School Choice 2016 – The 74

What Do Americans Think of School Choice? Depends on How You Ask the Question

Kevin Mahnken — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

When the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions convenes on Tuesday for Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearing, 2017 will have its first major education story — and the first preview of what education policy will look like in the post-Obama era.

Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary will be grilled on a familiar but wide range of policy questions ranging from federal K-12 funding to the Common Core standards to college debt to early-childhood education. But the president-elect’s vision of education appears to center on large-scale expansion of choice programs, and since her nomination DeVos has become something like the poster girl of school choice. A billionaire evangelist of charter schools and school vouchers, she has, through generous political giving, helped bankroll and .

Her nomination has also bought her something of a bifurcated reputation: To , she’s become a To defenders like fellow Michigander Mitt Romney, though, she’s for kids stuck in failing schools. Trump clearly agrees.

Issues relating to choice could therefore feature heavily in DeVos’s hearing. Though Republican control of the Senate makes her confirmation probable, it won’t answer three questions raised by the nomination. To wit: Do most Americans actually support school choice? Can they agree about “school choice” means? And how is DeVos likely to affect these views from the Trump cabinet?

The answer to all three questions, frustratingly, is that it depends how they’re phrased and who’s being asked.

The limits of polling

Public opinion polling on education isn’t especially plentiful, and questions about school choice have been only sporadically surveyed. These questions are also particularly sensitive to nuances of wording.

“It is challenging to ask about issues of school choice, and vouchers in particular, in a way that elicits a true barometer of public sentiment because the way in which you choose to present the issue to the public really matters,” said Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

As editor in chief of the journal Education Next, West helps administer to more than 4,000 American adults annually. The poll’s findings demonstrate the extent to which respondents’ answers may be influenced by how questions are asked.

Consider school vouchers. For many, the very concept — a form of taxpayer funding for private education — flouts traditional ideas of public schooling. The EdNext pollsters devised two separate ways of raising the issue: One emphasizes the increased options available to parents, while the other stresses the use of public monies. Using the first construction, respondents in 2016 were evenly divided about vouchers (45–44). Using the second, support for the idea withered (29–57).

That kind of variability, and the nuances of wording that generate it, sometimes rouse accusations of bias. Phi Delta Kappa International, a professional organization for educators that has administered a respected poll annually since 1969, has varied the way it asks about vouchers, but its more frequent question has troubled some choice advocates: “Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?”

That formulation, with its buzzkill finale, has yielded predictably negative responses over the years (31–57 disapproval in 2015, nearly the same as Education Next when using its less sunny description) and elicited accusations. PDK Chief Executive Officer Josh Starr vigorously defended the survey’s integrity in an interview, pointing to the ideological diversity of the advisory panel that helps construct it. Still, he conceded, “It is true that with polls, it’s how you ask the questions [that determines] how you get the result.”

While more widely supported than vouchers across a variety of polls, charter schools also present a dilemma. After filtering out respondents who say they have no opinion, both the Education Next and PDK polls show (71 percent and 72 percent, respectively).

But those figures become less meaningful when we consider that the public may not understand what a charter school is. According to PDK’s 2014 poll, respondents believe that charters can charge tuition and select students based on ability; they are also divided evenly on whether charters can teach religion — and whether they even qualify as public schools. Those basic misconceptions remain common more than 25 years after the charter movement began.

No matter how carefully constructed, polls suffer from the deficiencies of their respondents, whose views are fluid and subject to incomplete or bogus information.

Amid the noise, however, it’s possible to decipher a growing trend.

Education becomes polarized

Last August, Gallup released a survey on Americans’ views about public education. In contrast to previous years, the 2016 sample showcased : 53 percent of Democrats described themselves as satisfied with the quality of education, while only 32 percent of Republicans agreed. That’s a startlingly large difference on an issue that doesn’t typically stoke political passions (at least not in recent history). The average satisfaction gap between the parties over the 18 years leading up to 2014 was just 4.13 points.

There’s some precedent for this phenomenon, especially in election years. In 2004 and 2012, the satisfaction gap between the parties was eight and 12 points, respectively. But 2016’s 21-point chasm began widening in 2015, when the Common Core standards emerged as a contentious (and widely misconstrued) topic in national media.

Partisan polarization is reflected in how Americans view their government, the economy and most policy concerns; its encroachment into education should alert lawmakers and educators — if they’ve somehow missed the fracas of recent years — to guard against greater ruptures.

EdNext’s 10-year polling averages present compelling evidence of growing division. In 2010, Democrats and Republicans both registered 70 percent support for charter schools. While Republicans are now even more likely (74 percent) to hold that position, Democratic support has flagged in the intervening years, now tallying just 58 percent. In the PDK poll as well, charter-friendly .

PDK’s Starr believes that media coverage and party messaging on the issue might be influencing voters who are less likely to peruse policy papers. “As charters have become a political football, there’s a trickle-down effect on the person who … just sees it as something that gets written about,” he said. “Like everything in America these days, it’s subject to that kind of political dynamic.”

A partisan gap has opened up on the voucher end as well, though it is narrower and perhaps more surprising. Support has declined significantly among the public at large over the past five years, with overall approval for income-targeted vouchers falling from 55 percent to 43 percent over that span. Notably, however, this softening has been concentrated among Republicans, whose political leaders are far likelier than Democrats to endorse such proposals. Regardless of how the question is posed, but especially when the dreaded matter of public financing is foregrounded, Democratic respondents are consistently more pro-voucher than Republicans.

EdNext’s West proposes an explanation grounded in self-interest: While the Democrats’ urban minority constituencies may covet scholarships to private schools as alternatives to their subpar district offerings, Republicans are more likely to dismiss such mechanisms as handouts. “It seems that many Republicans have come to see vouchers as a government program benefiting low-income families that is unlikely to do anything for them,” he said.

