Grow black entrepreneurship: better education, more opportunity and higher profile role models to make technology scene look more like Philly

Bruce Marable is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Defined Clarity. Photo by Brian Dzenis

When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien ‘I don’t know a single black entrepreneur,’ the snippet of the fourth installment O’Brien’s “Black in America” documentary set off a firestorm of debate about race in the cradle of America’s tech community, Silicon Valley.

In Philadelphia, among some black entrepreneurs in and around technology, Arrington’s comments were not a surprise.

“Something could be so normal or commonplace that you don’t even know something is wrong,” said Tayyib Smith, the founder of two.one.five magazine and Little Giant Media. “I don’t begrudge him for saying that because that’s how he feels, it just proves the lay of the land in Silicon Valley, so it was a good thing and it got people talking.”

The documentary, which originally aired on Nov. 13 and was screened locally soon after, followed eight black entrepreneurs: their struggles and perspectives in developing investment and user interest in the competitive world of high technology.

“Personally, I think it’s an accurate depiction of what the technology scene looks like, especially here in Philadelphia,” said Bruce Marable, the co-founder and chief marketing officer for Northern Liberties web development shop Defined Clarity. “When I go to any local organization meetings, happy hours or anything going on within the technology community, it’s primarily young Caucasians, some Asians and maybe an Indian person. There’s hardly any African Americans.”

“There’s a lot of times when I’m the only African American around,” he added.

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Dr. Chad Womack: A vision for tech-based local development and the STEM education needed to get there

Womack in 2007.

Updated, Dec. 13, 2011, 12:41: Changed company named from NanoTec to NanoVec; corrected Dr. Nunery’s name.

When Dr. Chad Womack moved his nanobiomolecular startup company NanoVec to Philadelphia in 2006, he was working from an office located in front of University City High School.

Though he was born and raised in Philadelphia, he didn’t know the history of the school. Long drawn to education, he began wondering how the school was impacted by science, technology, education and mathematics (STEM) initiatives.

That was how he came to chair a School District of Philadelphia task force run by then Superintendent Thomas Brady to help shape a vision for boosting STEM opportunities.

“The school district was not prepared to address STEM as an initiative that would provide an opportunity for students to have a pathway into college, majoring in STEM, and then into careers,” Womack says.

It wasn’t the first time that he has been involved in the issue.

In 1999, Womack followed a health fellowship at Harvard researching HIV/AIDs to a research position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. His interest in STEM led him to D.C. Public Schools, where a year later, Arlene Ackerman would resign as Superintendent.

So it was that Ackerman’s departure from the School District of Philadelphia this summer was familiar to him. He was actively working to encourage STEM initiatives in the District, when he wasn’t working with The America21 project.

“Ackerman didn’t want to be bothered with it, but this is very typical of leadership in public education. To them, STEM is this special thing for whiz kids,” he says.

Womack’s The America21 Project is focused on empowering urban centers and communities through STEM education and workforce development, high-growth entrepreneurship and access to capital. With his new venture, he’s still actively engaging the District around STEM priorities.

After the jump, we caught up with Womack about the state of STEM education in Philadelphia.

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How to get involved with STEM education in Philadelphia

A child plays with one of the robots at the Philly Robotics Expo during Philly Tech Week 2011. Photo: Rachel Playe

Of the four parts of a series on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education that ran this week on Technically Philly, it was perhaps the fourth that grabbed our attention most.

Despite mounting problems in the School District of Philadelphia related to STEM education, many are beyond its immediate control, and citizens are taking action to get involved.

Throughout conversations with dozens of people involved with STEM education in Philadelphia it was said repeatedly: This is the city’s and nation’s problem, not the District’s alone.

That makes it a local technology community problem.

What is missing is a pipeline to connect that community of bright, active individuals in Philly tech with students. Second, we believe, entrepreneurs could use their experience with innovation to attack the problem with business plans.

It’s with that in mind that we’ve partnered with Teach for America’s Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education workshop series. Focused on innovation in education, the invite-only workshops, which will take place in 2012, are intended to inspire the creation of actionable nonprofit and business ventures to impact education.

When TFA launched a similar workshop series in the San Francisco Bay Area, it resulted in the launch of new startups, including Junyo, a tool to help teachers measure student learning, and Skoodio: a student portfolio platform for the social media age. Perhaps most interestingly, of 25 participants in the workshop series, a third were experienced in technology and business with little education background.

When we connected with the organization, it was abundantly clear that the entrepreneurial spirit of Philadelphia’s technology community could help create organizations that could inspire actionable change in education.

The workshops will lead up to a pitch event in May where participants will demonstrate their ideas.

We encourage you to apply for the workshops here. Mention that you saw the opportunity on Technically Philly. Deadline for applications is December 16.

If you’re not interested specifically in the workshops, there’s plenty of ways to get involved with STEM education in Philadelphia. After the jump, we point to some of the organizations that have mentorship, volunteering and sponsorship opportunities.

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Citizens work alongside the school system to strengthen District STEM education opportunities

This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.

After graduating from Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School while living in a working-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia during the 1980s, Myreon-Michael Smallwood had a decision to make.

He didn’t have an interest in attending a four-year college, but his father, who worked as an inspector for the Philadelphia Water Department, wanted better for his son. They agreed to meet in the middle.

Having always liked to take things apart, Smallwood enrolled in a two-year electronic technology associates program at the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology outside the city in Media.

Smallwood

It was there that he learned computer-aided drafting, using an emerging software package called AutoCAD, which would shape the course of his career.

After graduating in 1989, he got a job as a technician at a small polymer processing plant. Five years in, outsourcing of industrial jobs began to impact the plant. But the computer skills that Smallwood learned at P.I.T. and in high school made him an indispensable asset to the company.

