of the
inequalities urban schools already face with respect to the access they have to high
status figures as discussed in the Crane study (E. W. Crane, Rabinowitz, &
Zimmerman, 2004). Such inequity would merely perpetuate a lack of development
of additional high-status figures.
Mentors must have support when needed. In addition to the challenges
discussed in table 4.1, anecdotes of very challenging mentor / mentee relationships
emerged during interviews. In many of these cases a mentor was unable to provide
the needed support to the mentee, which resulted in a disconnect. In certain

141
instances, the needs of the child would emerge in a show of deep emotional problems
that the mentor was not equipped to handle. While the organizations were always
quick to act, helping the child and the mentor, these sorts of experiences had
negative effects on the mentor’s willingness to continue participating in the program.
They often resulted in the loss of mentors – the most critical component of a
mentoring relationship. Safeguards must be in place to assist all participants and
mentors must be supported. Multiple respondents stated that one of the causes of a
mentor leaving mentorship was due to an unfavorable experience (Table 4.1, 4.6).
This is supported in mentoring literature that states the most successful mentors will
always seek out the assistance of program staff to aid with complications (Arbreton,
et al., 1998).
Discussion of Research Question Four
What would a design for an urban school district look like that could assist in
overcoming these barriers and provide mentorship to all urban youth?
This research conducted investigations of a wide variety of mentoring
programs. Thus, the design of a mentoring program that would fit a diverse and
large urban school district is one that will consider the diversity of students that it
encompasses and serves. An effective system for a large urban school district will:
• Not distract from a school’s need to meet assessment goals
• Be cost effective
• Operate within existing infrastructure

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• Hold true to the necessary components of social capital by bringing
children into a completely new environment and context.
• Be realistic
• Be manageable
The proposed system is organized into three phases.
Phase I.
Determining costs and feasibility. The findings of this study are such that
bringing mentoring to every child in a large urban district is a distinct possibility.
For purposes of demonstrating the feasibility of this effort, Los Angeles Unified
School District will be used as a model of an urban district with the means to bring
level one and two mentoring to its students as an embedded component of high
school curriculum.
Level I feasibility. The California Department of Education states that LA
Unified has approximately 208,000 students currently attending high school.
Approximately 37,000 are seniors, 48,000 are juniors, 56,000 are sophomores and
66,000 are freshmen (California Department of Education, 2009-2010). A
successful model of mentoring scalable to large numbers was the group mentoring
model of organization G, which uses three mentors with groups of twelve students.
This four-to-one ratio would mean that level one mentoring could be provided to
every high school freshman with 16,500 mentors. Organization H states, confirmed
by Arbreton, et al., that the total cost, (including insurance, clearance procedures and
administrative costs) of one-on-one mentoring is approximately $1,000 per child,

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while mentoring in a group setting costs approximately $400 per child. Thus, level
one group mentoring could be provided at a 4:1 ratio for all high school freshmen in
LAUSD for $26.4M. However, because level one mentoring focuses on social and
emotional development, which is a capacity many children receive naturally from
their home environment, not every student needs level one mentoring. Therefore
that figure could decrease as much as 75%, to nearly $6.5 million (16,500 students
and 4,125 mentors). Additionally, many organizations are already providing these
services presently throughout the community, but because they are episodic and
independent partnerships with individual schools, they cannot be tracked and
quantified. Thus, the funding needed could potentially be as low as $4 million.
In 2009-10, LAUSD allocated $1.25M towards the Beyond the Bell program,
which provides extra and co-curricular activities for kids after school (Los Angeles
Unified School District, 2010-11). In other words, monies are already in place that
could aid in a significant portion of funding level one mentoring programs for
students in need of this type of mentoring.
Level II feasibility. Level two mentoring was demonstrated through a variety
of methods that contain numerous costs. Unfortunately, it was not possible to extract
a unit cost from the programs investigated in this study. However, optimistically
assuming successful level one mentoring prevents dropouts at a rate of 100%
between sophomore and Junior year, 56,000 Juniors would all be seeking level two
mentoring each year.

