Steve Mariotti - Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement

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To my mother, Nancy Mason Mariotti, a beloved special education

teacher, who taught me that a great teacher affects eternity;

to all my students, who have inspired me and given meaning to my life;

and to my friend Diana Davis Spencer.

My dream is not to die in poverty but to have poverty die in me.

Michelle Araujo, NFTE graduate

CONTENTS

I first spoke on the phone with Steve Mariotti when I was studying at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 2001. That sounds like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but actually I grew up much like the struggling low-income students Steve comes to know and love as their teacher in Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement.

My sisters and I were raised by my widowed mother in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore and the Bronx infiltrated by drug-dealing gangs. Like Steves students, I didnt always see a connection between my schoolwork and finding my way to a better life.

Goodbye Homeboy is Steves deeply movingand often very funny!memoir of his career as a special ed teacher in New York Citys most dangerous public high schools from the Lower East Side to the South Bronx during the early 1980s. Its a great read, and it also offers a real answer to this question: How do we engage our low-income youth in education that will equip them to rise up out of poverty?

In Goodbye Homeboy, Steve discovers that teaching his rowdy students about entrepreneurship awakens a passion for learning in them, and an eagerness to start their own small businesses and take charge of their lives. He realizes that they are brave, street-smart, and resourceful, just like all great entrepreneurs.

Steve shared this with me during our first conversation. I still remember Steve exclaiming, Street smarts equal business smarts! We have to help our at-risk youth understand that they have a gift they can use to get out of poverty, and teach them about entrepreneurship so they can! He told me he had founded the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) to fulfill that mission.

Steve said he believed that many teens in Americas inner cities were being misevaluated and their enormous potential overlooked. Our public schools fail to teach low-income children how to enter our economy and succeed, Steve argued. As a result, students drop out. Many enter the illegal drug trade. Sadly, they often pay a terrible price for choosing this path.

As Steve describes so vividly in Goodbye Homeboy, he was inspired by his students to found NFTE in 1987 to bring entrepreneurship education to as many low-income youth as possible. By the time Steve and I spoke in 2001, NFTE was a global leader in entrepreneurship education, and had both the anecdotes and research to prove that NFTE programs were helping low-income teens stay in school and change their lives for the better.

I felt very inspired by our initial phone call; so inspired that when I returned to the United States in 2006 after completing my service with the Armys 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, I reached out to Steve again. We picked up easily right where we had left off, and our lively conversations continued.

I eventually returned home to New York City, and I began volunteering for NFTE. My wife, Dawn, was also inspired by NFTEs mission and became NFTEs Director of Business Development, Corporate, and Foundation Philanthropy. In 2017, I became CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, one of the largest poverty-fighting organizations in the country. Dawn and I both consider Steve a valuable mentor and friend, and always will.

To have this opportunity now to read Steves unflinchingly honest memoir of his trials and triumphs as a teacher, and how NFTE came to be, is a real treat. We thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Steves wonderful students and reading about his adventures with them in