Her Story
About Ashley
I grew up in the inner city of Boston in Mattapan and was a student of the METCO program, which was birthed out of desegregation in Boston. That was birthed out of a need, because we knew that students in the surrounding areas, the suburban areas, were receiving a level of education that we didn't think was being offered in the inner city at that time. I felt fortunate enough to get access to different educational systems and exposure to varied socioeconomic backgrounds early on in life, and realized that education is the tool that helps you transcend environments. The more you commit to being a lifelong learner, the more access you get. I viewed, and I continue to view, education as a tool, something nobody can take away from you - no one can remove what you know and what you learn. Wanting to give that to children in communities that look like me, and feeling like everybody deserves that type of access, was what brought me to the educational field. That's informed my work in education and workforce development, which are so tightly connected. I want to look at what is the life cycle of people and who we are if we want to be quality citizens, and it starts with the things that feel more simple, like learning how to read, and then it's also like, how do I apply the reading skills that I've developed to something far greater. I feel fortunate to have been able to see it on all spectrum.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Ashley
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say I had a really good mom. I had a really good village, and a lot of moms, actually - my grandmother, my aunts, mentors. I was really built on the back of a vast network of women and men. I have a great dad, I have a great family that was committed to my success, and really supported whatever direction I wanted to go, and they continue to be supportive in that way. I can't undersell at all what a blessing that is and how much I've been able to achieve because I've been held up by so many.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
To stay multi-dimensional, and to grow in areas of things that bring you joy, and find ways to build careers out of those things versus trying to box yourself into saying, like, when I started my career, I thought, oh, I'm gonna be a teacher, and I left it very narrow. I think because of the wealth of my experiences, I became something far greater than just a teacher, and I've discovered the many ways you can be a teacher of so many facets.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
It's such a key age, especially just given the statistics right now and the deficit we're facing in making literacy progress. COVID took a huge hit, specifically as a region, and being able to advance a lot of that work. It's super important right now that we try to get our children reading on grade level, which is at Tier 2 of the challenge. There's so much science behind what we already know which helps them read, and not every parent has that, and parents were really having to try to survive during that time. Them being the teachers all of a sudden, if that's not your field, it's very difficult to help enrich that process. When you think about phonemic awareness and just the fundamental development for them to have the learning blocks, you really do need individual engagement. They need to be in classroom settings, and there's so much socio-emotional skills that are developed in the classroom that you can't really replicate online - what is it to share blocks or share space, even, to sit back and let somebody else talk. All those things we don't realize are cultivated at a very ripe age.
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