People Matter — Mightily: Maia Heyck-Merlin Takes on Talent Development at AF

Achievement First is growing its network of schools. This requires developing our existing corps of educators and recruiting literally hundreds of new teachers. Maia Heyck-Merlin, our first Vice President of Talent Development, is tackling this challenge head on. Here she answers questions about talent development at AF.

What is your role at Achievement First?
I joined the Achievement First team in October as Vice President of Talent Development. Most people love the sound of this title but don't know exactly what it means. Basically, I lead the execution of our "people investment" efforts. This means attracting, recruiting, developing, recognizing, and retaining the nation's best talent to lead our students to significant academic gains.

What did you do before Achievement First?
My career in education began in 1999 as a Teach For America corps member in South Louisiana, where I taught 4th grade. In 2002, I returned to TFA and worked for five years (fantastic ones!) in various leadership roles, all related to teacher training. When I decided I wanted a job that was a little closer to the classroom, I found a great fit with Achievement First.

What's innovative about AF's recruitment and hiring strategies?
For one, applicants for teaching and leadership positions must complete a rigorous, three-round application process that includes an online application, phone interview, and live interview with sample class. We don't make apologies for the fact that, on average, fewer than one in ten applicants is offered a position. We know that teacher quality is the most important factor in student success.

For aspiring school leaders, we've begun implementing a multi-day, multi-candidate interview process that includes a sample lesson and leadership simulations in data analysis, teacher feedback, and leadership case studies.

Last but not least, our referral reward system is a critical component in the success of our recruitment effort. The system is based in part on the fact that great teachers know other great teachers. We offer a generous financial incentive to AF teachers who send new teachers our way. We also want our friends and supporters outside of AF to refer us candidates they think would love to work on our team. Astonishingly, more than 30% of new hires for the 07-08 school year came from internal and external referrals!

Describe one element of AF's talent development strategies.
We're building our systems out from the premise that instructional excellence alone should take you as far as you want to go in your career. We want to debunk the idea that professional growth invariably follows a management track from teacher to dean to principal. This isn't to say we aren't investing a ton in developing school leaders, but just like Google wants to keep their best engineers doing work that requires those unique skills, we want to keep our best math instructors focused on student achievement in math-not only in their own classrooms, but in other people's classrooms as well. Leadership takes many forms: we want there to be just as much incentive and reward in instructional excellence-whereby great teachers become mentors, curriculum consultants, and drivers of achievement-as there is in a principal or dean career path.

What are you working on now?
My team and I have been laying the groundwork for a professional growth plan (PGP) process that's consistent and reliable in guiding the development of AF employees at all levels, in all areas of the organization. Every single person should be growing in a direction that he or she is excited about. Everyone should be able to answer this question: What are your two or three learning and development goals for this year, and what are you doing (with our support) to reach them? The PGP process should yield four or five areas in which the employee is doing exceptionally well, and one or two areas they need to grow in, be they content areas, skill areas, or both.

What are some challenges that you and your team face?
One challenge is that none of Achievement First's structures or curricula are "people proof," which is to say that the AF model alone is no guarantor of high student achievement. What matters is an outstanding teacher in every classroom and an outstanding principal at every school. It's so logical, but I think people tend to forget it. That leads me to our next challenge, which is finding and retaining enough great people to maintain our standards of excellence and grow our network. For those of us who are passionate about closing the achievement gap, I can't emphasize enough the importance of everyone's role in attracting and retaining talent. As I like to say, everyone's a recruiter, and it's always recruitment season.

Amistad Alumni Have Inspiring Story to Tell

Jared Bailey and Kevin Walker, two best friends from Amistad's first graduating class, are busy college sophomores pursuing their goals and dreams at New York University. Jared, home after a semester in Prague, is doing coursework for his major in economics and recording a music album called College Boy. Kevin is working on his degree in film from NYU's world-renowned Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. Kevin spent a summer interning for a famous Kanbar alum, filmmaker Spike Lee, between his junior and senior years of high school.

Jared and Kevin are from New Haven's Tre and Hill neighborhoods, respectively-two of the poorest and most dangerous communities in the city. Jared's biological father has never been in the picture (although his mother later remarried a man who is, by every other account, Jared's dad), and Kevin was raised by his grandmother. From the time Kevin was born, his mother and father's lives were ruled by drug abuse and jail time, so Kevin adapted to seeing them for short visits every few years. Like many other self-made people, Kevin has learned to use adversity as a tool for building character. He attributes his deep-rooted sense of independence to his unusual and often solitary upbringing.

Jared and Kevin were among Amistad Academy's inaugural class of 6th graders and remember the sense of adventure as they began attending this "radically different" new school. "At Amistad, I finally had teachers who invited my mind to explore," says Jared. The books that the boys read and the class discussions that ensued captured their imaginations, and their love for reading soared. To this day, they agree that Manchild in the Promised Land, the unforgettable story of a boy growing up on the streets of Harlem, is one of the best books they've ever read. At Amistad, the boys also found encouragement to be creative. They started a music group called BK2 and performed their first rap, "Welcome to Double A," to a gym full of proud Amistad Academy students.

Jared and Kevin were among a handful of Amistad's first 8th-grade alumni to be accepted into the distinguished Icahn Scholars Program at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, CT. This meant a full ride to one of the country's best private high schools. Even with an Amistad education behind them, the boys had a lot of adjusting to do as soon as they arrived. Being a successful student at Choate meant balancing study time with extracurricular activities, admitting that they needed help sometimes and being proactive about getting it, and ultimately figuring out how they were going to "leave their mark" at the school. Jared and Kevin remember being asked this question by an influential teacher in their junior year. They decided to have their music group create a CD and give a concert as part of a campaign to raise AIDS awareness. Proceeds from the project went to the VH1 Global Fund to Fight AIDS.

While they were at Choate, Jared and Kevin returned to Amistad Academy numerous times to talk about their experiences. Today, Jared is a mentor for young AF scholars as a tutor in AF's Saturday Tutoring Program in Brooklyn. The boys hope their accomplishments will inspire students like them-students for whom opportunity and success were never foregone conclusions-to work hard and aim high in life. It will be very exciting to see what else these talented young men will accomplish with the support of a great education, their family at Achievement First, and their amazing friendship.