Of course, there’s no better measure of how the public views private school choice than the results of the voucher referenda that have actually gone before the voters. Dating back to 1967, the cause of freeing public dollars for private education has been defeated — including losses for tuition reimbursement, tax credits, auxiliary services like textbooks and transportation, and full-fledged statewide voucher schemes.

Two of the worst defeats came in 2000, when voters in both and comprehensively rejected ballot initiatives by margins of 41 and 39 points, respectively. Both found friends in civic-minded philanthropists, though these deep-pocketed allies couldn’t carry the day. In Michigan, as has been widely reported, the prime mover .

What comes next

Donald Trump has pledged $20 billion for “charters, vouchers and teacher-driven learning models,” an agenda that would suit his would-be education secretary very agreeably. The extent to which these mechanisms meet the expectations and preferences of the electorate is another question. The only poll conducted so far on the plan , an advocacy group founded by DeVos that trumpets itself as “the nation’s voice for educational choice.” By a 51–35 margin, the survey sample backed the idea of “shifting twenty billion dollars in funding from other programs to school choice.”

Note the diction: the word “choice” tends to poll well, and the generic “other programs” displaces costs into the ether.

That’s a fairly good illustration of where we are in determining American attitudes on both traditional schools and reform alternatives. “Incoherence,” as education researcher Morgan Polikoff has written, “may well be the defining characteristic of Americans’ attitudes toward our public schools.” We like the school down the street, but . We admire charters but can’t be relied on to define what they are. We’re willing to fund private alternatives, but mostly when the money is redirected from “other programs” with no constituencies.

Americans speak increasingly less with one voice, and, divided, with less care.

“I think that most people, frankly, are pretty far removed from the realities that Marty [West] or myself think about all the time,” concluded Starr. “I don’t know how they’re making their calculations. But I think it’s likely completely different from how we think they are.”

Kevin Mahnken is an editorial fellow of The 74.

School Choice Week: 5 Inspiring Neighborhood Schools that are Rewriting the Rules

Mark Keierleber — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

At one school on Chicago’s South Side, students are being driven from the streets to careers in health. At a school run by monks in Newark, kids are calling the shots. And in New York City, a resurgence is uplifting Catholic schools on the verge of shutting down.

It’s a vast world out there in American K-12 education. No two schools are alike, and they don’t have to be.

In honor of National School Choice Week, reporters and contributors here at The Seventy Four offered a handful of schools from across the country that are shaking things up a bit. Here are the top five:

Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy, Chicago, Illinois:

At Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy in Chicago, students have to take twice as many math and science credits as traditional public schools require. In fact, the whole school day is longer. But there’s a mission behind the added rigor: Keep inner-city Chicago kids off violence-prone streets and on the right path to careers in healthcare.

“Imagine a world where just a few blocks away from us, Cook County Jail is not necessary,” said the school’s CEO Juan Salgado, who was selected as a recipient of the prestigious 2015 MacArthur Fellowship. “Imagine that world, because it’s not a dream.”

Be sure to watch the inspiring video by The Seventy Four’s Heather Martino, which offers an inside look at Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy.

St. Athanasius, New York City

Just a few years ago, St. Athanasius, located in an impoverished neighborhood in the South Bronx, was in a bad place. Like other Catholic schools across the country, the school was hit hard by plummeting enrollment and dwindling financial support.

“We were in survival mode,” said Principal Marianne Kraft, a former nun who saw the school through the worst days of crippling poverty, drugs, and street gangs. “I knew we were going to have to be closed. There was no way. How can you continue to operate when you can’t pay the teachers?”

But then, in 2013, St. Athanasius and five other struggling NYC Catholic Schools were thrown a lifeline. Today, the school doesn’t look or feel anything like it did during those dark times.

St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, Newark, New Jersey

Take a visit to St. Benedict’s Prep and pretty quickly you’ll notice something a little peculiar: the students run the joint.

Student leaders make sure their younger peers aren’t dozing off in class. They lead daily Bible readings. They present club announcements. At the all-male school, students are trained to take charge of their own education. Led by monks, the school gives boys who may be excluded from opportunities because of poverty and race a rigorous education, emotional support and the leadership skills they need to thrive.

The result: more than 95 percent of seniors head off to college after graduating, including a regular crop admitted to Ivy League schools.

“We don’t do it because they’re Catholic,” said Father Edwin Leahy, a Benedictine monk and the school’s headmaster. “We do it because we’re Catholic.”

Perspectives Charter Schools, Chicago, Illinois

Through field studies at other schools and homeless shelters, Perspectives Charter Schools ripped senior Gabby Dixon from her comfort zone. But it’s the small size that gave Perspectives that personal touch the Loyola University-bound senior craved.

“The small size and personal relationships have definitely helped me grow. Even when I do bad things, somebody actually cares what I’m doing and helps me redirect.

Hebrew Language Academy, New York City

“Yadayim al ha chatzait,” one Hebrew Language Academy student commands in a game of Simon Says. “Put your hands on your skirt.”

Just a few months ago, many of the students at the Brooklyn school didn’t speak a word of Hebrew. A good number are not even Jewish. They come from diverse backgrounds: 41 percent are black, 53 percent are white and 3 percent are Latino.

“There is something so exciting about walking into our schools and seeing this diverse group of kids together, making life together in this environment,” said founder Sara Berman. “They’re learning this is what America is — America is a melting pot, it’s a diverse country.”

Learning to Laugh in Hebrew: How Two Schools Used An Ancient Language to Achieve Integration

Bill Hammond — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

(Brooklyn, New York) — On a November morning at , a public charter school in Brooklyn, a 5-year-old girl led a dozen kindergarten classmates in a “Simon says”-like game, telling them in Hebrew to touch various articles of clothing.

