Change Maker:
Closing the Achievement Gap for Children of Foreign-born Black African Immigrants, in Harlem.
Educator François Nzi’s solution.
By Mamadou Niang
Aissita Koné comes home from work at 4:30 pm to fix dinner for her three teenage girls — her eldest child, Aboubacar, a 20-year-old young man, is a junior at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, NY. A single mother, Aissita (eye-Seeta), believes that fresh homemade meals are vital to her children’s wellbeing, just as education is to a bright future.
She immigrated from Ivory Coast in 2001 to join her husband, Abou Gbané, in a Central Harlem enclave where an African population of close to 8,000 has settled, totaling 67% of Upper Manhattan’s 12,000 African-born immigrants’ families. Abou, a business owner, died of cancer in July 2016, leaving her with modest financial resources. At the time of Abou’s passing, daughters Aissata Gbané, Zenab Gbané, and Ralissa Gbané were respectively 13, 9, and 6.
“Abou was very keen on the kids’ academic success,” Aissita said, “he waded through the maze of New York City’s public school system and struggled to make crucial decisions that landed the kids in the charter school network.” Abou also believed that the kids would need personalized assistance to enhance their academic skills in a culturally responsive setting.
Down the road opposite their apartment building at the corner of 137th street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., a sign written in blue on a street-level learning space reads: New York Math Academy and Coaching Services (NYMACS.) Abou and Aissita knew about the after-school program at NYMACS, and the founder, François Nzi, 45, is widely known and admired among West African families with school-age children. Abou entered the place and met a man with a broad smile and a reflective gaze who greeted him with an Ivorian chatter and toured him around the two-floor learning center. The main floor hums with students and teachers, seated in three or four around five symmetrically arranged desks. The walls are punctuated with a classroom wall décor, a mathematics decal, a birthday, and a motivational bulletin board with words in fancy calligraphy, like Kindness, Dream, Imagine, Believe, Joy. In one corner, a kid is working a math quiz machine with a nervous impatience.
Abou described his two daughters’ learning challenges and booked an evaluation date.
“His name comes up every time in our community meetings; at weddings, at baby-naming ceremonials, and even on our WhatsApp chat groups,” said Aissita. She is speaking about her network of friends and associates, all of them mothers praising François Nzi; “my friends swear by Mr. François. They say ‘God has blessed us’ with a big help to save our kids’ education. Mr. François is the answer to our prayers.” Aissita claims.
The study center, which started in October 2010 as a street-level math reinforcement after-school program, has become a multidisciplinary learning center. It focuses on coaching students with homework assistance, skills development, and organization techniques to improve their academic performance. It also prepares them to advance to the next grade level and eventually succeed in college. It provides a safe place for children when many parents are at work and unable to provide supervision. And the knowledge that kids develop in math, English, and other coursework helps them gain self-esteem and resilience and reduces the likelihood that they’ll engage in risky behavior such as drug use, delinquency, and even sexual activity.
The needs of the students can range from academic rigor to emotional and social support. NYMACS, some say, has transformed many kids’ futures and redefines K-12 education for young African children of immigrants with multilevel academic support. Alumni are bound for Yale, Wake Forest, U-Penn, as well as prominent state colleges.
François Nzi’s educational entrepreneurship was not foreordained. He had a different career path, was an accidental teacher-guide-mentor who found opportunity, passion, and service to benefit vulnerable, disadvantaged children. One year after he immigrated from Ivory Coast to New York at age 22, he graduated in aeronautics technology and enrolled in grad school at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. His knack for mathematics, physics, and his learned obsession for mental discipline could have landed him at NASA’s Jet Propulsion lab or in the R&D design shops at Boeing. But François Nzi’s uncharted path collided with the educational needs of his young child and the demands facing his young family. In 2010, his son Axel-Ryan Nzi was readying for pre-K, and François needed an arrangement that kept a roof over the family’s head and food on the table — and he needed to complete grad school.
Providing an answer to the education crisis in our communities.
He signed on for a tutorship at Kaplan, the test prep behemoth, junior tutoring community college students to senior classes at four-year colleges. “I was hired to teach math and physics. In the process, as I saw my students succeed, I realized I could take the prescription to my communities of African immigrants,” says François. “If I can help reduce the academic achievement gap in our districts, it could provide some answers for dealing with the education crisis in our communities.”
