Scarsdale Data Wrangler Helps Yonkers Students Get College-Ready

Scarsdale resident Bud Kroll was profiled on the front page of the Journal News on January 6th for education research he recently published for the local non-profit Yonkers Partners in Education (YPIE). Kroll is a retired investment manager who has been focused on inner city public education issues since 2009. A member of YPIE's board, he has been a volunteer teaching assistant in math classrooms in Yonkers, and serves as the organization's pro bono 'data wrangler', collecting and analyzing internal and external data to better evaluate the needs and program results of the group's work. "Yonkers is literally Scarsdale's next door neighbor, yet the challenges that many Yonkers students face are almost incomprehensible to most Scarsdale families," said Kroll.

YPIE's Program Director, Ellen Cutler-Levy, is an Edgemont resident.

"YPIE College Centers in six Yonkers high schools logged over 29,000 student visits in 2013-14 with 95% of Yonkers seniors using the centers in their schools. 135 YPIE Scholars are mentored weekly by 65 volunteer coaches, several from Scarsdale over their four years in high school. And that is just part of the work we are doing," said Cutler-Levy.

Kroll's recent paper, College and Career Readiness in the New York State Public Schools, came out of work he was doing for YPIE to evaluate and quantify the need for the organization to expand its focus to include student college and career readiness, in addition to the work YPIE was already doing in college awareness and access.

"The relationship between educational outcomes and poverty has been well documented for years, but this new framework allowed us to quantitatively derive a "handicap" for this highly correlated variable that enabled us to identify how well districts and individual schools were doing net of poverty. No longer can districts 'blame' their results on poverty, we can now clearly see those districts and individual schools who are doing better, and worse, than 'expected' given student poverty levels. This allows us to focus resources and attention on districts and schools that are underperforming net of poverty, and learn best practices from net outperforming schools."

YPIE is using Kroll's findings to shape its program offerings. Several Scarsdale and Edgemont residents volunteer at YPIE's College and Career Centers and its YPIE Scholars mentoring program. YPIE is expanding its programs and is looking for more volunteers. Information about opportunities to get involved or help financially are on the YPIE website.