An agile education that meets the needs of students and our evolving economy requires new and different kinds of leaders. Sometimes those leaders emerge from unlikely places.
Ask me what one of the least likely places would be, and I’d answer huge urban education bureaucracies. Yet one of the most impressive young education visionaries I’ve encountered in recent years rose up out of the New York City Department of Education, the granddaddy of all bureaucracies.
Meet Kayon Pryce. He’s the principal one of the most innovative public education programs in the country. It’s called the Brooklyn STEAM Center, and it’s a half-day program for 11th and 12th graders from a handful of New York City public high schools. It sits smack in the center of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a hub of tech innovation.
Pryce, a youthful looking African American man in his mid-30s, founded the program after serving as senior director of Career and Technical Education for the NYC education department. He came into that job with a deep understanding of the value of hands-on, relevant education, especially for students who have been poorly served by more traditional modes of schooling.
Pryce should know, because he was one of those students. “I was labeled as a special education student, and had an IEP (Individualized Education Program),” Kayon told me during a recent Zoom call. “I was encouraged by my high school guidance counselor to apply for only CTE programs. The clear message was ‘people like you are not college bound.’ Wouldn’t you know I am now halfway through a doctoral program and I launched my own school. But that’s oftentimes the messaging young people receive when labeled as special needs or made to feel as though they are less-than. It worked out well for me but that’s not often the case.”
One thing that makes Brooklyn STEAM Center so special is how embedded it is within the bustling work center that is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As Pryce describes it, when students arrive from their home schools, they are showing up for work on this “entrepreneurial campus full of disruptors.”
There is a dazzling array of exciting activity surrounding the school. Engineers are testing self-driving cars and building parts for Mars Rovers; an entrepreneurial hotbed company called Newlab brings together hundreds of creative thinkers to design solutions to a wide variety of challenges.
“There are so many options here for them to explore,” Pryce said. “Many CTE programs are narrow in their scope. Scholars aren’t exposed to enough options to make an informed decision about their future path. That’s certainly not the case here.”
At Brooklyn STEAM, students can sample a wide array of offerings. There are several specialties in the construction trades: construction technology, carpentry, electrical, insulation, solar, plumbing, masonry. Then there are design and engineering programs, offering architectural drafting, 3D modeling and printing, robotics, machining, and electronics.
There are also programs in media and film, featuring a full sound stage, editing space, and constantly updated software packages. There are also computer science and IT programs, culinary arts and hospitality management, and, soon, a welding program.
“Our mantra is that we build with, not for,” Pryce said. “Our young people are involved at every level of decision-making. I treat them as colleagues, not students.”
From his own experience, Pryce knows this is the approach that helps students engage deeply in their learning. “As a younger man of color, I often share my own story,” he said. “If you have this label or that label, it does not mean you are doomed to only factory work or working with your hands. Anything is possible.”
All those students have to do is look at their principal to know he’s telling the truth.