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Founders
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Dan Corley
Founder and Head
Community Preparatory School
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For most people, community service is a pastime. For Dan Corley, school reform advocate and founder of Community Preparatory School, it is his life's work.
While a student at Brown University, Dan spent a year living with the homeless and working in soup kitchens in New York City and Washington, D.C. He served as a VISTA volunteer and, with his wife, was the first house manager for Advent House, a shelter for the homeless in Providence, R.I. When he began his teaching career, he spent five years at a school for delinquent boys in Narragansett, R.I.
In 1984, at the ripe old age of 29, Dan founded Community Preparatory School in the heart of South Providence. For twenty-five years, he has implemented and refined innovative teaching techniques that have enabled Community Prep to grow from a small, neighborhood inner-city school to a model in urban education.
Today, Community Prep serves 154 students and has been acclaimed by The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Wall Street Journal. Ninety-two percent of the school's graduates have been accepted into college preparatory high school programs, and 83 percent -- more than twice the urban public-school average -- are attending or have graduated from college.
At the heart of a Community Prep education is the trimesterly parent-student-teacher goal-setting conference -- a highly successful technique pioneered at Community Prep and now widely employed across the country. At the conferences, students set lofty goals -- goals that have personal meaning to them -- and, with their teachers and parents, create plans for achieving those goals.
In the classroom, you find rigorous academics, a teaching style that instills values and self-esteem, community service (which is required of every student), and family support. Studies integrate reading, writing, math, science and creative arts. Field trips and experiments predominate. Students keep personal journals to promote writing skills and free expression. And, Dan's acclaimed "Calculator Club" encourages students to beat the calculator by performing math functions in their heads.
Dan uses classroom volunteers to help provide the individual attention essential to any student's success. And, every week he provides teachers with free time to discuss each student's progress.
Now Dan Corley is guiding Community Prep into its third decade. His goal is to share the school's vision and programs with the broader educational community. As Dan tells his students, if you can dream it, with hard work, you can make it happen. |
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Dr. Robert w. Hahn
Co-founder
Community Preparatory School
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Robert Hahn is Tesco Professor of Economics and Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University Manchester, England. He is also a senior visiting fellow at the Smith School at Oxford and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. From 1999 to 2008, Dr. Hahn served as the director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center, a leader in policy research in law and economics, regulation, and antitrust. Previously, he worked for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he helped design the innovative market-based approach for reducing acid rain. He also has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Hahn is a frequent contributor to leading scholarly journals including the American Economic Review, Science, and the Yale Law Journal, as well as to general-interest periodicals including the New York Times. He is also the co-founder of Regulation2point0.org. Dr. Hahn is the author of several books, among them Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, Policy and Internet, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy and Regulation.
Dr. Hahn has served as a consultant to government and business on a variety of issues involving benefit-cost analysis, regulation, competition, and privatization. In addition, he is co-founder of the Community Preparatory School--an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.
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