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The idea of having 56,000 students seeking temporary employment in the
fashion demonstrated by organizations A,B,C and D that left students ultimately
responsible for recruiting or finding their work is too daunting to entertain.
However, those organizations had methods for troubleshooting mentor shortages,
such as splitting a mentor at different times or having students work in different
semesters of the school year to still permit individual attention.
To use those strategies as a model, if a district were serious about the
endeavor and worked to secure the right partnerships, companies could create
standing internship positions through which students would rotate for two-week
internships year-round. Using just 50 weeks out of the year, one job at one
company, could provide level two mentoring to 25 different students with direct,
one-on-one mentoring for two continuous weeks with a dedicated curriculum for that
job that could be revised and tailored for each student. With a target group of
Juniors, as organizations A,B and C targeted, this job to student ratio of 25:1 would
mean only 1,920 jobs would be necessary throughout the City of Los Angeles to
satisfy the current number of juniors in LAUSD. City jobs, police departments, fire
departments, city hall, the district attorney’s office, the school system and public
works alone could easily provide hundreds of these.
These positions would perform the unique task of making level two
mentoring both replicable and scalable. Since students would be performing the
same jobs as other students, only at different times, a pre-set curriculum could be

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used and re-used, merely being “tweaked” to the individual needs of each student
coming through the program.
The school district would need to begin working with its partners in the city
and build relationships with the major industries to help install these internship
positions in each company and support them through the early stages and after.
Such an effort could decrease costs tremendously by asking each company to
screen and clear all employees who will be in direct contact with the students,
effectively eliminating that cost from the school district, and allowing the process to
build its own rhythm and function in a city that will get to know itself in ways it
never thought possible.
To make the level two experience as authentic as possible, students could
apply for the various positions by creating a resume and interviewing several weeks
before candidates are selected for the position. An internship coordinator would
exist to interview, manage curriculum and any problems that arise at the various
companies or offices mentoring the student. He or she would oversee the learning
process, ensure quality and be present for the fifty or more students who would come
through his or her assigned companies each year. Organization F stated that a typical
caseload was approximately 40 mentees to a coordinator (Table 4.3). Rounding up
to a ratio of 50 students to one internship coordinator, the position would hardly be
different than an elementary teacher on special assignment. The student’s primary
learning would come from working with people in the business, but the coordinator
could perform all the administrative duties, grade assignments and be a familiar point

146
of contact for all involved to ensure the businesses do not begin to see the process as
a burden.
Creation of a central office to facilitate and manage mentoring district-
wide. This project performed an analysis of several organizations in the Los Angeles
area. The list of organizations and schools was by no means exhaustive and there are
many organizations, small and large, private and public, with a variety of foci that
simply need assistance in becoming mentors. The challenges of recruiting,
managing, maintaining, funding and matching with schools speak to a larger problem
of centralization.
There needs to exist a central hub for organizations to get in touch with and
for the district to alert schools as to which organizations are best suited to their
students’ unique needs. New mentoring organizations and their job types first need
to be identified and cataloged by field, location and difficulty. This should be an
office familiar with the needs of the schools. Presently there is no centralizing
agency or organization in the Los Angeles area that can organize this effort. When
inquiring about this idea, the respondent from organization G stated, via incidental
communication, that such central agencies have existed in the past but are usually
very short lived. Having such an agency run and funded as a component of the
school system would help sustain it and legitimize it.
Additionally, as programs need support materials in the way of operations
assistance and curriculum, these materials can be cataloged and distributed through
the central mentoring office. This office would optimally consist of as few

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employees as possible so as to not add a level of bureaucracy to the mentoring
efforts, but be a point of contact and a central dispatch for schools and organizations.
Active recruiting and screening of companies, partnerships and mentors.
Successful EMOs and schools all had long-standing partnerships with local
businesses, museums or universities to ensure their students always had connections
to mentors in the community. These partnerships will be the lifeblood of level two
mentoring and should be forged early in the process. Suggestions might include
hosting an annual gala or event that brings out business people from the city with
educators to learn about the mentoring program and be recruited. Existing avenues
of social capital, via the teachers’ family connections and spouses are an easy way to
begin, as organization D showed with its own internal network of social and business
connections.
Recent news supports the desire for people to work in organizations that are
affiliated with children and outreach. In 2010, Georgetown University’s website
reported that 53 members of its graduating class headed to Teach for America due to
feeling a commitment and obligation to public service. The numbers grow larger
each year because students want to feel value in their work. A company who
provides mentoring opportunities would provide an option for someone determined
to move forth in their career, but who still wants to affect change with children
(Peterson, 2010). Companies need to be aware that such outreach can help them in
recruiting better talent for their companies. The mentor recruiting problem may, in
fact, turn out to be a marketing problem.

