Eleni
Eleni is a senior at Columbia studying Earth & Environmental Engineering. She is particularly interested in health disparities and intersections between environmental issues and race and class dynamics. She is also interested in education access in low-income communities, specifically for English Language Learners and students with disabilities.
Zyaira
Zyaira Speller is a sophomore at Barnard College. She is majoring in American Studies with a Concentration in Race & Ethnicity with a minor in Education, and hopes to be apart of NYC education reform in the future. As a product of the NYC Charter School system, she has interest in exploring the stakes of charter schools in low-income communities, and their long-lasting impacts beyond the K-12 education.
Jack
Jack is a junior at Columbia studying Urban Studies and economics originally from Boston, Massachusetts. He is very interested in New York City local politics and the complexities of governing a city of over eight million. Last summer he worked at a corporate governance consulting firm which helped inspire his interested in responsible governance and led him to ask who should be responsible for educating NYC’s school children.
Tianna
Tianna is a sophomore at Barnard College studying Urban Studies with a concentration in Public Health. She is passionate about changing the ways hospitals function in the United States and wants to pursue a career in hospital management and administration. She is also interested in different health disparities in the United States, specifically, ones based on race and gender. She is also interested in global health and improving health systems in developing countries or countries in crisis to reduce mortality rates for various diseases prominent in that area. Tianna also believes that education is a powerful tool in all areas of life and the different methods we use to educate children is imperative to the way society is structured. She decided to write her op-ed about the implication of no-excuses charter schools because of the controversial behavioral methods enforced in these schools that affect students of color and the kind of racial hierarchies that they sustain.