In a gleaming new building off a dusty mountain road deep in the heart of Guatemala’s Western Highlands, a group of teenage girls talks about the solar system. Their teacher, Marlen Karina Muj Cúmes, a petite young woman wearing a long skirt and a colorful embroidered blouse, the apparel typical to indigenous women from this region, walks toward them. She examines their diagrams one by one, considering each carefully.
Looking at one particularly detailed diagram, Cúmes pauses, and looks up at 12-year-old Yoselin. “I see that you’ve drawn the Kuiper belt,” she says in Spanish, pointing to a ring of rocks drawn in delicate pencil. “And — oh, wow. I see the moons of Jupiter here, too. I love that attention to detail.” She smiles generously at her student.
Yoselin, a wisp of a girl in a bright red sweater, reddens, and looks away from the gaggle of peers surrounding her. They smile at her too, before adding their own moons and Kuiper belts. These girls come from indigenous families who speak Kaqchikel, a Mayan language; most of their parents work as farmers in the campo, often earning just enough to feed their families a basic diet of vegetables and tortillas. Most families are deeply religious, either in the Evangelical or Catholic traditions, and have five to 10 children. Many of these girls’ parents witnessed brutal massacres of indigenous villages in Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, and were never taught to read or write. Most of the girls will be the first in their families to receive an education past third grade.
And yet all of these girls have grand ambitions — they aspire to be journalists, scientists, lawyers, and politicians. They are part of an educational experiment the likes of which this region has never seen: They are in the founding class of the MAIA Impact School, which gives full scholarships to promising indigenous girls in grades 7–12, and seeks to propel them from poverty and isolation into the most elite spheres of Guatemalan society.
The Impact School currently has 50 girls each in grades 7–9, and plans to add a grade every year, until it has 300 students total across grades 7–12. By its own description, the school seeks to “maximize the potential of Mayan girls by providing a high-quality education while supporting holistic socioemotional development and celebrating culture.” To do this, the school’s leaders — who are nearly all indigenous women from the same circumstances as their students — have looked to a unlikely inspiration: An American charter school network, KIPP, which is famous for its highly structured, “no excuses” approach to education.
The Impact School experiment is new, and many questions remain: how does a pedagogical approach developed in New York City apply to such a profoundly different cultural context? Is it possible to bring high-quality education to a community that has historically not experienced it — and, if so, is it possible to do so with an entirely indigenous staff?
TThe opening of the Impact School in January 2017 represented a new chapter for its parent organization, MAIA. Since 2007, the organization has aimed to identify and mentor ambitious adolescent indigenous Guatemalan girls, with the goal of preparing them for higher education and careers. In its previous iteration, the organization was not a school but a mentorship organization that provided scholarships, supplementary classes (including on environmental stewardship, health and sexual education, and financial literacy), and mentoring from slightly older Kaqchikel women.
MAIA focuses on indigenous girls, its leaders explain, because they are the most marginalized sector of the Guatemalan population. Nearly half of the country’s population is indigenous, and 60 percent of indigenous women are illiterate. Only 10 percent of them have completed primary school, and almost 40 percent are married before age 18. Indigenous girls also face the hard-to-quantify but nevertheless insidious effects of prejudice, discrimination, and a society defined by machismo, a Latin American form of aggressive masculinity.
In its prior version, the program was making progress: MAIA says that after 10 years, 100 percent of its mentees were graduating from high school, 92 percent had avoided early pregnancy, and 60 percent were going on to college; half of its graduates were formally employed.
However, the organization’s leadership — including Travis Ning, the U.S. Executive Director (and the only leader who is not an indigenous woman), and Norma Baján, the Guatemala Executive Director — decided that this model was not producing the kind of transformative effects for which they were striving. Eventually, they decided that in order to fundamentally re-route girls’ futures, they needed to open a full-time school.
TThere was only one problem: they had no idea how to do that. Their ideas were rough: they knew that they wanted to employ current mentors as the school’s teachers, to incorporate elements of MAIA’s existing life skills curriculum into the school’s approach, and to create a rigorous academic curriculum. Beyond that, though, they really didn’t know what they wanted — or how to incorporate these elements into a school the likes of which, as far as they knew, did not exist in any indigenous community in Latin America.
To gain inspiration, Ning and Baján embarked on an exploratory trip to dozens of charter, public, and independent schools across the United States in 2011. The first school they visited was a KIPP school in Denver, Colorado, which left an indelible impression. This visit, he said, proved that not only did educators not have to apply the one-size-fits-all model to which Guatemalan students were accustomed, but that the academic mastery and engagement they observed among students at this KIPP school might even be due to their school’s focus on individualization.
The visit to KIPP, Ning explains, demonstrated that a school could be made to conform to its students’ needs, and not the other way around. “We came to this epiphany that ‘education’ and ‘school’ are words that you can define,” he continues. “Everyone has a definition of school, and it’s often the school that you went to — so everyone [on our staff] had a definition of school and teachers that come from the rural Guatemalan context.”
That context, he explains, generally involves classes of 30 to 40 students, sitting in rows, copying sentences or math problems done by a teacher — who often is not even 20 years old, and who likely didn’t have a strong academic foundation herself. MAIA’s leaders had the sense that, if they wanted their students’ lives to diverge from prior generations’, their education also needed to diverge from the national norm.
