IMPROVING EDUCATION ON A GLOBAL LEVEL

BY DANIEL LIPPMAN ’08

BRIAN SIMS ’89 FELL IN LOVE with education as a teacher and principal, and he discovered a passion to take this work to a global level. He wakes up every day trying to solve an important problem: many teachers in the developing world struggle with the material they are trying to teach, which makes it difficult to pass along that knowledge to their students.

In a stark example, Sims said a generation of Black South Africans were intentionally deprived of a high-quality education by the apartheid government. Two-thirds of South African sixth-grade teachers have not mastered the math content at that level. “It’s not their fault that they don’t know sixth-grade math. The system was designed for that to happen,” Sims said. “Our goal is to help them teach sixth-graders the math that they need to learn.”

Sims is the executive director of the One World network of schools, a global education nonprofit working to improve student learning by developing the next generation of school teachers and leaders. He helps train principals and teachers in 15 countries across four continents, and One World’s work has already touched more than 2 million students. According to the organization, research shows that highly effective principals can raise student achievement by 160 percent in a year, helping students who were once behind catch up.

He traces his love of education all the way back to Hotchkiss, where he looked up to his teachers and aspired to forge a similar path. “They all seemed like they were having fun, and they had a youthfulness and joy to them that I think happens when you work with young people to open their minds and provide them opportunities in life,” he said.

Sims grew up in a small town in Michigan and comes from a long line of Bearcats: his father, Mac Sims ’49, who was a banker and chief financial officer of a Fortune 500 equipment company; his brother, Frank Sims ’75; and his sister, Laura Sims Davis ’87. At Hotchkiss, he was student body vice president, captain of the football and golf teams, and the managing director for The Hotchkiss Record, where he spent countless hours cranking out the next edition.

He said a strong work ethic and a sense of civic responsibility were all values that Hotchkiss built in him, and he credits the late Blair Torrey ’50, P’74,’80 for shaping his thinking and helping him grow up at the School. “Hotchkiss taught me what it’s like to pursue a fully enriched life,” he said. “It is my most pivotal educational experience. I owe so much to Hotchkiss.”

He headed to Dartmouth College— inspired by his Hotchkiss peers who went there—and studied history. He was the rugby captain, and he chose to stay a semester after graduation to coach the team. Following a stint as a substitute teacher in Austin, TX, he spent three years teaching social studies and coaching sports at an independent Episcopal school in Lafayette, LA. He wanted to deepen his knowledge before he continued his career, so he headed west to earn a master’s degree in education and history at Stanford University, where he also met his future wife, Gretchen Crosby. They moved to New Jersey, and Sims taught seventh- and eighth-grade social studies in a high-poverty community. He called the job “life-changing.”

“I got very motivated and inspired by the opportunity that education could provide, and I have dedicated my career to trying to improve schools so that young people could have the kind of opportunities that those of us who went to Hotchkiss enjoyed,” he said.

Sims and his wife moved to Chicago, where he became the managing director of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit organization that provides equity-focused programming to improve educational outcomes for students in underinvested communities. He was the founding principal of the program’s first high school, and he helped grow the organization from five schools to more than 20. He also helped improve the academic results of elementary school students to be double the district’s average.

In neighborhood schools where more than 80 percent of students received free or reduced lunch, Sims saw firsthand the challenges high-poverty schools face in getting their students to attend college. “These were schools that had been underperforming for many years, and we had the chance to work with the communities to turn them around and bring in new approaches to teaching and new extracurricular programs to kick-start a transformation process,” he said.

After a few years serving as the head of education at a network of 40 public schools across England, he became the executive director of One World. The nonprofit supports schools in countries such as India, Uruguay, and South Africa, with some of its biggest projects in Tajikistan and

Malawi, where they are rolling out teaching methodologies in first- and second-grade classrooms to improve literacy.

The issues they face are profound, but the opportunities are endless. Sims says education is key to making countries more prosperous, which can make them more peaceful and often more democratic. But what works in one country’s culture doesn’t necessarily work in a country thousands of miles away, so he tells his employees that one of the organization’s mottos is “the universality of questions and the locality of answers.”

One World helps identify key teaching techniques that can be replicated at scale. For example, it just helped Malawi classrooms roll out two approaches: one called “positive praise,” where teachers actively narrate positive behaviors as opposed to pointing out bad ones; and another called “pair share,” where students are instructed to talk to their neighbors to grapple with questions and report back to the teacher.

Due to the vast need for improving the skills of teachers and principals around the world, the organization has doubled in size in three years. It gets funding from several major family foundations, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Sims continues to find connections to Hotchkiss alumni in his global education work. One World is helping Lorem Aminathia ’11 as he plans to launch Kinyeti Academy in South Sudan (see preceding story). Sims attended a fundraiser for the budding school hosted by Carolyn Smith Henderson ’95, who works as an education coach at One World. He met Henderson when she was an English teacher at an Academy for Urban School Leadership school in Chicago.

“I was overwhelmed with joy that my experience at Hotchkiss could lead me back to somebody who wanted to start a school in South Sudan,” he said. H

Daniel Lippman ‘08 is a reporter covering the White House and Washington for POLITICO and can be reached at dlippman@gwmail.gwu.edu.