By Susan Elise Campbell
Jane Chen left Wall Street to start a writing center for youth in a career leap that surprised her peers in the world of investment banking. But helping children read and write is something Chen has been devoted to since she was 16 years old.
Her business, Eyre Writing Center, was launched January 2020 from Saratoga CoWorks and Chen has already helped 900 middle school children “take the mystery out of writing well,” she said.
“At the end of my time in asset management on Wall Street I was writing a curriculum for a new writing center for the new age,” said Chen, whose parents named her after The literary character, Jane Eyre. “My task was to break down the foundations of writing and make it a science.”
The center would focus on middle school students because “we have great elementary schools and, depending on the district, great high schools,” she said. “But middle schools are underperforming so it is difficult for students to jump from eighth to ninth grade. When I saw what books were on the recommended summer reading list for seventy or eighth grade, I realized I had these titles on my reading list in fifth grade.”
She said she doesn’t know exactly what is behind the drop in basic skills, it was “aggravated by COVID,” she said. “I don’t look at data to see where the problems may lie, but I know anecdotally that there has been a deterioration in the quality of writing.”
As Chen edited college essays on the side she was “learning what the students weren’t learning. Switching tenses, poor sentence structure and punctuation are fundamentals that should have been addressed 10 years earlier,” she said.
Chen said she “personally had an interesting education.” She was a youngster in the New York City school system who was fortunate to get a scholarship to Trinity School, a prominent prep school, where “the discrepancies became more vivid.”
Later she would attend Harvard University for her major in history, minor in economics, and a calling for “educational empowerment.”
About 10 later when she presented a business plan to fellow Ivy Leaguers on Wall Street, they told her, “This plan is untenable.” But Chen went forward. Her market would be children and their parents in lower income communities.
“I was accustomed to financial stability and starting a business is always challenging,” she said. Chen wanted to hire the best instructors and graders, “and that is a high fixed cost,” she said.
“I was going to have a school with a price tag that’s affordable,” she said. “How was I going to scale that to make a profit?”
Chen felt there were enough people like her devoted to the mission of helping youth read and write with more clarity who would “give their time at a lower hourly rate than the private schools, whose students came from wealthy families, were paying them.”
She hired two part-time professionals to be instructors, editors and graders alongside Chen. Today the staff of three are full time. One is in Cambridge, Mass., focusing on marketing. A recent graduate of University of Albany’s master’s program is assigned with the administrative tasks, editing and graphics. As of this year, Chen is the sole instructor of all the classes.
In-person classes began from the workspace co-op on Broadway in January 2020, but were shuttered when the pandemic hit. Two years later Chen is making another far-reaching change in the business model. She is recording 100 hours of on-demand videos and offering them in addition to live classes.
“We are testing out the video model with the students and have found that may preferred videos over live instruction,” Chen said.
That decision led to a four-tiered pricing system for enrollment. The flex plan offers only videos. The live plan is videos with lectures. The edit plan is videos, no live lectures, and editing of writing assignments. The all-in plan offers the full spectrum of instruction and editing.
All students have a live option, which can be book club or a community event. Each course level, of which there are five, progressively teaches the fundamentals of how to read, write sentences, and write paragraphs. A writing project is done over the 12-week semester.
“The writing project will be either creative or analytical,” said Chen. “We teach every type of writing except business writing.”
Papers are then published in EWJ, the EWC Journal, found online at ewcjournal.com.
New students do not have to decide which course level is best for them. Chen developed a 45-minute placement module and enrolls the student in the correct level based on their answers. Then it is up to the student and parents to select live and video options based on their preferences and learning style.
Chen said she would like to “find a way to work with after school programs or other partnerships” and has a pilot program running now that is exclusively on-demand videos.
“The students like this program, but it’s success is purely qualitative,” she said. “I am bringing a person on board to talk to all the families and quantify our results.”
From there she hopes to build out software on writing instruction.
“My mission is to be a high quality writing resource and make it affordable for families across the community, the nation, and even the world,” Chen said.
Eyre Writing Center has opened EWC Book Club to the public. It meets twice a month on Zoom and the reading list and registration form are on the website. More student essays and a blog that includes past book club discussions are also accessible.
Visit www.eyrewritingcenter.com for more information.