Today, Smallwood’s success, of graduating from Philadelphia’s public school system as an African-American and earning a degree at a two-year technical school in a field related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as STEM, would be considered a statistical anomaly.

As we reported Monday, between 2005 and 2010, less than one percent of African-American students — who make up more than half of the District’s enrollment of 150,000 — graduated high school and went on to earn college degrees in a STEM-related major.

Having later earned a bachelor’s degree from Drexel University, Smallwood now works at Boeing’s southwest Philadelphia location as an engineer, helping to keep track of the physics that enable the company’s helicopters to fly.

It was out of concern for the District’s STEM opportunities that he stepped outside of his daily routine at the company to address the situation that faced his own children.

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State and District math and science policies leave gaps in competitive STEM curriculum

The cover of the subsequent book resulting from the Gathering Storm committee.

This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.

It was the Gathering Storm that brought Philadelphia’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics professionals interested in STEM education to action.

Known as the “Rise of the Gathering Storm” committee, in 2005, representatives of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine addressed a congressional committee on America’s ability to compete globally in the 21st century.

The committee said in its executive summary that it was “deeply concerned that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.”

On the top of the list of actionable change was improvements to K-12 STEM education.

In part, it led to the Philadelphia Education Fund’s launch of the Math & Science Coalition, a group of 45 partner organizations from corporate and educational industries dedicated to advancing the conversation around math and science instruction in Philadelphia public schools.

“An overwhelming majority of future jobs in the country will have some STEM component to them. The skills that STEM gives to students are absolutely essential for the future workforce,” says Math & Science Coalition President Don McKinney, who has run the program since 2006.

With STEM programming abundant across extracurricular activities and in alternative learning environments, the Math + Science Coalition raises awareness and creates opportunities to ensure that good teachers are available in public schools in Philadelphia.

As we reported earlier this week in the first two parts of this series, STEM education faces an uphill battle in the School District because of policy precedent and the summer’s budget crisis, which could affect the local workforce that is available for 21st century jobs.

Today, leaders say that in School District classrooms, success in STEM education is hurt by a disproportionate focus on math skills driven by state testing requirements, a curriculum that has difficulties impacting and interesting young students, and an inability to retain teaching talent across STEM studies.

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Lack of citywide STEM education vision leaves Philly’s skilled workforce in jeopardy

Alliance for Progress Charter student Karizma watches her LEGO robot automatically follow a black line.

This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.

At the Alliance for Progress Charter School, just west of Temple University along Cecil B. Moore Avenue, technology teacher Mary Beth Hertz runs the school’s first all-girl robotics club.

It’s an upstart team, funded by a $640 online donation campaign and Hertz’s own dime, which brought the purchase of a $1,000 robot kit this summer.

On an early evening in October, sixth grader Karizma L. plugged a LEGO Mindstorms robot into an iMac computer and began to fix the ‘bot’s light sensor while Hertz hustled between her and a team of two students working across the room.

After using a kid-friendly software package to program the light sensor by herself, Karizma crouched down beside a white mat nearby and watched as the robot automatically followed a circular black line by comparing the color values of the white and black pixels underneath it.

Karizma gasped and threw her hands up in the air in celebration. “I just followed the instructions!,” she yelled to Hertz, who watched nearby.

“It’s the epitome of what learning looks like. They’re working through a problem. You can see the light bulbs go off,” Hertz says.

It’s a familiar story across public school science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs: children learning the values of problem-solving, the impact of technology and the math and science that make it possible.

STEM education reform could be a powerful way to rejuvenate the urban core of Philadelphia, advocates say, where the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last half-century and the recent global recession have led to an unemployment rate larger than the national average. In September, Philadelphia reported a 10.9% unemployment rate compared to the national average of 8.8%.

And though it appears that the District is renegotiating a focus on STEM education under new leadership, stakeholders close to the issue say it’s bogged down by precedent and budget concerns.

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STEM graduation rates show uphill battle with math and science in School District

Students drive their underwater robot through a series of hoops during the 2011 Greater Philadelphia Sea Perch challenge. Photo: GPSPC

Updated, Dec. 5, 12:26p: Added total number of students graduating from 2005-2010 period, and total number of District enrollment to compare with STEM results; Corrected Womack’s title at America21 Project.

Last week at Drexel University, public school student teams kicked-off a five-month regional challenge to develop an underwater robot.

Students will prototype and engineer their robots until March of next year, when they’ll compete regionally for a slot at the second annual National Sea Perch Competition in Virginia.

At a local level, the competition is intended to show off the talent of students in the School District of Philadelphia and other regional public schools who spend hundreds of extracurricular hours building state-of-the-art robots with the help of dedicated teachers and industry mentors.

Teams gather around an indoor swimming pool, drop remote-controlled robots into the water, and are challenged to perform specific underwater tasks, like stopping the flow of a simulated leaking oil well, or propelling through a series of hoops.

“If people came to one robotics competition, they would be floored that our students do this,” says the District’s STEM Coordinator Kendrick Davis.

Advancing the priorities of math and science initiatives is a focus for Davis and his small team in the District’s division of College Readiness and Accelerated Programs. But the Sea Perch competition is launching at a time of great uncertainty for the school district’s education initiatives related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as STEM.

Despite an aggressive federal push to prepare students for 21st century jobs, the School District’s perceived lagging prioritization of math and science education was amplified this summer by a budget crisis that is tearing down fledgling and disparate STEM efforts, leaving concerned citizens and stakeholders to move outside the system to fix the problem. Without improvement, they say, Philadelphia will have a hard time assembling a 21st century workforce that can rely on math, science and technology skills.

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