* Get all your brilliant friends to tutor kids; crowdsource college scholarships; produce a movie that shows why teachers are superheroes; tell stories that make us care.
A little more than a decade since the publication of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (has it really been that long?), Dave Eggers, now in his 40s, is one of his generation’s great writers. We pretty much saw that coming. Who would have guessed, though, when he started tutoring kids in the back of a pirate shop in the Mission, that nine years later, 826 Valencia would have turned into a full-fledged education brand, serving almost 24,000 kids around the U.S. last year and inspiring similar projects as far away as London? For all his literary fame, Eggers has become at least as influential as an educator and an advocate for teachers.
Increasingly, he’s concerned about the future. Legislators have slashed nearly $20 billion from California’s education budget just since 2008, and this summer, cuts could run billions deeper. It’s an unsettling moment.
Ask anyone to define the American idea, and most people, after a few stumbles, will come up with something like this: Anyone, from anywhere, can amount to anything. If you told a story about that idea, it wouldn’t be about muskets, or wagon trains, or moon shots. It would be about a little kid with a backpack heading to a good public school, and a bigger kid, years later, graduating from a good college. If that story gets more complicated, if new obstacles are thrown in the way, if college gets tougher to afford and to finish—it’s the American idea that we’re messing with.
Against this backdrop, Eggers has launched his latest education venture, ScholarMatch, in a bright storefront space across the street from 826 Valencia. High school and college students—his students and others—who are struggling to afford tuition can tell their stories on ScholarMatch.org and build their own financial aid packages out of small donations from individuals who feel moved to support their education.
And—because Eggers never does just one thing—in a few days, his new documentary, American Teacher, which he coproduced with Academy Award–winning director Vanessa Roth and his longtime 826 colleague Nínive Calegari, will premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The film makes the case that, more than better testing or sophisticated reform schemes, the biggest priority in education policy should be to improve the lives of teachers.
“There are definitely better theorists out there, and better data analyzers than me, for sure,” he said, when we sat down at ScholarMatch a few weeks ago. “I give examples. It’s what I know.” In a pair of conversations with San Francisco, Eggers talked about his experiences in classrooms across the Bay Area and his hopes for his newest education nonprofit—and for public education.
[The conversations have been combined and edited.]
You’ve been working in education for a decade now. How have things changed for your students in that time? The main change, in the last two years, has been the California State University system imploding. The go-to option for many of our students has gotten a lot less attainable. Between that and the University of California system’s problems, there’s a terrible state of uncertainty. You have a lot of students who did all the right things for 12, 13 years. They’re 18 now, and they’ve been more or less promised an affordable higher education in California. But we’ve seen tuition increases that would have been unconscionable 20, 30 years ago. It’s highly unfair. And it’s shooting ourselves in the foot as a state and a nation.
Do the kids feel these changes? A lot of students, being the first in their family to go to college, they feel insane pressure. Sometimes it can seem to them, like: Is this really worth the struggle that my family is going through, cutting back on everything else, selling the car to pay for tuition? And the assurances of a job when students get out aren’t what they were 5, 10 years ago. In a lot of cases, the kids cannot justify the sacrifices.
It wasn’t like this when you started 826 Valencia? I think it has changed drastically. The ladder is a lot more rickety. And now the UCs have cut back pretty sizably on the number of in-state students they admit who need financial aid. A lot of our kids who, even last year, would have gotten into all the UCs, this year got into one or two, or none, and I know it has to do with the increased number of out-of-state and international students who are accepted because they’re paying full price. It’s pretty much the opposite of why the UC system was created in the first place.
When did you start tackling the problem of money for college? When 826 Valencia opened, we immediately started giving college scholarships. We’d average 100, 150 applications. We’d sit around a table with the staff and some board members for six or seven hours, and choose five out of those 150. It was the worst job ever. It was inspiring, because the kids were amazing, but choosing five was terrible. Almost every year, some donor would say, “I can’t stand that this student isn’t going to get a scholarship. I’ll jump in for a sixth scholarship; does someone else want to jump in?” It became clear that once you knew the students, you would be more likely to participate in their education.
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