And, at least according to several of the students, the school has been tremendously successful in that regard. Ester Noemí Bocel, 15, says that, unlike at the schools she attended previously, she feels valued by her teachers and her community for her individuality. “Here, I have the opportunity to raise my hand and express what I’m thinking,” she says, in Spanish. “My teachers encourage me to write about myself, about my feelings and my identity. And when I write, I figure out what I think, what I believe.”
AAs Ning and his colleagues contemplated in 2011 how to design their own school, MAIA hosted Ken Goeddeke, the Head of Schools for KIPP Houston, who happened to be visiting the area. Ning and Baján were excited to share the ways their vision had been shaped by the KIPP ideology. The meeting, however, did not go as they expected. “We told him, ‘We want to empower people,’” Ning recalls. “And he was like, ‘Great. What is that?’” Ning laughs. “He said, ‘Unless you can define that numerically, you should not open a school.’”
This was a shock at first, Ning says — but, after sitting with this feedback, they realized that they agreed. They decided to refine and quantify their goals by using the KIPP paradigm, asking themselves two fundamental questions: What is the school designed to do, and what would success look like?
Based on needs they had observed in their own communities, the team came up with four concrete, measurable goals. First, they wanted the girls to eventually have economic autonomy, defined as formal employment with an annual salary exceeding $3,500, the average national annual income. They also wanted to delay marriage and pregnancy until age 25 or older, when they were “in a stable position to support a family.” Third, they hoped to increase the years of formal education to 15 years, from the 2.5 years of schooling received by the average indigenous adult. Finally, they wanted to aid in the development of “the internal strength, skills, and emotional intelligence they need to be leaders.”
According to school administrators, what makes MAIA different from KIPP (and other charter school networks) is the fact that 95 percent of the staff are indigenous women who come from the same villages and cultural contexts as their students. According to Baján, this is as important as any other academic or philosophical element of the MAIA paradigm, if not more. “They see me as a model for life, as a model as a woman,” she says. “And a few girls and colleagues have told me that they want to be like me, or have a trajectory very similar to mine.”
However, the fact that the school’s teachers come from the same circumstances as their students — and graduated from the type of schools MAIA sees itself as improving on — also presents significant obstacles. Ning and Rob Jentsch, a Boston-based school consultant (and former KIPP teacher) who has worked extensively with MAIA’s faculty, say that due to the education MAIA teachers themselves received, many have significant gaps in their own academic preparation and subject area knowledge. This presents a considerable challenge: these educators are teaching students who may only be a year or two behind them academically, while simultaneously trying to develop pedagogical and classroom management skills.
According to Ning and Jentsch, “no excuses” teaching methodologies have been invaluable in addressing the particular needs of inexperienced teachers. Ning acknowledges that these techniques have been criticized as excessively austere, and that they may not be techniques experienced teachers would use. However, he argues, critics of these methods — or at least how they’re applied at Impact School — don’t understand the particular circumstances faced by the organization’s teachers. “We’re building content at the same time that we have 6 percent math proficiency in our educators,” he says. “So cut us a little bit of slack in terms of how tight we have to run this, right? Because our goals are really high.”
The school has also encountered other, unforeseen consequences of applying KIPP’s model to rural Guatemala. In the past year, Jentsch says, the school has had to face the reality that many of its original goals for students, such as fluency in English or matriculation at institutions of higher learning in the global north, may be mismatched with the realities of their lives.
“We’re [asking ourselves], ‘What’s our best bet?’” Jentsch says. “Is our best bet getting four of them fluent in English and proficient for the IB exam in the States? Or are we better off getting 100 percent of them ready to pass the entrance exam for [the free national university]?” The latter, he explains, may not look as impressive to outsiders, but it likely better serves the best interests of the students themselves, rather than the aspirations of outside observers or funders.
When outsiders pose difficult questions — What if an Impact School student wants to become a homemaker? What if the lifestyle changes the Impact School teaches, such as an embrace of feminism and open discussions of sexuality, are at odds with a family’s own values? — educators do not answer readily. According to the Impact School leaders, these kinds of situations simply don’t arise — in part, they claim, because families self-select into the school, and also because the indigenous mentors guide both students and their families into seeing the wisdom of the school’s approach.
Lidia Oxi, the director of the high school, explains that ultimately, the organization seeks to set off what it calls la chispa (spark), or the “girl effect.” As Oxi explains, “It’s not just about these girls. It’s also about becoming models for other girls in the country, so other families start to see the value of investing in girls. And when we as a country start to realize the value of it, that it’s not just about doing something nice for a girl but investing in our country.” It is for this reason, she explains that part of the school’s selection criteria includes recommendations from community leaders, and why parents, including fathers, must attend all family workshops and explicitly agree to support their daughters in every aspect of the program.
Ester, the 15-year-old budding writer, describes the impact of this concept in a world that matters deeply to her: the world of her family. “Now, if my little brother gets something, my little sister does, too. If my dad is talking to my little brother about something, now he includes my little sister, too.”
