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The Critical Optimist: Marvin Figueroa, Ed.M.’10
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Recent Ed School graduate, Marvin Figueroa, Ed.M.’10, excelled during his yearlong stay on Appian Way and promises to continue to impact education in the future. This past spring, Figueroa was part of the Harvard team — including students from the Kennedy School, Law School, and Business School — that took first place in the Public Schools Urban Education Redesign Challenge, a national case competition for innovation in urban education.
The competition asked teams to examine building community and public engagement at Washington D.C. schools. The Harvard group focused on a need for more community involvement. As a result of winning against schools like Yale, Cornell, and Duke, the team earned a $5,000 cash prize, a trip to Washington D.C., and an opportunity to meet chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools Michelle Rhee. The win also earned Figueroa a prestigious internship in Rhee’s office in the data and accountability division, where he is currently developing an evaluation mechanism to guide school improvement efforts and provide transparent and accessible information to parents.
Figueroa credits the team’s success to its diversity, showing how already great research benefits from having a voice behind it. Figueroa’s voice, as an immigrant student growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., has largely shaped where he is today. When he moved with his mother at the age of five from his native Honduras to the Bronx, it certainly wasn’t easy. His mother sacrificed her professional career as a secondary school teacher in Honduras and worked in New York as a home health aide, in order to ensure that her son receive a good education.
Figueroa can still recall sitting in a packed auditorium on the first day of high school and hearing the dean of students say, “Look to your left, look to your right, one of you will graduate, one of you will not.” That statement, says Figueroa, turned out to be true for his class. Luckily, there was always someone to intervene and keep him on the right track. In fact, when he joined the debate team in high school, it changed his world in ways he could never have imagined. “It taught me to use words, not fists,” he says, noting that the team also afforded him an opportunity to travel.
Ultimately, it became clear to Figueroa that “you can work harder or choose to give up,” he says. “You can say, ‘I’m going to make it.’”
Still, it wasn’t until Figueroa was an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, studying the social, political, and economic issues plaguing low-income Latino communities that the field of education called out to him, he says. He became immersed in studying the role of education in engendering inclusive societies. He even spearheaded a tutoring program at Glencliff Comprehensive High School in Nashville, which widened his perspective on the educational needs of struggling English Language Learners (ELL).
Figueroa’s growing interest inspired him to participate in a research project as an undergrad in San Lorenzo, Ecuador, where he explored why students earning government grants for higher education didn’t complete their degrees. “What we uncovered is that parents were inclined to discourage their children from studying because time spent in school was time not spent earning wages,” he says. “Even informal jobs like selling oranges could net two to three dollars a day, which in some cases could be the difference between the family eating and starvation.”
Later he studied abroad in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he taught English to returning students taking the Brazilian college admission test. Figueroa says he saw firsthand how “poverty discouraged academic pursuits” where frustrated students often dropped out to earn an income. “Their poverty prevented them from attaining an education, and their lack of education kept them in poverty,” he says.
At the urging of a friend, Figueroa applied to the Ed School, where he says he picked “good classes” that explained the “entire education trajectory.” He also really enjoyed meeting people here. “People really care and want to engage with you,” he says.
Today Figueroa returns to the Bronx often and sees many old friends, who did drop out of school and get a kick out of him attending Harvard. “I’m a kid from Honduras representing the oldest and most well-known institutions,” he says with a laugh.
In the fall, Figueroa plans to continue his work in education. This time, he will go to work on Capitol Hill as part of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Fellowship, which provides an opportunity to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the issues that engender a “school-to-prison pipeline,” and the policy mechanism necessary to address the inequalities that deny some students access to a complete and competitive education, from cradle through career.
“I have witnessed childhood friends enter and reenter the penal system, and seen family members handicapped by hopelessness,” Figueroa says “I’ve made a commitment to work on behalf of these individuals to improve the educational services available to them. I am a critical optimist, humble enough to know how difficult implementing reform is, but committed enough to aspire to be a change maker for a generation of students — this fellowship pushes me one step further.”
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