The stint opened his eyes, seeing how to introduce tutoring in the inner-city communities of West Africans where math and English reinforcement classes could benefit young students of foreign-born Black parents. Nzi, born in Ivory Coast, founded New York Math Academy and Coaching Services (NYMACS) in 2010 in central Harlem, with the trailblazing spirit of a social engineer. Before he opened in Harlem, François tutored students at their homes, hired mostly by mothers he met at hair braiding salons and community events where he promoted his services. He checked into the women’s social media channels to drum up his campaign; he also advertised in Brooklyn’s West Indian communities. When NYMACS opened, the mothers dropped off their kids after 3 pm, signaling to African American families in the neighborhood the arrival of an after-school program that could relieve their academic anxieties and keep their kids busy.
“At Kaplan, I prepared high-performing junior community college students going to senior four-year colleges,” says François. “Even as good students as they were, they lacked some basic skills in math and reading,” he continued, “if this is the reality with good students, I thought, what could be happening at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels?” He went on, “I researched about the kids in the communities of West African immigrants of Harlem and the Bronx and found deep pockets of need. I created NYMACS.”
The opening In 2010 was a work in progress. NYMACS began with five kids in a family home of one student, operating two days a week, before moving to the two-story space on Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. The school reached a peak enrollment of 142 students with a six-day-a-week calendar and attracting families beyond the communities of African immigrants and their children. To finance the deposit costs towards the $5000 rent, supplies, furniture, utilities for a first five-year lease, Nzi pulled together savings; financial contributions from his wife Solange, an ardent supporter of MYMACS. She is a managing supervisor at the chain restaurant and Bakery, Au Bon Pain.
Kadiatou Keita, an NYMACS alumna, started her senior class at Yale this academic season with a double major in English and Data Science. A clear-eyed, ambitious girl with the hair braided in long Senegalese Twists medium rows, she came to the U.S. from Guinea with her parents when she was 8. Kadiatou threaded through middle and high school at Democracy Prep, Harlem, a highly focused student who loves English and math equally. The school is a network of campuses in five states located in predominantly minority and low-income neighborhoods. Democracy Prep is a high-performing K-12 that marries academic excellence with civic engagement. The population of 1,033 students at the Central Harlem school consists of 33% LatinX and 64% Blacks, 23% children of foreign-born Black parents from Africa. White, Asians, and Pacific Islanders make up about 2%. Kadiatou went to NYMACS for daily math classes. With a 4+ GPA, she picked Yale among several offers. She returns every summer to teach at NYMACS. “It is really fun to work with the kids, and I love giving back, helping François, who has been doing it consistently since I’ve known him, with the same dedication to the job and his mission.” She says.
A recent graduate of 2020–2021, Chérif Kassé, is a freshman at Penn State. Chérif (She-riff) had an unorthodox trajectory, shuttling between Dakar, Senegal, where he studied for the school year, and New York at NYMACS, from June to September. His father, Aliou Kassé, a welder who had a shop in the Bronx, but now retired with Chérif’s mother in Dakar, sought to strengthen Chérif’s bicultural upbringing. He enrolled from 6th to 11th grade, traveling every summer until he signed up at Democracy Prep’s Bronxville Charter School campus. “At first, I was reluctant to the shuttle schooling, but I ended up liking it,” says Chérif, “that gave me a strong perspective into the different education systems. François assigned me a volunteer, Lisa Chan, a senior at Columbia, a math geek who made me appreciate the rigorous demands to grasp a subject. I traveled with mass transit when school let out, a bus and two trains for about an hour each way. But I don’t regret it. NYMACS made the transition easy for me; I had good grades, took three APs, and got a 3.7 GPA.”
Pivoting hard to adapt to COVID.
Chérif is a “pandemic student” whose last season at NYMACS had been conducted entirely remotely. “Taking classes at home with a teacher on video was challenging,” he says, “It took me a while to get used to it, but I knew I wasn’t alone. Now, we’re in-person, full class in college amphitheaters.” The pandemic brought its stressors in the schools, upending the fundamental nature of after-school programs, including NYMACS. “When COVID hit,” François said, “we had to scramble to pivot. Parents and children were stressed out; students and teachers had to learn this new virtual schooling, which was very difficult. Even now that we are slowly re-emerging, we have to reinvent ourselves completely.” He concluded.
Managing staff and teachers was a challenge for NYMACS, which is a small organization. Even later, when demand surged, they didn’t have a well-trained teacher pool for virtual classes. “There are good teachers, but they’re not trained to engage online,” says François, “and our revenue stream was severely impacted; our parents couldn’t pay the fees. We are very fortunate to have been able to tap into the multiple grants awarded by government, foundations, and private institutions to make it through.”
Get Mamadou Niang’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Chérif is an interesting case for a child who successfully transitioned between two vastly different education systems. “He has outperformed peers at Democracy Prep,” says François, “but we have others who did not do so well. That encouraged me to create a new program, the New Immigrant Project, to ease the transition for young immigrants from Africa.
