Khaya Njumbe enrolled at GEO Academies’ 21st Century Charter School, in Gary, Indiana, when he was eleven years old. By age thirteen, he’d become the youngest student in state history to earn an associate degree. By the time he graduates this May, at age fifteen, he will have earned a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University Northwest, and will soon enroll in medical school.
Abram Lewis, who attends the same school, was accepted to Purdue Northwest’s bachelor’s degree track at age sixteen, the youngest student to ever do so. He will also earn a bachelor’s degree by the time he graduates in May.
These are just two of the most recent success stories to come out of the GEO Academies network of eight schools operating in grades kindergarten through twelve in Indiana and Louisiana. Founded a quarter century ago, they focus on preparing traditionally underserved students for college-level coursework—a laudable and important goal in a country plagued by large race- and income-based college-success gaps. One of the noteworthy ways the network does this is by putting high school students on real college campuses and supporting their success there—demonstrating to these young people that they’re absolutely capable of earning a degree. This differs from many dual-enrollment programs that merely give students access to college-level coursework that’s taught by a high school teacher in a high school classroom.
To learn more about GEO Academies’ operations, philosophy, and success, I spoke with Kevin Teasley, its founder and CEO.
Why did you start GEO Academies twenty-five years ago? What were the foundational principles? Have those changed over the last quarter century?
Back in 1992, when I led California’s school voucher campaign, I met a man named Dr. Anjim Palmer. He had a private school for Black students located in South Central Los Angeles. I was trying to get his support for vouchers. He, of course, supported school choice but was reluctant to support Prop. 174. Why? Because he didn’t know the people behind the initiative. He said if you care about our children and our people, then where were you when I built this school? When my mother died? When my children got married? His point was well taken. There is no relationship. No history. Thus, no trust. Many school choice advocates, including me, didn’t invest any more time in the communities they seek to change than the life of a political campaign. Without my realizing it, this shared wisdom formed a foundational principle of GEO.
After leading many political campaigns across the country, I was looking to do something more meaningful than just raise money for radio, TV, phone bank, and mail campaigns. I thought about Dr. Palmer’s comments and decided to start Greater Education Opportunities (GEO) Foundation in 1998 to build meaningful and trusting relationships by empowering underserved families to create and support the school choice policies of their preference—charters, vouchers, tax credits, etc. They choose. I committed to support them for the long haul, and GEO was the vehicle to make it possible.
After a few years of GEO operating, Indiana passed a charter law, and we were invited to open one of Indiana’s first charter schools. I saw this as an opportunity to go beyond the talk of school choice and prove to our local communities that choice works and benefits inner-city families. Over the last twenty-five years, our efforts have become so much more than proving choice works. We’ve developed strong relationships in the communities we serve. We are present for funerals, weddings, graduations, new jobs, and new births. We have very meaningful and trusting relationships in the communities we serve. That’s good for school choice.
And while we started our schools with the stated intention of improving test scores and high school graduation rates, we found a strong disconnect between our aspirations and student aspirations. Most students we served didn’t see themselves as going to college due to costs and lack of anyone in their families having gone to college. Heck, many of the families we serve lack high school diplomas. And we want their kids to do better on tests and go to college?
So after many years of doing what traditional college prep high schools do—focusing on academic rigor, stressing the importance of going to college to increase lifetime earning potential, and doing the college tour, scholarship, and application workshops, and yet, ultimately failing to get through to students—we decided it was time to take a very different approach. We stopped talking at them and started showing them. We started putting students on a real college campus while they are supposed to be in our high schools. We wanted to show students they can do college. Take away the mystique and fear of college. Knock down the financial barriers of college by paying their tuition, too. And provide them the necessary staff support—academic and social—to help them succeed.
It started with Vincent Pena in 2011. He was sixteen. He was smart, but he was going to drop out of our high school. He didn’t see himself going to college, couldn’t afford it, and his family needed him to help pay the bills. It was a five-alarm fire for us. We offered to put him in college if he passed the college entrance test. We promised to pay his tuition, buy his books, and to help him earn an associate degree. He took the test, passed, and two years later, he became the first in Northwest Indiana to earn a full associate degree before graduating from high school. This experience changed GEO’s model dramatically.
Today, more than sixty students have earned associate degrees before graduating from our high school in Gary, and now we are replicating our model in Indianapolis and Baton Rouge. One Gary student earned her bachelor’s degree from Purdue in 2017 before graduating from our high school. She was not a unicorn. Two more will do that in 2024, and six more will do that in 2025. We are just getting started in Baton Rouge, but already had 10 percent of our inaugural graduating class of 2023 earn associate degrees while in our high school—a first for the city. This year, in 2024, we will have 20 percent of our graduating class accomplish this goal. The support of our schools and the actions and results of these students are having a positive psychological impact in Gary. And now, it’s spreading to Indianapolis and Baton Rouge.
Those college and career readiness programs you just mentioned—central to GEO Academies and with many extraordinary success stories over the years—are a rather sharp departure from how high school is usually structured in the country. Why do you take that approach? And how do you facilitate and maintain its success?