“Yadayim al ha chatzait,” the girl said at one point. “Put your hands on your skirt.”

“I don’t have one!” a little boy blurted out, also in Hebrew, to giggles all around.

“They can laugh in the language,” the school’s director of Hebrew instruction, Arleen Danon, pointed out to a visitor. “That’s big.”

Just three months before, Danon proudly noted, most of those children had not spoken a word of Hebrew.

Making the scene even more remarkable was something else: Both the girl leading the game and the boy without a skirt were African-American — as were several of their classmates. It turns out that the language of the Torah, in combination with school choice, can be a force for racial integration.

The academy’s overall enrollment, in fact, is 41 percent black, 53 percent white and 3 percent Latino, a far cry from the all-Jewish enclave that some skeptics foresaw when the school opened seven years ago.

Its three-year-old sister school, is even more racially mixed at 42 percent black, 38 percent white and 20 percent Latino.

Both stand out as islands of integration in the New York City public school system, which a UCLA study identified two years ago as one of the most racially and economically divided in the country.

Their diversity is no accident, according to Jonathan Rosenberg, president of the ,the parent organization of the two New York City schools and seven others around the country.

Principal David Penberg speaks with Hebrew Language Academy fifth-grader David Dvir

Rosenberg said organizers of Hebrew Language Academy put “a lot of sweat and work” into enrolling students of different backgrounds — and he argued that more charter schools should do the same.

“In New York City and New York state, we have grown so accustomed to egregious patterns of segregation that they’ve almost become part of the backdrop,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg, who said he does not speak Hebrew, is a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Education. He lives with his biracial wife and kids in Montclair, New Jersey renowned for desegregating its schools through a system of “controlled choice.” (Read The Seventy Four’s takeout on Montclair’s school integration, its achievement gap and the political forces behind the district’s 2015 opt-out movement)

The melting pot myth

Sixty-two years after Brown vs. Board of Education, Rosenberg said he is dismayed that the formal segregation banned by the Supreme Court has been replaced by de facto segregation — driven by white flight, mortgage redlining, poverty-related housing patterns and arbitrary school district boundaries.

Most of New York’s charter schools, meanwhile, have focused on serving the students who need help most: black and Latino kids whose only other choice is a poor-performing district school. Their “no excuses” goal has been to demonstrate that children of color can succeed if given the right tools and attention, which has been borne out by the test scores of high-performing charters such as the

A side effect of this approach is racial segregation. The by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that 73 percent of New York City’s charter schools were less than 1 percent white, and 90 percent were less than 10 percent white. Only 8 percent had white enrollment at or above the citywide average of 14.5 percent.

“The key tension is between a desire to (direct) your limited resources to the students who need it most, versus a corollary desire to serve kids in an integrated context,” Rosenberg said. “If you believe integrated schools are good for low-income kids, you can’t achieve it by serving only low-income kids.”

At Hebrew Language Academy, diversity was a priority from the beginning, said founder Sara Berman, who is board chairwoman for both that school and the Hebrew Charter School Center.

“There is something so exciting about walking into our schools and seeing this diverse group of kids together, making life together in this environment,” Berman said. “They’re learning this is what America is — America is a melting pot, it’s a diverse country … This is what a public school can and should be.”

That most American schools are not melting pots was brought back to the nation’s attention by the 60th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education in 2014. The UCLA study brought the issue painfully home for New York City. A recent of the public radio program “This American Life” made a compelling research-based case that integration is the surest way to equalize education for children of color.

Yet direct attempts to desegregate schools still struggle for traction, even in multi-ethnic and otherwise progressive places like New York. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example, community opposition persuaded Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration to drop a rezoning plan that would have shifted students from a mostly white elementary school to a nearby school that is mostly black and Latino — and identified as “persistently dangerous.”

In Brooklyn, meanwhile, the city is moving cautiously forward with another racially charged rezoning in the face of resistance from parents of all colors. (Read The Seventy Four’s opinion piece on why New Yorkers should favor diversity in their schools, not just their neighborhoods.)

Charters have the advantage of being schools of choice. They don’t order families to enroll, they persuade them to. Plus, as James Merriman of the points out, charters are not wedded to any particular neighborhood or ethnic group. If the demographics shift, people are less likely to resent being “taken over.” “Charters can provide a place that is no man’s land, so to speak,” Merriman said.

This is where Hebrew Language Academy came in.

Taking a page from the Greeks

The city already had many dual-language charter or magnet schools for Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Greek and other languages. Many were among the city’s more multi-ethnic schools. Berman said her father — financier-turned-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt — and other like-minded donors set out to establish something similar for Hebrew.

As she studied how to make that goal a reality, she said she was particularly inspired by a tour of the in Brooklyn, which has emphasized Greek language, food and culture, yet enrolled a substantial number of African-American and Latino children along with those of Greek heritage.

“It was just this perfectly wonderful, warm diverse, normal public school,” she recalled. “I was excited about teaching Hebrew to all American kids.”

Berman and the other organizers then faced the usual challenges of starting a charter in New York City — especially in finding suitable real estate — with the further complication of recruiting a diverse student body.

Working to their advantage was the broad appeal of charters for black and Latino families, who tend to live in neighborhoods with poor-performing district schools, and the uniqueness of the theme. “I had a feeling that in New York City a lot of families would be interested in a first-rate school that taught Hebrew,” Berman said.

That proved correct in the case of Noellene Foresythe, an immigrant from Trinidad who was eager to keep her son Jayden out of the neighborhood district school, which had a reputation for fighting. As she scouted for an alternative, Hebrew Language Academy caught her attention.