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Work with city leadership. Organizations F and H spoke of the need for
outreach to city government (Table 4.6). Assistance in the form of an ad campaign
would be powerful in the building of an ethos designed to integrate teaching and
mentoring in the life of a city and its businesses. Additionally, it can appeal to
people who want to get involved by referring them to the central office to match
them with EMOs with whom they can volunteer in level one programs or companies
they might choose to work for because of their ethos for mentoring.
Securing of funds. Presently, urban districts receive funds for the purposes of
after school programs. Mentoring programs are typically considered appropriate
after school programs. If mentoring is adopted in a district, these funds could be
redirected to cover much of the cost. Additionally, many of the EMOs provide their
own funding and, if a partnership is created, a discussion of cost-sharing should take
place in the early stages of planning.
Assess resources already in place. Urban districts, such as LAUSD,
currently have in place programs that bring mentoring opportunities to children in
some capacity. Beyond the Bell, for example, is a popular program with a mission to
“ensure that all children and youth in LAUSD have access to high quality, safe, and
supervised academic, enrichment, and recreation programs that inspire learning and
achievement beyond the regular school day”(Los Angeles Unified School District,
2011). Such programs could shift both efforts and funds to aid in the mentoring
effort, at level one or level two.

149
Identification system for needs of students. As stated previously, not all
students need a level one mentoring program, as it focuses on capacities commonly
taught and learned at home. Yet, many students in the highest-need areas do need
assistance in building these basic capacities before they can proceed to level two.
Thus, much like the teacher who performs a diagnostic reading test of students to
determine which group or book they should be learning from, mentorship too needs
an assessment of the students’ needs to determine if and when level one is needed.
As stated in chapter two, Vygotsky frequently discussed the Zone of Proximal
Development as being a space for learning that was neither too easy, not too
challenging. The “ZPD” is where the student will learn most effectively and applies
in the areas of mentoring as well to ensure children have developed the necessary
capacities to move forward.
Assess assets and needs of schools and provide options. Schools that already
possess access to social capital have an advantage in setting up partnerships between
companies and schools. A community assessment should be performed that looks at
types of occupations, local businesses as well as unique geographic features about a
school. Level one mentoring may be needed at a high rate in a certain schools, and
the school should be provided with options for level one programs in the community.
If parents are able to bring in mentoring opportunities at any level, the school should
consider the quality of those opportunities. If they’re found to be insufficient for the
needs of some children, the central office should provide alternative options.

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One such example of using local assets emerged from organization H, who
was working with a school located near a thriving church. The church had dozens of
adults who were able to compensate for the lack of local businesses in the
community and they were able to provide effective level one mentoring. This same
neighborhood would not be able to generate enough level two mentoring
opportunities however and would have to rely on the recruitment efforts of a central
office.
Phase II.
Identify several coordinators to run the early stages of the program.
Effective programs had effective administration. A new program is always plagued
with unforeseen complications and problems. People who can design curriculum but
also are able to navigate the city and communicate with mentors and worksite
management is a must for a successful execution of the program.
Develop operations manuals specific to levels I and II. While most all
EMOs desired to see an organic relationship emerge in level one mentoring, there
were still policies, procedures and issues on which mentors needed to be trained or at
least familiarized. EMOs will likely bring their own operations and curriculum,
however, materials will need to be provided to workplaces (in level two) to cover
basic procedures and rules. Additionally, students will need clear rules about how to
apply for a level two internship, when due dates are, what they can expect to do at
the job, how they will get to the location, what they will need to do to prepare and
what they can expect to learn from the experience. These should all be established

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prior to the student’s commencing a level one program or applying for a level two
program.
Develop curriculum and authentic assessments. For level two mentoring,
mentoring coordinators should work with businesses to design a curriculum unique
to the needs of the business that culminates in a product that can be presented to a
manger or business owner. Organizations A,B, and C showed examples such as a
company website, enhancements to the website, building a display in store, writing a
piece of marketing literature, registering the business with the chamber of commerce,
researching local competitors, designing a logo, performing an efficiency analysis,
creating a new product, building a profit forecast model and countless other projects
students can perform and find relevant to their unique interests and existing skill set.
Building upon the project-based curriculum seen in organizations A, B, and C, there
must be a built-in opportunity for students to present and talk about what they have
learned to teachers, community members and mentors. Such experiences lay the
groundwork for innovative thinking by individuals within the greater economy.
Provide an exit. A recurring theme in the literature of mentoring
organization as well as in the discussions with their leadership, was what to do in the
case of a student not becoming engaged. Organization D, for example, aims to find
the student another placement to ensure they find something about which they can
become passionate and interested. Organizations C and D both stated that finding
out what the student does not like is equally as important as finding out what they do
like – and thus, the mentoring relationship must have escape routes or provide job

