Danielle Guindo, like Kelly Clarkson, is a teacher’s daughter.
Both learned at a young age not only how inspiring the classroom can be for students, but how rewarding the experience can be for educators. They recognized the fulfillment shared by a student and teacher when a first math problem is solved, a first word is read, or a first lesson is learned.
“Just to see that light come on and then they get it,” Clarkson said of a child’s comprehension during Guindo’s recent appearance on NBC’s “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” “That’s the coolest part my mom would talk about.”
Guindo has seen that light shine many times, as the daughter of two teachers and as executive director of Read Alliance. The organization, founded in 2000 and based in New York City, trains and pays high school students to serve as individual reading tutors for younger peers in their community who are struggling to read.
“Our founders were very concerned about a pattern of blaming children or their families if they were struggling to read,” Guindo said. “So, they envisioned a model and asked what would happen if you can pair older kids with younger kids in a learning relationship, and have those older kids serve as mentors and role models and reading tutors for their younger peers in the same communities. And 26 years later, that model still works.”
It’s what Guindo calls a “win-win-win model” for students, tutors and communities – having employed more than 22,0000 high school students and provided more than 23,000 children with reading tutoring in New York and Pennsylvania.
Children in under-resourced schools, from kindergarten through second grade, receive one-on-one phonics tutoring three to four days a week after school, with some who complete the program improving more than a grade level in reading. Teen leaders, as the tutors are called, develop leadership skills while also earning income and building the foundation for careers.
“The unique part of Read Alliance is truly that relationship between the teen and the child,” Guindo said. “The way you see the kids’ faces light up when they see the teens come into the classroom and they see the teen they’ve been working with. That excitement that they’re connected to this big kid who often looks like them, and shares a lot of the same lived experience, who encourages them, who’s focusing only on them…That’s the magic that we believe is the secret sauce to the Read Alliance model.”
Clarkson, who made a surprise donation to the program at the end of the segment, agreed that words can take on a new meaning to children when they’re said by someone viewed as younger or “cooler.”
“I do notice, like, even with my kids, when I tell them something, it’s something very different when it’s coming out of a teenager they know that they think is cool. It’s a completely different environment and tone,” she said. “I am very cool, I keep telling them, but they’re not listening.
‘Changes the course of their life’
The Read Alliance staff received an e-mail in the fall about the opportunity to appear on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”
“It was one of those moments where our staff was like, ‘Is this real? Wait, is this real? Is this spam? Is this true?’ Guindo said.
In February, Guindo made her way to Clarkson’s studios at 30 Rock to appear on the show with Ashley Martinez, a teen leader alumni who is now a kindergarten teacher in the Bronx, and Edna Mensah, a current high school senior and teen leader.
They were given their own green rooms, just across the hall from fellow guests Bunnie Xo and Gabriel Basso. They received the celebrity treatment while having their wardrobe prepared and their hair and makeup touched up. They then went onto the set and sat on the couch across from Clarkson.
“There is a major teacher shortage nationwide, y’all, and its often students most in need who suffer the consequences,” Clarkson said at the opening of the segment. “Here in New York, nearly a third of teachers plan to retire in the next five years, meanwhile the number of people planning to become teachers is on a steep decline.”
Guindo went on to say roughly 20% of Read Alliance teen leaders, who have been trained in a structured phonics curriculum and gained first-hand experience working with students, go on to become educators.
“They’ve shared with us that whatever they’ve chosen to do was deeply impacted by the experience that they had working with Read Alliance,” she said. “Patience, responsibility, knowing that someone was counting on them, that they were showing up for someone who was looking for them every day, changes the course of their life.”
Martinez wasn’t planning on becoming a teacher until the program put her on a path to do so.
While growing up in the Bronx, she said she signed up for the summer youth employment program when she was 14 and was placed with Read Alliance, where she began tutoring kindergarten students.
“I saw my students grow and change, and they went from not being able to read to then going and being so confident in how they were,” she said. “It was just super exciting and super heartfelt to know that they’re growing that confidence at such a young age.”
While tutoring, Martinez taught herself a valuable lesson.
“I learned to be confident in myself, to also just try to always put yourself out there,” she said. “Not always do you think you can have opportunities for things, especially when you come from certain backgrounds, you don’t think you’re able to do things…or you don’t have access to it, but Read definitely gives you all the access, all the support in order for you to get where you want to be.”
Edna Mensah said she originally took the role at Read Alliance as a way to earn money.
“But then once I started working there, I realized that my mindset then had to shift,” she said. “I was working with kids that were struggling to read so I had to realize that their literacy was in my hands.”
She wasn’t just a tutor, but a mentor to a child only a few years younger that she could grow with.
“Even if it’s them saying the same sentence or reading like the same five words, celebrating those small wins within themselves helps me celebrate my small wins and shows that growth is still progress,” she said. “And then also it taught me trust: trust that I do belong in leadership spaces and trust that I would have a good career as an educator.”
It helped her and many others go from teen to tutor to teacher.
“It almost sounds like you’re pretty well equipped before even getting to your first solid year of teaching, which is an incredible gift,” Clarkson said. “Cause I remember my mom’s first two years, that wasn’t easy. The first two years, teachers always say, that’s the hardest.”
‘Angels on earth’
Clarkson has called her mother, Jeanne Taylor, her “favorite teacher.”
Taylor, a retired first-grade teacher, appeared on Clarkson’s show in 2019.
“My mom is a teacher, and I always brag on that,” Clarkson said at the time before asking her mom why she wanted to become a teacher.
“As I was growing up, I had good teachers, and I had some that were not so good,” Taylor said. “I learned wonderful things from the good teachers, and then I felt bad so bad for, not so much for myself because I behaved, but some of the kids that had a hard time sitting still and doing things, I mean some of those teachers were really rude and they were mean, and I thought, ‘I don’t ever want to be that way.’ I want kids to want to come to school. I want them to love learning. I want them to be a lifelong learner, because I am. I want it to be fun. I want to meet them at the door and welcome them in. I want them to love it.”
Those same principles apply at Read Alliance, which Guindo believes is one of the reasons a program helping to build the next generation of teachers resonated with Clarkson.
“I actually started to tear up out there,” Guindo said after the show. “I was a little bit overwhelmed by her authentic connection to the mission of Read Alliance. Her mother was a teacher, so was mine. She has children, she understands what it looks like to have a child, all of a sudden, open up the doors to reading. And it was so clear that she genuinely understood how powerful the message and mission of Read Alliance was and is.”
Clarkson announced on the show that she and the publisher Scholastic were donating $5,000 each to Read Alliance, saying the program “creates so much opportunity where there might not have been.”
“Your program is helping so many people,” Clarkson said. “So, thank you guys so much for what you do. You really are angels on earth.”
Call it a gift from one teacher’s daughter to another.
“It certainly wasn’t expected,” Guindo said. “Being in this studio, having an opportunity to share our story was a gift in itself. But having this additional contribution to support the work that we do, which is so critical and so necessary, really just touched me deeply and just on behalf of everyone at Read Alliance, I’m tremendously grateful.”