“When they said they were teaching Hebrew, I said, ‘Wow, that’s a different language. You don’t ever get that,’” Foresythe recalled. She enrolled Jayden in kindergarten, and said he has thrived there to the point that he skipped third grade. “When we’re driving around and he sees the (Hebrew) writing, he will tell us what it says.”

To maximize the variety of families who would enter their admission lottery, HLA organizers chose to locate in Community School District 22, a section of Brooklyn with a mix of immigrants from Russia, Israel, the Caribbean and the Philippines along with African Americans and Latinos, said Shane Goldstein Smith, the Hebrew Charter School Center’s executive director for the New York region.

Organizers also did a lot of recruitment at community groups, houses of worship, nursery schools and even nail salons and fruit stores in what Berman called “a very concerted effort to reach out to everyone and say, ‘This is a school for you.’”

The result has been what Principal David Penberg calls an “incredible mix of ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, socio-economic backgrounds. It’s a real opportunity to get it right with regard to diversity.”

Organizers ran into community opposition when they sought to co-locate in an existing district school — a not-uncommon experience for charters — and eventually chose instead to use leased space for several years before renovating a building of their own.

Students at the Hebrew Language Academy

Academically, Hebrew Language Academy has had its struggles. It received an “F” on its report card from the New York City Department of Education in 2013, its fourth year of operation. City officials said the school’s test results were above average, but had not shown enough improvement from year to year.

The test scores have since strengthened. Today, under revised standards implemented by de Blasio’s administration, the school is rated “good” or “excellent” in all categories, including academic performance.

For the 42 percent of its students passed their state English tests, and 64 percent passed in math, substantially beating the averages for District 22 and the city as a whole.

On the waterfront

The academy occupies a waterfront building in an otherwise industrial section of Mill Basin. The renovated warehouse is roomy and pleasant and still has a slight smell of fresh paint.

As Penberg, the principal, led a visitor on a tour, a student greeted him with “Hi, Dr. P!” and asked when they could have lunch. “I let the kids have lunch with me,” he said afterward. “They can sit at the table where the adults sit. … It’s better than locking yourself in an office and being the place where folks go for discipline.”

Under the school’s immersive approach to language instruction, students receive a period of formal Hebrew lessons each day, and several of their other classes are conducted in both English and Hebrew, with one teacher speaking each. Hebrew instructors also preside at meals.

During one language lesson, students clustered on the floor in semicircles around instructors who led them in speaking, reading and writing exercises, using nothing but Hebrew. Rather than simply asking students to call out the name of an object or conjugate a verb, they wove words and concepts into a flowing dialogue with students.

“We’re imitating the process of first language acquisition,” said Danon, the Hebrew instruction director. “We don’t want to say, ‘What is this? This is a pencil.’ Rather: ‘Pick up the blue pencil.’”

Often, the teachers use worksheets and other materials they have designed and made themselves, because most of the commercially available Hebrew-language materials have too much religious content to be appropriate in a public school.

Whether playing games or doing exercises, the students appeared thoroughly engaged to the point that they scarcely seemed to notice adult visitors coming in and out of their classroom. Nor was a word of English heard.

Like most charter schools, Hebrew Language Academy relied heavily on philanthropic support at the start. Now in its seventh year, the school operates almost entirely on government funding, primarily the $13,877 per pupil it receives from the city under the state charter school law. Berman said that amounts to 70 percent to 80 percent of the per-pupil funding for nearby district schools.

Asked how she affords the extra staffing needed for Hebrew instruction, Berman answered: “I would flip it on its head and say that the district schools need to do the explaining as to what they’re doing with the money.”

Culture clash, not really

Her academies are not alone in harnessing the flexibility of charter schools to promote racial integration. The , founded in 2014, has dozens of members in 12 states and the District of Columbia. Rosenberg, the president of the Hebrew Charter School Center, is a founding member of the coalition’s board.

Another member, Century Foundation fellow Halley Potter, noted that the first proponent of charter schools — the United Federation of Teachers founding president, Albert Shanker — had meant for them to be teacher-run and draw students from across a region instead of a single district. “In that original idea, student diversity was built in,” she said.

Charter leaders later drifted from Shanker’s vision — leading him to repudiate the movement — but Potter said she welcomes the renewed focus on diversity.

“It has been an exciting year for school integration issues,” Potter said. “There has been so much more conversation over the last year than there has been for many years prior to that.”

Standing in the way of more progress for diversity-oriented charter schools, Rosenberg warned, is a state law mandating that charter enrollments closely match the economic makeup of their home school districts. That rule effectively bars charters based in poor districts from trying to bring in wealthier white families. Rosenberg said the law is well-meaning, but should be made more flexible.

The value of the dual-language approach used by Hebrew Language Academy and other culturally themed schools was confirmed by a recent study out of Portland, Ore. by RAND Corporation and the American Councils for International Study found that students randomly assigned to dual-language programs gained an extra nine months’ worth of reading ability by eighth grade.

Harder to quantify are the long-term benefits of learning and socializing with kids of different races and classes.

“What’s amazing to me is how little culture clash there is and how wonderfully normal and conflict-free the schools are,” Berman said. “It just gives you the greatest sense of optimism and hope that children really are color-blind and, if put into the right environment, are so excited to learn about each other’s culture and backgrounds.”

Berman recalled an African-American student at Hebrew Language Academy whose family home was destroyed in a fire.

“The city was going to provide housing so far away that the child was no longer going to be able to attend HLA,” she said. But then a white family from the school with access to an empty apartment offered it to the family who had lost theirs.

“As I tell this story years later, I have the chills,” Berman said. “Because those are relationships that wouldn’t have been built otherwise.”