One clear goal for NYMACS is to provide quality Common Core-aligned academic activities to elevate students’ math and literary skills to support their academic instruction in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). With a staff of a dozen rotating professionals with advanced degrees, including research assistants, graduate students, receiving $25 to $30 an hour, and volunteers who receive cash rewards or gift items. Nzi is not saying his salary but reveals that he is making enough to carry on.
Beating the odds, one student at a time.
With the most recent data in 2018, the school demonstrates an impressive record. NYMACS students have scored higher than the District, the City, and the State-wide averages for Grades 3–8 Math and English Language Arts (ELA) exams. 99% of all NYMACS students grades K-12 have been promoted to the next grade:
Nicholas Jenkins, 12, a student who struggles with math but thrives in other subjects, started scoring 100 in math quizzes after three months at NYMACS. His mother, Nicole Jenkins, an African American, said, “I am so satisfied…Nicholas has struggled with math for the past two years, managing to do well in other subjects but failing math. That’s why I brought him to NYMACS. Math always has been his challenge. Today, he scored a 100, thanks to François.”
“When the West Indian mothers brought their children to the center,” says François, “the word-of-mouth spread; they told me how happy they were to see a brother do this.” “Historically,” one of them said, “Blacks don’t do this type of work. The organizations which usually create this type of service in our communities are funded and run by Caucasians.” NYMACS is the only program of the kind in Harlem with an accent on math tutoring.
The star comes for algebra.
Jaden Michael, 17, is a Senior at Dwight, an elite Upper West Side K-12. His mother, Clara Perez, got a tip from a friend and took Jaden to NYMACS. An impressive young Afro-Latinx, second-generation Dominican, buoyed with artistic talent and commanding eloquence, says he struggled with algebra. “I am a bit of a visual learner, and I was struggling a lot with algebra. François would use many different methods of making quadratic expressions. We were practicing algebra, algebra, algebra, just filling in algebra. When the school year came around, I was so prepared for algebra that I felt like I wasn’t being challenged enough. I know that because the rest of my peers were struggling.” Though Jaden is diligently fostering an acting career full of promise — he brilliantly played to critical acclaim in the Netflix’s mini-series: Colin in Black and White the young Colin Kaepernick, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who kneeled through the national anthem as a protest against racism. His defiance spread across sports throughout the world. Filmmaker-producer Eva DuVernay produced the series. His mother believes that math cultivates confidence. “What François did for Jaden,” Clara says, “was to instill confidence that he can learn the material. He wasn’t afraid of math; he just didn’t like it,” she adds, “François is a genius at helping students to love to learn.”
It also means intensive tutoring with some students. Christopher Cissé and Sandra, his sister, were two of Nzi’s first students. Their mother, Nahomie Komenan Cissé, hired him at a hair salon where she was having cornrows weaved. Nzi tutored Christopher, then in 3rd grade, twice a week at his home from 2012 and later at the center. “Studying was a challenge for Christopher,” Nzi said. “We worked hard to strengthen his cognitive skills, math computation, and reading acquisition. He is a shy and withdrawn child, but he persisted and prevailed. This year, he is a freshman at the Rochester Institute of Technology.” For Sandra, reading and comprehension, and math are demanding. Still, she is a gifted and promising ballet dancer with artistic talents and charismatic enthusiasm that secured her a starry role at the Dance Theatre of Harlem School of Classical Ballet. This September, she started at the select LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts.
Another characteristic example of a struggling learner, Ami (1), is a 10-year-old foster girl with parents dispossessed of their child tutelage by the courts for abuse and negligent care. She grew up in the fog of city agencies, judges, caseworkers, and pediatric psychiatrists. In 2019–2020, in the thick of the school season disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, she received failing grades in English Language Arts (ELA): 54%; in Reading: 35%; in Math 40.31%. Managing schoolwork is a significant challenge for Ami. She was placed under the care of a West African family who enrolled her at NYMACS for coaching after her remote-day classes with the Teachers College Community School in West Harlem. A troubled but proud and resilient young girl, with the trauma of her estrangement visible, she strives to adjust and find stability in a new home. She showed dramatic improvements this end of the 2020–2021 “school Zoom” season, with passing grades: ELA: 83.54%; Reading: 85.9%; Math: 81.14%. She also averaged 84% in both Writing and Social Studies. NYMACS has vastly improved her learning and helped her achieve significant gains by building her memory, attention, processing techniques, and sequencing in English language, reading, and math — (1)(To protect her privacy, her personal nickname is being used to refer to Ami.)