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alternatives for critical circumstances – as mismatching with a career or individual is
simply a part of the learning experience.
Phase III.
Vet and clear mentors. Use the Department of Justice for fingerprint
clearance and perform background checks. If necessary, request references from
mentors and have the coordinator visit the sites to meet and “check out” mentors. As
stated above, attempts should be made to have the company performs this and absorb
the costs.
Inspect sites. Coordinators should perform a preliminary inspection of work
sites, personnel and equipment to ensure safety for the student both in terms of the
worksite as a physical place and the people who occupy it.
Write, publish and grow. This program will provide countless experiences
and realizations that need to be shared with the education community. Furthermore,
sharing the successes will aid in gaining funding, legitimacy, new mentors and
partners.
Stay true to the vision. Ambitious programs and endeavors often fall victim
to compromise and cuts. These programs could very quickly turn into Regional
Occupation Programs, shop class or a science club. And while those experiences are
valuable in their own right, they lack the capacity to bring social capital to urban
youth in the way this model aims to do, or are stigmatized as being vocational tracks
for students who cannot compete academically. Social capital cannot be provided to
children if they are not given the opportunity to visit new places, meet new people

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and see new things, and do so with the confidence that it is designed in a unique way
to benefit them.
Rolling start. The program should be phased-in over the course of several
years to ensure needed attention is paid to refining its processes. Several EMOs
responded that a negative experience could result in a mentor leaving mentoring
permanently. The early mentorships should be managed and studied closely to better
inform the program as it grows to scale.
Get through the first ten years. If the program can survive long enough for
students who participated in it to enter the workforce, this research demonstrates they
will begin to give back in the way that so many mentors say they give back because
they had an inspiring mentor or experience themselves, for which they are grateful.
Summary of the Discussion
The findings of this study demonstrate that there exist a variety of different
mentoring programs that can be categorized into two basic types—level one and
level two programs. These two types of programs provide different services to
children of differing needs and have many characteristics making them transferable
to a school setting. However, the programs need close monitoring and observation to
ensure success, as well as a curriculum that makes sense for the children they serve.
Furthermore, they provide a framework for a group-mentoring model that could
bring level one mentoring to all ninth graders in a district the size of LA Unified, as
well as level two opportunities to children through the development of rotating
positions in local businesses and agencies throughout the city of Los Angeles. The

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findings demonstrate that Los Angeles has a tremendous capacity to mentor children
and help them obtain the social capital necessary to help them succeed in the
economy of the 21
st
century.
Reflections
Urban Settings as a Catalyst to Success
Seth Low, the 20
th
century educator once wrote: The great city can teach
something that no university by itself can altogether impart: a vivid sense of the
largeness of human brotherhood, a vivid sense of man's increasing obligation to
man; a vivid sense of our absolute dependence on one another.
Mentoring is not an educational panacea. Some students will still not
perform or take complete advantage of a mentoring opportunity no matter how close
to their heart it may be – but many more will. Inversely, not every wealthy child
whose parents are “connected” are successful or more professionally effective
because of who their parents are—but many are and can build better lives for
themselves. Education is often said to not be in the perfection business, but in the
improvement business. With more kids succeeding simply because they have more
access to social capital, the playing field becomes more level. Mentoring has the
ability to bring Low’s vision to fruition and make the American school system again
one of the most integrated and progressive school systems in the world.
Mentoring and internships, with a unique eye towards professional
preparedness, will play a role in 21
st
century education, but are merely components
of a much larger revolution needed in schooling. However, this problem with the

155
American system is one we should recognize as being present in other countries as
well. The German school system has long been educating with an mind towards
career preparedness for decades in the Real Schule, which provides avenues for
students to obtain social capital in their teenage years to begin to focus their career
interests. And while the German system can certainly be criticized for its
premature designation of college-bound and not college-bound students, it should be
commended for its ability to provide mentoring opportunities to students who can
learn about a job which, oftentimes, results in employment upon graduation.
The Mentoring Organization is a Conduit to Social Capital
Children obtain social capital by using their school or mentoring organization
as a means of tapping into a vast pool of people and the organizations of which they
are a part. Each organization researched in this study has some existing network
they were able to provide to kids in need of a mentor. This is precisely the social
capital children need but cannot obtain without help. The mentoring organization is
literally a conduit for capital for any child who wants to access it.
Behaviors Matter, Not Indicators
Seven of the eight organizations stated they found evidence of their successes
in places such as projects, presentations of learning and, for many of the EMOs, the
improved confidence in a child’s ability to speak with an adult, make eye contact or
experience simply improved attendance and grades in school. In a time when
education is raising standards, most schools focus on the indicators rather than the
actual behaviors intended to be reflected by those indicators. Mentoring, however,