Opinion: Student Praise for a Chicago High School Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Gabby Dixon — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

When you go to school, you should never feel like just another seat in the class. Everyone in the school should know you by name—not just the teachers, but the engineer and the lunch ladies, too. Having school choice helped me find a place where that could happen.

When my older sister was looking for a middle school, my mom found Perspectives Charter Schools at a school fair. After a visit to their Rodney D. Joslin campus, located just south of downtown, she was impressed with the programs, the graduation rates and the new building. She wanted to get us out of our South Side environment and expose us to something different.

Thanks to my sister’s experiences at Perspectives Joslin campus, we had some great reviews of the school when I was going into sixth grade. I joined her there and never looked back. There was a welcoming feel when I came in every day. In grammar school, my class had about 30 students, but at Perspectives there were about 20 students tops in class, with two teachers. Everybody could get help if they needed it.

Through field studies—where we worked in schools, homeless shelters and other environments—we did get out of our comfort zones, just as my mother hoped we would. I worked as an assistant teacher in the preschool program at South Loop Elementary, just across the street from Perspectives Joslin. We set up for lunch, read stories, and helped children with activities like building blocks. Even though I don’t really like little children, it was a good feeling to have someone looking up to me.

Though my sister chose elsewhere for high school, I stayed at Perspectives Joslin. Her high school had three floors—I just couldn’t imagine that for myself. I liked the more intimate setting at Joslin. The small size and personal relationships have definitely helped me grow. Even when I do bad things, somebody actually cares what I’m doing and helps me redirect.

Perspectives Charter Schools Rodney D. Joslin Campus

Here at Joslin, I’ve had the ability to create deep relationships with teachers and other school staff. Our school social worker has made a big, big impact on my life, not just in helping me deal with emotions. Academically, she helped me find which colleges would best suit me, and helped me find and apply for scholarships.

Right now I’m taking my first Advanced Placement class, AP Literature. We’re reading Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”. Sometimes I really have to sit down with my teacher to understand it—there’s so much going on in the text. What’s great is he told us it’s OK not to understand something right away. It’s OK to wrestle with a text. It’s OK to be vulnerable and open. That’s the best way you get to learn.

When I leave Perspectives for college, the main thing I will take away is our school’s principles for They’re not just principles posted on the wall. They’re the foundation of the school, and they give you ethics to live by. We’re required to pick an ADL principle to work on every quarter, and our parents are, too.

Right now I’m working on “taking initiative,” whether by asking more questions in class or stepping up to do the dishes at home. Plus, I can tell my mom, “You’re watching too much TV. Let’s put the remote down,” and remind her of her ADL principle: “use your time wisely.” And she can say the same to me.

I am a student ambassador here at Perspectives, which means I get opportunities to tell people about our school, whether they are visitors or potential new students. Earlier in high school, I got to lead school tours at an open house for new students. I enjoyed helping people get to know our school and think about what to do with the next four years of their lives.

School choice made it possible for me to attend Perspectives Charter Schools. I always recommend Perspectives to anyone entering middle or high school. I think it’s just a great school.

How a Newark Monastery Trains Young Men in School — and Life

Naomi Nix — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

(Newark, New Jersey) — That the students are the ones running the show at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School is evident from the moment the day begins.

During school-wide morning meetings, student leaders scan the crowded gym to make sure their younger peers are paying attention to the presentations. Teenagers are responsible for leading the school in daily Bible readings and presenting their own team and club announcements in front hundreds of students and teachers.

When no one from the freshman basketball team volunteers to report the results of their recent game, they are chided by school administrators.

“It’s important that you not ignore one another’s successes,” Father Edwin Leahy, a Benedictine monk and the school’s headmaster, told the group. “Announce the scores of your teams…Nobody is having the success that you are having.”

Here at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, the all-male student body isn’t just handed a prep school education, they are trained to take charge of it. The 7th-12th-grade school is sponsored by the Benedictine Abbey of Newark, a monastery that has embraced a big-hearted mission: to give young boys who may be excluded from opportunities because of poverty and race a rigorous education, emotional support and the leadership skills they need to thrive.

“I feel like people have your back,” Francis Jean-Paul, a 15-year-old freshman, said of the school. “It’s like a family.”

St. Benedict’s efforts were thrust into the national limelight in 2014 after the much-talked about release of “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.” The book chronicles the experience of a young man who graduated from the school and went onto to attend Yale University only to be become ensnared in Newark’s drug trade and killed.

But the school has been educating students in families with enough gumption to seek a top-notch private education but not enough money to pay for it for more than four decades. About 85 percent of the 530 students receives need-based financial aid for the $12,500-a-year tuition. Despite their financial circumstances, more than 95 percent of seniors head off to college after graduating, including a regular crop admitted to Ivy League schools.

St. Benedict's Preparatory School teacher Frantz Brillant works with students. (Photos courtesy St. Benedict's Prep)

St. Benedict’s began in 1868, initially to help educate an influx of German immigrants in Newark. Their early efforts at education were an outgrowth of their commitment to follow the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, a religious text that offers a vision of what a life of faith looks like for monks living communally.

By the late 1960s, the demographics of the city had changed after white Newarkers fled for New Jersey’s suburbs. In 1967, racial tensions erupted in days of rioting that left 26 people dead. Besides a brief one-year closing in the 1970s though, the school has staked — and held — its ground in Newark, a city that now has an up-and-coming downtown core but whose surrounding neighborhoods still suffer from crime and poverty.

Last school year, close to half of all St. Benedict’s students were African American while a third were Hispanic, 13 percent were white and 7 percent were an undefined race. Many students live in Essex County but some also hail from Union County and even foreign countries. While most students identify as Christian, if not necessarily Catholic, there are also Muslims and other religions represented among the student body, according to Leahy, the headmaster.

