In a scene as idyllic as a Norman Rockwell painting, Elevate Tutoring fellow Mia Matute sat at a dining table with her 12-year-old tutee, Kaycie Grant, as golden hour light shone on the fractions of a paper worksheet as they worked together one Friday evening in the Oakland hills.
Grant solved another problem in a series that had given her difficulty.
“Do you see the pattern, now?” Matute asked.
The nonprofit Elevate Tutoring provides scholarships, work experience and professional development to low-income, first-generation college students. In return, these fellows tutor K-12 students from similar backgrounds, establishing a model for academic success and the resilience to overcome challenges in their education.
“It’s really an amazing opportunity for kids who are in school and are first-gen… to be able to give back, build that connection long term and short term (with a student), and also help them further their career and their goals,” Matute said. “After I’m done with this program, I’m gonna come back and work with them.”
Elevate Tutoring was founded in 2011 as a side project of Bob Schaffer, now a professor of engineering at Mission College. He had recently completed his PhD at Stanford University when he realized he had an “itch” for teaching students. With his level of experience, he knew he could find tutoring gigs in the South Bay that would offer him hundreds of dollars per hour, he said, yet he was aware of the deep inequality that exists in the region’s education system.
“Obviously, being in the Bay Area, I certainly could have found some of those (tutoring jobs). But then at the same time, I was doing a lot of reading about the achievement gap, the haves and have-nots,” Schaffer said. “The extra money wouldn’t hurt. But what if I created some sort of structure where I tutored students who couldn’t afford it?”
Matute said she grew up in a low-income household in the East Bay, where tutoring wasn’t an option for her family. Many students from her high school barely graduated, and few of her peers pursued education past high school. Even college seemed out of reach because she said she didn’t see many people of color like herself who were pursuing higher education.
“I wish I had a mentor, or someone to look up to,” Matute said. “I struggled a lot when I graduated high school, and I didn’t have a growth mindset. As soon as I failed a test, I would drop the class. So it held me back a lot of years in college.”
The “growth mindset” is a key mission of Elevate Tutoring, Schaffer said. The idea was to create an environment where failure is a productive and necessary part of learning; where students felt safe to make mistakes, reflect on their challenges and build mental resilience to return to the challenges they faced.
For 7th grader Grant, the biggest challenge is algebra. During her tutoring session with Matute, Grant became frustrated when she answered a question wrong consecutive times.
“What’s the point?” Grant said to Matute. But Matute urged her to keep going. Eventually, she figured it out herself.
Since starting as a one-man operation, Elevate Tutoring has spread its influence to the East Bay to engage with college students at UC Berkeley, CSU East Bay and Laney College, and Schaffer said the nonprofit will add more tutors in the next few years for future expansion across the Bay Area. Meanwhile, Matute said she wants to continue volunteering to uplift students like Grant and help them pursue higher education.
“I don’t want them to struggle the same way that I did,” Matute said. “She looks like me, and we bond, and we interact, and we’re kind of the same. She can do it like I can do it, too.”