156
has the luxury of focusing only on behaviors, ensuring that their efforts are pure and
the results visible.
Improvement For All
Mentoring programs realize the “next” step is different for children
depending upon how far they have come. While career-minded activity should
undoubtedly play a central role in the later stages of a mentoring program, children
need to build their foundational capacities to be prepared for that type of decision.
Children benefited from simply having an adult around them that may have been a
teacher, a stay at home mother volunteering her time or by a local church. These all
provided space for children to grow within the context of a community of inspiring
adults who had found their own successes in the world. And students in level two
programs benefited from having a model of a possible career choice laid before them
in a way few children ever do.
A strong, globally competitive workforce for a global 21
st
century economy
must move all children forward and help them maximize their potential. This means
not only motivating and inspiring the lowest performing students to work harder and
perform at a higher level, but also ensuring the most capable students are in jobs
where their unique talents and abilities can be maximized. As Jim Collins states in
Good to Great, to move an organization forward, you not only have to have the
“right people” on the bus, but have them in the “right seats” (Collins, 2001). An
organization wouldn’t want an engineer running the marketing department, just as
they wouldn’t want a publicist leading research and development. In the same way,

157
we don’t want our students with a passion for science entering professions that are
misaligned with their interests where they will perform at a level of mediocrity when
they would thrive in the right field. Even amongst the highest performing schools
and students, exposure to the realities of the workplace is an essential component to
helping them find the right place for their unique sets of talents and abilities. Being
in the right profession will not only improve that profession, but the productivity of
that individual and the passion with which they bring to their work each day.
The Heart of a City
There exists an amazing capacity within the city of Los Angeles and in many
of its largest businesses to take part in a program to help children. Companies such
as Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Ernst & Young, to name a few, are already
encouraging their employees through the facilitation of relationships with numerous
mentoring organizations throughout the city of Los Angles to help mentor at risk
youth. These capacities are fueled by a myriad of reasons that emerge from Los
Angeles’ identity as a thriving diverse metropolis. Some people want to give back to
their community. Some are looking to please their bosses by participating in a
company-wide initiative to get involved in the community through mentoring at-risk
youth. Others merely want to feel like they make a difference or find it is their duty
to participate in the community to which they belong in order to keep it functioning
in the way that it does. The motive and desire already exists and that is the seminal,
single-most important ingredient to the success of a program in the schools.

158
A Representative Sample
During the interview process, respondents frequently referred to other
programs around the city and the nation. Programs such as the ACE Mentor
program in New England and other more popular programs such as Big Brothers Big
Sisters, are working to bring mentors to children. They operate under the same
assumption that social capital is necessary for growth and the success of children in
America (Abdul-alim, 2011). Brief investigations into these programs find that
many of the procedures and operations of those organizations are used in the
organizations researched in this study.
Affecting Organizational Change
Not to say that changes are not needed in schools, but for mentoring to take
hold in a school, little needs to change within the school itself or on the part of the
teaching staff—rather, mentoring changes students and transforms them in ways that
makes them more consistent with what teachers and administrators desire to see in
students. Looking at the measures of effectiveness for the mentoring programs show
that amongst level one programs, things such as school attendance, fewer fights, and
more responsible decision making were all cited by the respondents. For level two
programs, students took a greater interest in a specific field, allowing them to see
true, real outcomes and possibilities for their own future informed by the classes they
were taking and the subjects they were studying. Such experience virtually
eliminates the question of “when are we ever going to need to do this or use this in

159
the future?” and shows how mentoring can cause the very sort of “disruptive”
innovation discussed in Christensen’s text in chapter two.
Edgar Schein argued that the most difficult level of change to instill was at
the level of core beliefs and assumptions. Mentoring has the power to transform the
very individuals about whom teachers hold assumptions – the people who inform
their beliefs and guide their daily behavior and work. When evidence to the contrary
is presented regularly, it becomes very easy to let go of old beliefs and assumptions.
Areas for Further Study
What are the best ways to design high quality, individualized curriculum
around an internship for a large group of students? One of the greatest challenges
in using an internship model in a school, such as organization B, is the need to tailor
and customize curriculum towards the unique interests of the student. This work is
challenging and it and leads to a high turn-over rate in personnel. What are strategies
and methods of creating personalized curriculum quickly and effectively for this type
of schooling experience?
What would enable companies to build partnerships with schools and mentor
more often? Since retaining mentors and partners tends to be the most challenging
part of mentoring, a study would interview companies who have been involved in
mentoring to understand what troubles and challenges they face. This could permit
accommodations to be made at the schools, city, county or state level to allow a
school or mentoring organization to operate in such a way as to make it more

160
inviting and enticing for companies to mentor children and provide them the social
capital that could be the difference between their success or a nation’s failure.

161
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