Regardless of their religion, the school tries to send the message to all students that they are welcome in this community and that God loves them.

“We don’t do it because they’re Catholic, we do it because we’re Catholic,” Leahy said.

The abbey where the monks sleep is connected to the school building, which means the school is always open—a phenomenon administrators compare to a “24-hour diner” style of education. In fact, about 65 students stay at the school at any given time either because they live too far away to commute every day or because of extreme circumstances in their life at home.

St. Benedict’s school year runs 195 to 200 days of the year—longer than many traditional public schools. Students start in July with a five-week semester and take an intensive core class such as math and another elective. The next two semesters students attend regular classes in a block schedule pattern. At the end of the year, they embark on an experiential learning project, which might include urban gardening, community service or cooking among other options.

Some older students also take freshmen students on a five-day hike through some 50 miles of the Appalachian Trail in the mountains of New Jersey as a class-bonding exercise.

Students at St. Benedict’s tackle many of the same academic subjects that other private school kids learn. During a recent visit, high school seniors debated in college seminar-style the Freudian influences in the classic tale of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Other students mustered up interest in the different types of tissue in an anatomy class while freshman learned about metaphors and foreshadowing in literature.

What is distinctive about St. Benedict’s is its culture, which holds student leadership and a sense of community in high esteem.

“They are responsible for the day-to-day operations. They run the place,” said Leahy. “Most schools run from the top down…It doesn’t work that way (here).”

That means that students form their own companies to clean up the classrooms, take out the trash and shovel the snow. They interview for jobs at the companies and organize themselves to get the work done. The pay for the teenagers is minimum wage, but the responsibility it instills in the students is priceless, administrators said.

The emphasis on leadership is also evident in its student government structure. The young men are separated into sections and self select leaders who are in charge of making sure students are doing what they are supposed to do. If a student, for instance, has been particularly rowdy or absent from morning meetings one of those leaders may recommend some sort of disciplinary action.

“We tell them what’s acceptable and not acceptable,” said Bruce Davis, 17, St. Benedict’s top senior leader. Davis, who aspires to be a doctor of physical therapy, said it took time to adjust from being a regular student who jokes with his classmates during class to the one in charge of the whole student body outside of it.

“I’ve got to switch (when) it’s time for business,” he said.

In recent years, the school has attracted notoriety in New Jersey and beyond. Its made USA Today’s ranking of top high school boys basketball teams in the country and regularly sends players to Division I colleges.

In 2014, two Newark filmmakers released a documentary on PBS and the film festival circuit called , which profiled the school’s success. The film also tackled the death of Peace, the St. Benedict’s alum who was killed after becoming involved in the drug trade. Peace, the imprisoned for murder, had reportedly earned the school’s top academic award when a business executive offered to cover all his college expenses at Yale. The film, and even more so, the book, was widely covered by outlets as the tragic ending to an extraordinary person’s life.

This exposure has prompted education leaders outside the state to seek advice from St. Benedict’s administrators. Leahy said the school is considering starting a resource center for other school leaders to learn how they can bring the St. Benedict’s model to their communities.

The national attention being paid to St. Benedict’s has not eliminated its financial problems. The school has a $10 million annual budget but on average only receives half of what it charges in tuition. The school attempts to make up the difference with donations from city foundations, companies and alumni but it still has about $25 million in debt and only $19 million in its endowment, according to Leahy.

For now, St. Benedict’s is focused on developing the minds and hearts of its students. During that recent school-wide morning meeting, assistant headmaster Michael Scanlan used Jesus’ example to implore students to help other people even when it’s difficult or a way out tempts them.

“It’s easy to hide behind the rules,” he said.

‘The Kids Come First’: A Day with D.C.’s Principal of the Year

Carolyn Phenicie — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

(Washington, D.C.) — It’s 3:15 on a chilly Thursday afternoon in January, dismissal time at Seaton Elementary in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood. Students, parents and teachers are swarming in the school’s lobby as one little girl, a preschooler, spots her grandmother through the crowd, and shouts, “Another great day!”

Principal Kim Jackson, the person responsible for bringing those great days to the 320 students in the pre-K-5 school, moves throughout the commotion, zipping backpacks and giving pats on the back and chatting with a pair of boys about the relative difficulty of solving the four-colors-per-side Rubik’s cube vs. the nine-color.

Throughout it all, Jackson carries a Post-It note and marker so she can write down all the questions and concerns the school’s parents and students raise as they head out the door.

On this day, it includes helping a father get a replacement for his child’s city transit card and investigating whether there’s room in the afterschool program for a student who recently returned to Seaton.

Jackson, beloved by parents, teachers, students and her superiors, was surprised this fall when Chancellor Kaya Henderson showed up at her building to present her with the district’s principal of the year award — and made Jackson call her mother so Henderson could share the good news. She and the other honorees — the teacher and staff member of the year, plus the winners of nine other awards — will be honored with a gala at the Kennedy Center on Monday hosted by “Project Runway’s” Tim Gunn.

“She really stands in a league of her own,” said Althea Smith, a reading intervention teacher who has taught under five different principals during her 30 years at Seaton.

DC Principal of the Year Kim Jackson talks with some of her students at Seaton Elementary school. (Photos courtesy DCPS)

Aileen Murphy, a superintendent in the D.C. Public Schools and Jackson’s supervisor, said Jackson is “the consummate professional and principal.” Jackson often shares credit for the school’s success with her staff, Murphy said, but she is the school leader driving that success.

“Sometimes people like that are overlooked, and she should never be overlooked,” Murphy said. “She really is a talent.”

Jackson came to Seaton in 2012. The Washington-area native, who holds degrees from Morgan State University and Coppin State College, worked as a special education teacher and school administrator in Baltimore and Illinois. She took the top job at Seaton having been principal at Moorestown Upper Elementary, a school that served about 900 fourth- through sixth-graders in New Jersey.

