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Classroom Coaches

By joining forces with teachers and communities, Ben Bhatti's Group Excellence takes tutoring to a new level

By Karen B. Manahan

As a corps member, Ben Bhatti (Atlanta '03) spent his downtime at local bookstores packed with college students from Georgia Tech, Emory, and Morehouse. Bhatti made friends with some regulars, and an idea soon took root. "I asked them, ‘Hey, do you want to come tutor my class?' "

A handful of students agreed, and Bhatti arranged to bring them into his class twice a week. Bhatti would introduce the lesson and work with the middle-level students while the tutors worked with his high- and lowperforming students. "I started to see a relationship that I couldn't have with my students that the tutors could have. They became mentors. The kids were really attached. They saw me every day, so the tutors were the cool ones."

Bhatti wanted to capitalize in other classrooms on this highly effective tutor-mentor model. He called his best friend, Carl Dorvil, to discuss starting an elementary and high school program in their hometown, Dallas-Fort Worth. The pair convinced Texas Instruments to give them $20,000, and they launched Group Excellence in 2004 with four schools and 200 students. "The teachers absolutely loved it," Bhatti says. "We monitored test scores, and [our kids] had astronomical scores compared to the district. In one school, we moved 100 percent failures to 60 percent passing."

"The second year, they were really rolling," says Felicia Johnson, who was math department chair at W.W. Samuell High School when Group Excellence began. "They had their own plan and curriculum, and that was the year we had double-digit gains for our 10th graders." A May 2007 independent study requested by the state found that tutoring time with Group Excellence led to a passing rate of 64 percent at schools that averaged a 17 percent passing rate, a feat no other tutoring provider in the area came close to matching.

Now, more than 300 tutors work with 3,000 students in 20 schools. Group Excellence's area coordinators, who are often former tutors or educators, work with the schools to create curriculum and recruit and train tutors, who are paid between $8 and $12 an hour. The tutors are mostly college students who provide college-prep workshops and tutoring in classrooms as well as after school. Bhatti credits the program's success to what he calls its "multidisciplinary and holistic approach to the problem."

"We're like life coaches," he says. "[The kids] want someone they can talk to, someone they can relate to. We go to all of the parent-teacher meetings in our schools, the homecomings, and the football games. We are very involved with the community. We have to be."

Group Excellence tutors build special relationships with the teachers, too. They plan curriculum together, go to departmental meetings, and talk with teachers several times a week, says Matt Houston, the program's executive director. "What evolves is that we end up talking with them between classes, at track meets and basketball games, about individual kids' needs and approaches to collaboration."

"Group Excellence is a part of our school fabric," says Clyde Pikes, a community liaison at Samuell High. "I've seen kids who didn't care about coming to tutoring with other providers,
but because of the relationships they have with the Group Excellence tutors, they are eager to be here for tutoring— holidays, weekends, you name it."

Group Excellence has served more than 5,000 students and has expanded in Texas to districts in Austin, Houston, and Greenville. Bhatti hopes to take the program nationwide, and its graduates might help them get there.

"For a lot of my friends who weren't so math-proficient, they were finally able to pass," says Pikes' son, Clyde III, a Group Excellence graduate now attending Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. "Some of them were even commended. The tutors were able to help us, and some of us are in college now, ready to be tutors. Before Group Excellence, we didn't think we ever would get here."