Deborah Bial, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’04: Round Up the Posse
by Lewis Rice
Looking back on her earliest experiences running leadership
programs in public high schools in New York City, Deborah Bial,
Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’04, laughs at how little she knew then about what
makes a leader.
She certainly knows now. Throughout her career and studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Bial has focused on identifying young people with the potential to flourish if given the opportunity and support. Now, with 20 years of experience under her belt, Bial serves as the president of the Posse Foundation, an organization that has changed the lives of hundreds of urban high school students, preparing them for higher education and guiding them toward successful careers. The students served by Posse are “tremendous leaders,” she says, “not only on their campuses but in the workforce.”
Bial founded the organization in 1989, after a young man told her what could have prevented him from leaving college after only six months despite having a scholarship: “If I had my posse with me,” he said, “I never would have dropped out of college.”
His lament stirred Bial to action. She developed the idea of forming groups — or posses — of promising high school students who would go to college together. First established in New York City, Posse has expanded to five more cities since 1999. Today, the organization has 28 university partners that, through the program, have offered $175 million in scholarships to a total of 1,850 students.
While universities are now eager to sign on as partners, that was not always the case in the early days. “One of the challenges was convincing universities that we could be successful with this concept,” Bial explains, “because we were and still are recruiting young people who don’t always show up on the radar screen.”
As a doctoral student at the Ed School, Bial studied such nontraditional means to identify academic potential. With the support of a $1.9 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund her dissertation work, she codeveloped the Bial Dale Adaptability Index, which identifies a set of noncognitive traits to predict college achievement for students who might not score well on standardized tests.
Posse finds its participants through what is called the dynamic assessment process, which evaluates recruits through workshops in which team-building and communication are emphasized as well as through personal interviews. Once chosen, students participate in an eight-month precollegiate training in the senior year of high school, meet with mentors and Posse staff throughout four years of college, and benefit from a career program that provides internships and counseling services. Bial points to a 90 percent college graduation rate for Posse scholars — a higher rate than that of other students.
She emphasizes that Posse does not choose the scholars based on need but on what they can offer: “It is not a program that defines itself by the deficiencies of the students. It’s a strength-based model, and it focuses on diversity in the true sense of the word.”
Bial plans to expand the model even more, to 10 cities, with 1,000 students a year and 80 partner colleges and universities by the year 2020, she says. The growth is desperately needed: About 7,000 students competed for 347 available slots last year. Bial’s future endeavors will be aided by the the MacArthur Genius Grant, which she was awarded in September.
While she basks in the success of those who have benefited from the Posse experience, she also bemoans those left behind. “We’re not in a good place in this country when you think about all the young people who don’t have opportunity,” Bial says. “Because we haven’t figured out how to make our public school system work, we have thousands and thousands of kids who could never go to schools like Harvard.”
Given the opportunity to go to college, 70 percent of Posse scholars either have founded an organization or have become president of an existing one. That, Bial says, is leadership.
— Lewis Rice is a freelancer and frequent contributor to Ed.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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