Jackson has a diverse group of students now under her. The Seaton student body is about 41 percent Hispanic, 35 percent African American, 17 percent Asian and 5 percent white. All papers are sent home in English, Spanish and Mandarin, and the students and staff represent 43 countries. More than 90 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch, a measure of poverty.

“It is my expectation, I should say, that the kids here at Seaton School have the same high quality education as every other student in the District [of Columbia], and whatever we have to do to make that happen for them, that’s what we’re going to do,” Jackson said. “I feel compelled and responsible for them, and like I have to make certain that it happens for them. This is an elementary school, so we are really laying the foundation. We have to do it right.”

Jackson’s day starts early. She usually arrives at the school from her home in Maryland between 6:45 and 7:15. She’ll check in with the school’s custodians or hold meetings with staff, but makes it a point to greet students — she calls them friends — either when they arrive at 8:15 for breakfast or at 8:45 when they head off to their classrooms to begin the school day.

It’s that focus on students above all else that has resonated with parents.

“She won the principal of the year for a reason, and that reason is she cares about the students like they’re her own kids,” said Christina Jackson Thomas, whose daughter, Madison Butler, is in first grade. “She makes this school feel like it’s a home and not just a school. You’re not just coming here to learn.”

Seaton Elementary School Principal Kim Jackson hugs DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson as she's surprised with the D.C. Principal of the Year award in December 2015. Dakiya Boone, school safety officer; Gloria Daisy Torrento-Del Cid, administrative aide; and Lisa Kirkpatrick, after school coordinator, watched the presentation.

Washington offers every student a choice of automatic enrollment in their in-boundary school, or entering a lottery system for the rest of the city’s schools: more than 111 traditional schools, including six selective high schools, and 114 charters. About 45 percent of Seaton’s students live within the school’s boundaries, which encompass parts of the Shaw, Truxton Circle and Logan Circle neighborhoods in a rapidly gentrifying part of the Northwest quadrant. The rest come from elsewhere in the city and often continue attending even as their families move farther away. Enrollment is growing, too. There were about 260 students when Jackson started in 2012, about 50 fewer than this year.

With a school this bustling and diverse, there are only a few constants in Jackson’s day after she greets students in the morning. They all revolve around spending time with the students.

The first part of the routine is her daily lap around the school with Assistant Principal Suzie Jacobs. They try to check in on every teacher at least once a week and offer feedback so their comments don’t come as a surprise during formal evaluations, Jackson said.

This day, they start in a pre-K art class, where one student shouts Jackson’s name and holds up a koala bear made from paper plates for her approval. She smiles and exits the room without fanfare to continue her rounds.

After art, Jackson and Jacobs are off to a fifth-grade math class. She moves quickly but quietly through the school’s bright yellow hallways, scaling the stairs between the building’s three floors with a practiced ease despite her heels. Here students are learning to multiply fractions. Jackson watches for a few minutes as the teacher wraps his lesson and students split into groups, some working on computers, some gathering with the teacher for more assistance and the final group starting on work sheets. She jumps in with the last group, asking them about the blue cards with yellow transparent overlays showing how a whole is split into parts.

Next up is a third-grade class, where students are reading fiction and working on using examples to prove a point. At the sound of kids playing outside, Jackson peeks her head out the window to check on the commotion.

On their way to their next destination, a kindergarten class where students listen to a story about the rainforest, a little boy stops on the way back from the restroom and says hello. Jackson and Jacobs greet him by name, and don’t mention the sticker of a ghost on his forehead — upside down.

The last stop of the morning is a fourth-grade health class, where students are making anti-smoking posters.

Throughout it all, Jackson exudes positivity, the key characteristic of her leadership style at Seaton.

“I think that any and everything is possible for kids,” she said. “I just think that you just get so much more out of people and so much more for children, if you’re positive. I just don’t see another way.”

For some students, especially really young ones, the principal can be a foreboding figure. Not Jackson, though.

“My favorite thing about Principal Jackson is she’s so nice,” said Shai Walker, a third-grader. “If my friends need help or I need help, I always go to her.”

Junior Trujillo, a fifth-grader, says she treats the students well. “She respects me like how I respect her,” he said. “She always makes me proud.”

The adults in the building respond to it, too.

“It’s like a magnet. When someone has that much positive energy, you have no option but to be a positive person and just do as they do,” said Terrence Chavis, the health and gym teacher at Seaton for the last 11 years.

Seaton, in pursuit of a healthy schools award, gives every student 30 minutes of phys ed a day. That means Chavis has 10, half-hour gym classes every day.

“It is absolutely exhausting, but she walks by and you just look at her face and she’s smiling, and you just push on and you know that the kids are benefitting 100 percent from it. It just makes my job that much more meaningful,” he said.

After the daily morning walk-through, Jackson’s next constant is a turn at either lunch or recess duty, a job some educators dread. Jackson does it every day.

“When she first got here three years ago, she did recess duty and I could not believe it. As long as I’ve been here, I’ve never seen a principal ever do recess duty. I’m talking about every day,” said Smith, the 30-year Seaton veteran.

The other totally non-negotiable part of her day is her 1 p.m. reading interventions class with a handful of fourth-graders.

“No matter what, I don’t miss my group,” she said. “That is absolutely, like, sacred time.”

She’ll also do another lap of the school at some point during the afternoon.

On this particular Thursday, she peeks through the door at the preschoolers, who are supposed to be napping. (A handful are rolling around on the floor dramatically instead.)

Then she stops in to help a second-grade teacher talk out some issues with supplies and how she’ll organize her bulletin boards before sticking her head in the teacher’s lounge to check on the new staff member who’s in charge of the school’s garden.