Yes, our schools are very different from traditional schools. We begin with the end in mind. And we believe this is just as much a psychological battle as it is an academic battle. We are all about student college and career success. We’ve learned talking about going to college is not enough for our students. Our students need real college experience while with us. Once they see they can do college work, high school graduation becomes more important to them. Our annual high school graduation rates are near 100 percent today, and our college and career readiness ratings in Indiana are nine times the state average for the demographics we serve and five times the general population across the state.
We facilitate and maintain our success each year by budgeting properly and prioritizing these outcomes. College and career success drives every decision we make. We don’t invest in huge facilities. We don’t have a large staff. We are not a destination high school. We are a launching pad. We intentionally partner with local colleges and universities to provide teachers and facilities. This increases the educational opportunities we can provide our students, saves us from having to compete with higher ed (and others) for high-quality teachers, and saves us facility costs, too. We don’t need to build huge facilities.
This approach allows us to spend the “savings” on paying tuition and providing students access to the many educational opportunities that already exist on college campuses and in career centers. We are a small school, but we seek to provide all the amenities you find at large schools and more. For example, we don’t own a plane or flight simulator, but our students earn pilot licenses. We don’t have a welding tool on campus, but our students earn welding certifications. And we don’t have a Spanish teacher, but our students learn Spanish (at the college level). We offered more than 200 additional courses to students and met their individual interests, but didn’t have the expense of all those full-time teacher salaries and all those additional classrooms. These are significant savings!
American schools have long suffered from “excellence gaps”—wherein students from marginalized backgrounds who are capable of advanced achievement fare much worse than their advanced peers who are more advantaged, be it test scores, college acceptance, college graduation, or lifetime earnings. Schools only have so much power to narrow these gaps—but where they do have influence, in what ways do you think schools fail? And how could they succeed?
I think many schools fail to fully empower students because they have blinders on. Schools say they believe kids can do more, but then they limit them to opportunities on their own campuses. They say it is too expensive or cumbersome to allow students to take real college courses and transport them to college campuses. These are excuses—convenient and focused on schools, not students.
Dual-credit or AP courses on high school campuses work for some students but not for all. And they are not the same as real college courses. Many students need and benefit from real college campuses experiences while they still have the support of their high school staff.
This is how we turn things around. We exist for the students and the students alone. The dollars we receive per student belong to our students, not our schools. We are here to help students earn as much as they can with the public dollar as possible. No law says students are limited to earning a K–12 education with K–12 dollars. No one says that. We don’t. So if a student of ours is capable of doing more and earning a K–16 education within the thirteen years we have them in our K–12 schools, why not allow and support that? Students benefit. Society benefits.
You believe you model is scalable across America. Can you expound on that, touching on start-up costs, state funding, and what, if anything, would have to change in other locales to facilitate that expansion? What are the biggest challenges to making such scaling a reality?
Yes, our model is scalable. Philanthropy is needed for school launch, but after that, we operate on state, local, and federal dollars. That is our goal. We don’t build a model based on annual philanthropic gifts. That’s not smart. The college credits and degrees our students earn are paid for with the public dollars we receive.
The most important change that is needed is in the mindset of adults running traditional schools. Everyone always wants more money (who doesn’t), but until that money flows, how are you going to help students do more with what you have? That’s the job. In Gary, Indianapolis, and Baton Rouge, we partner with local colleges and universities because they have the expertise, it is economical, and it provides real experience our students need to go to college and complete college. It also helps our students see why they need to finish high school.
At the higher-ed level, mindsets need to change, too. High school students can do college work, they don’t misbehave on campus, and they can work with older students and adults. And as an aside for all those higher-ed institutions with declining enrollments, partnering with your local high school is perhaps the best way to increase your enrollment and get students to not only enroll, but complete their degree with your institution. Don’t wait until they are seniors or graduate from high school to recruit them. We start our students as early as ninth grade in real college courses.
Lastly, at the state policy level, we need to break down the silo between K–12 funding and higher-ed funding. It’s as if the two shall not meet. They should. And the budgets should be blended accordingly. The funds don’t belong to institutions. They belong to students. States should fund students earning an education and not restrict it to K–12 results. Indiana is now supporting and rewarding high schools for producing students who earn one and two years of college. The state rewards high schools with a $1,500 check per student earning thirty college credits and $2,500 per student earning an associate degree. This is a giant step toward incentivizing high schools to do more than tradition expects. Other states should replicate this effort.
GEO Academies have grown to eight schools that serve more than 4,000 students. What are the organization’s plans for the next five to ten years?
We’ve been reluctant to say we will grow to fifty to 100 schools in five or ten years. While we would like to do that, that would take a lot of philanthropy to launch. It is most important for us to open quality schools, not focus on the quantity of schools. Each location is unique. That said, I think it is fair to say we will double in size in the next five years and serve more than 8,000 students by 2029. More important than the number of students we serve will be the number of students earning associate degrees before graduating from our high schools. While I’d like to say we will have 100 percent of our students graduate with an associate degree in four years, we are open enrollment schools, and many of our students want to pursue career certifications, too. So, our goal is to get to 50 percent of our graduating classes earning associate degrees, with 100 percent earning at least one full year of college and/or a high-quality career certification while in our high schools. Even for students who don’t complete the full sixty credits and only have forty-five, or thirty, or even only three, they have already taken significant steps towards envisioning and accomplishing their future.
