By Danielle Beurteaux
Trey Beck and Pamela Cantor: It’s really hard to focus on algebra when you’re actually afraid for your safety |
For most students, school is difficult enough without disruptions. Add in violence, instability and classroom disorder, and learning gets even tougher. “It’s really hard to focus on algebra when you’re actually afraid for your safety,” says Trey Beck.
Beck, 39, a managing director at D.E. Shaw, which manages $14.23 billion in hedge fund assets, knows this from first-hand experience. He attended schools in Virginia and Texas with problems, like gang activity, that made learning challenging.
He has long been interested in education; he almost became a teacher himself, and now he’s board chair of Turnaround for Children, an organization he joined in 2007. Turnaround works with troubled schools and focuses on poverty in tandem with teaching.
Programs to improve school performance often focus on one element—class size, teacher performance or test scores—when a holistic approach is needed, says Beck. The key is teaching educators to recognize and cope with the destabilizing effect poverty has on students and what a barrier it is to learning.
“Before you can get any educating done, you need to address head-on the effects of poverty,” says Beck. “Teachers have training in education, but I think it’s fair to say there’s very little specialized training for teaching poor kids and dealing with the unique artifacts of being poor.”
Turnaround’s approach is to partner with problem elementary and middle schools, where it installs full-time staff on-site for three years of intensive intervention. This academic year, Turnaround is working with 24 schools in Harlem and the Bronx; Washington, D.C.; and Orange, New Jersey, the organization’s first venture outside of New York. The Orange program is funded by a three-year financial commitment from New Jersey resident David Tepper, founder of Appaloosa Management. Turnaround is looking to work with schools in Baltimore and Massachusetts next year.
Outside support has been enthusiastic as well: The group’s first benefit last year raised $1.1 million, and this year’s, to be held in April at the Plaza Hotel, raised half that amount before tickets went on sale.
The organization has expanded—the budget has grown from $3.5 million in 2007 to $8.8 million for the current academic year—thanks in part to Beck’s direction. Pamela Cantor, who founded Turnaround in 2002, says Beck’s financial guidance has been invaluable, especially during the financial crisis of 2008, when he took the lead. “Trey has been a leadership mentor to me and very much a financial strategy adviser,” says Cantor. “When the meltdown happened in 2008, Trey was absolutely essential to shaping my thinking about the awareness of the impending risk and how to manage that risk.”
Much time and talk in the past few years has been devoted to dealing with the nation’s education crisis at the city, state and federal levels, and Beck knows the issue isn’t just about making life and learning better for one student, or a school of students. Rather, it’s about the bigger impact that insufficient education has on society.
“It’s absolutely critical that we as a nation get this right,” says Beck. “When kids aren’t being educated, it’s not just a problem for the kids, and it’s not just a problem for the family of the kid, it’s a problem for all of us. It has real repercussions socially, politically, and economically.”