François Nzi is refining a teaching approach to math by mitigating the anxiety and the phobia associated with learning mathematics. He explains that “the problem with math does not necessarily come from math,” he says, “reading comprehension, writing, have a role to play. The new Common Core asks students to write their mathematical ideas; you have a problem explaining if you can’t write. So, we extended the program to meet those areas, like reading and writing, to help students have the basics to be better at math and everything else.”
Mixing pandemic grants and teacher benevolence.
Extending the program means increasing staffing and funding capacity. The funding landscape for after-school programs is generally inadequate. Resources, budgets, and staffing are tight, and the demand for students’ spots far exceeds what can be offered. Traditional and well-established programs rely on a combination of public and private funding to cover costs, and even with this blend of money, programs still fall well short of their financial goals. Programs targeting foreign-born Black and Brown families like NYMACS have an even steeper financial challenge. Most of NYMACS’s students are from families in low-income areas: the combined median household income in District 9, where the program is in Harlem, and District 6 in the Bronx, where several students live, is $47,000. “We know that our community cannot afford the services we provide; they require financial and human resources. The fees we collect are grim, and the costs are high,” says François “the funds we receive from the city government are meager. Our most important financial sponsor is the West Harlem Development Corporation which helped expand our program with a $25.000 grant annually. We receive crucial additional funding from the Office of the Manhattan Borough President, grants from partner organizations, the New York Immigrant Coalition, and Tribeca Pediatrics. Our annual fundraising efforts bring in more than $20.000.”
The school allows discounts for families who cannot afford the $300 monthly tuition. In a characteristic gesture, Nzi waived the fees for the Gbané family when Abdou Gbané, father of Zenab and Aissata, passed away. Aissata (eye-Saata,) now 18, is in high school at Success Academy; Zenab, now 14, in 9th grade and Ralissa 11, in 6th grade. They are both at Democracy Prep. “François is a blessing for my family and the community. He was like a father to the kids when Abou died. He told me not to worry about tuition,” says Aissata Koné, the mother. She had been braiding hair in a salon for her income, but the earnings fell short of the family’s needs with Abou’s death. For better pay, she trained for homecare work, and a few months later, enrolled in an intensive training program to be a health care professional. Within a year, she completed a dual certification for Patient Care Associate (CPA) and Patient Care Technician (CPT.) She has been a Phlebotomist and EKG technician at Harlem Hospital for the past three years. She says she is now relieving the financial burden for NYMACS and is contributing to the kids’ tutoring.
NYMACS had its 10th-anniversary last year. Axel-Ryan Nzi, the founder’s son, now 15, is a 10th grader at Hotchkiss, the ultra-elite Connecticut boarding school. The rear-view mirror on his pre-K year is one yardstick by which François measures NYMACS’s progress. Axel was the child catalyst to the creation of NYMACS, and his education could also be the ultimate success François strives to cultivate with each of his students. Axel has scored 95+ in ELA and Math through all his primary and elementary classes. He was a student at the public schools with an educator-dad who’s an old hand, master of the mechanics of the school system. Axel produces a regular podcast program, Y With Axel-Ryan Nzi, discussing subjects ranging from creativity, passion, friendship, identity, with his teachers, schoolmates, and any creative acquaintance. His school has a page dedicated to “our very own resident podcaster. “
Parentally defensive, François says he feels a pit of grief and empathy in his stomach when many parents “don’t see what is going on with their kids. There is a disconnect between most students and their parents. They only learn about what is going on with their child when the school calls and says: “your child didn’t come to school today. Parents don’t know if the child is doing homework or turning in assignments. They think when they drop the kids at NYMACS miracle happens. We don’t have a magic wand; pray on our chart, and everything happens!” He continues, “So, we feel it is also our mission to educate parents about their responsibility at home.”
In December, NYMACS will be moving to a new space in the Manhattanville section of West Harlem, on 126th Street and Amsterdam. After eleven years in Central Harlem, the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic having reduced office leasing costs, it makes sense to move into a more prominent place at closer proximity to mass transit.
Nzi’s next big act is The New Immigrant Project initiative, the academic transition for K-12 students mostly from French-speaking countries in West Africa. With his success at NYMACS, Nzi’s idea has caught the interest of the Department of Education (DOE.) It is an important project. The DOE has greenlighted the pilot, which will bring a group of seven to ten students who will take classes at NYMACS. Each will be paired with one successful young professional of an African immigrant background as a guide-advisor who will engage them once a week, acting as a mentor. It’s a new chapter, a step up for Nzi to scale NYMACS’s program and cement the school’s reputation as a pathway for young Africans to gain access to robust educational support to succeed in college; and to land careers they might not have dreamed of.
This story was reported with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