Faculty said they appreciate that Jackson doesn’t give them unnecessary assignments or intervene when it isn’t helpful.

“She wants you to do your job and she wants you to do it well, and if you’re doing your job well, you’re fine. You don’t feel like you’re forgotten about, but she’s not in your classroom micromanaging,” said first-grade teacher Jenelle Diljohn. “Everything that we’re doing is productive.”

When she’s not doing one of her few daily constants, she handles paperwork and meetings for the school’s special education students (she’s the special education coordinator, too), troubleshoots problems or visits with parents and teachers.

On the day of The Seventy Four’s visit, she files some special education paperwork, then consults with the teacher of one of the classes for autistic children (the school added a third this year) about a student who got a bloody lip after some dental surgery.

She’s just sitting down to write her thank yous for the principal of the year award when a student runs into her office and breathlessly tells her that one student has hit another in a class being minded by a substitute.

Jackson springs into action — the incident is a “really big deal” at the school, which usually doesn’t have discipline problems, she says. She takes each child separately into a conference room to talk about the event, and she’ll call the parents of both later.

The unpleasantness handled, she checks in on the fourth-graders, who have just returned from a field trip to one of the city’s art museums.

At 3:10 sharp, the close of “another great day” at Seaton school and time for the end-of-day announcements. Jackson commends the five classes that had perfect attendance that day and reminds the children that it’s her expectation that they attend school on time, every day, in uniform — navy skirts or pants and a white collared shirt or T-shirt with the school’s logo, a bee reading a book.

She’ll have more meetings in the afternoon before she leaves, usually sometime between 5 and 6 in the evening. Jackson has three daughters — Morgan, who graduated from Howard University, whose campus is not far from Seaton; Taylor, a senior at Villanova University; and Macie, a middle schooler in Maryland.

Jackson knows she could be using some of her time during the day dealing with paperwork, evaluations and other more traditional-type principal duties, instead of spending so much time with the kids. She doesn’t think that time is wasted, though.

“Am I being absolutely efficient? I think so, because the kids come first.”

A Principal (and Former Union Insider) Reflects on 25 Years of NYC’s ‘Exhausting’ Charter Wars

Mareesa Nicosia — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

Amidst the endless charter-union debate, Stacey Gauthier is the rarest of New York City principals — a school leader who can relate to both sides of the argument.

Gauthier once worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, learning the ins and outs of organized labor, before later making the move to a traditional public school that would become one of the first in the city to convert to a charter. Today, she serves as the principal of one of New York’s few unionized charters: Renaissance Charter School, a pre-K-12 independent conversion school in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Through the decades, she’s seen it all.

Gauthier joined Renaissance as its director of operations shortly after the school’s founding in 1994, and helped to write the school’s initial charter application, which was issued in 2000. She now also serves on the of the New York City Coalition of Community Charter Schools.

Gauthier sat down with The 74 a few weeks ago to reflect on the history of one of the city’s oldest charter schools and her unique perspective of the turbulent city-charter school relationship.

The 74: Tell me the Renaissance Charter School origin story.

Gauthier: In 1992, our founding teachers were all working in public schools. They were a little disillusioned with what was going on, didn’t feel that teachers had enough voice in how schools were run, didn’t feel that kids were actually happy being in school. I think they felt that the learning was a bit limited and not as holistic as they would like, and at the same time the Annenberg Foundation put out an grant to create new models for schools and the teachers decided to submit one. They met frequently after school on their own time to submit this application … They were awarded the school and they opened up in 1993, initially with grades 3-7. It soon expanded to K-12 and started a preschool last school year. It converted to charter status in May 2000, becoming one of the first few independent charter schools in the city. We were one of the first schools I think that also shared space (with Junior High School 204 in Long Island City), which always makes me laugh a little bit given the climate now about sharing space. (Mayor Bill de Blasio has fought very publicly with various charter school networks over occupying space in existing public schools.)

I got involved in the school about a year later, about 1994, when Monte Joffee, who was the school’s founding principal, was kind of going around Jackson Heights drumming up interested parents. And for me, I was an interested parent; I had a 3-year-old and I wanted to get a more progressive education for him. I was working then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as director of education services and interested in having a school that seemed to have a family-like atmosphere, somewhere where I could be really involved and Monte sold me on the model and the mission and the vision.

At the same time we were forming this group called Friends of the Renaissance School to get people interested and excited and also to get the school a permanent home because we knew we were going to quickly grow out of being in 204 and wanted to move it to Jackson Heights. (Eventually we took over a former department store in the neighborhood on 81st Street; we’ve leased the space from the Department of Education for more than 15 years now.)

Back in the mid-90s, myself and several others really became passionate about (growing the school), and not all of us had kids; some were passionate neighborhood activists. We did have some opposition too, initially, because there were people who were not interested in having a high school come into their neighborhood.

Unlike some charter schools, Renaissance backfills every grade when a seat opens up, and enrollment is steady at 550. How else is the school unique, and what does it mean to “Renaissance-ize” incoming students?

When kids sometimes come from more traditional schools, our building can be a bit of a shock. We’re a noisy place. We’re a place where we really want to see kids actively involved in things. Not all schools are like that. We’re also a place where you take arts from the very lowest grades, and students in our upper grades major in an art.

We like to think of ourselves as a village, so we know our kids really well. Many of our families send multiple kids here. … But now since we’ve been around so long, we actually have kids of our former students in the school, as well as a member of the first graduating class of 1999 . So it is like a village, it’s a different way of thinking. We want our kids also to be independent learners and independent thinkers. Our kids call staff by their first names. So “Renaissance-izing” kind of means getting them to understand how you operate in an environment like that, which can be a little shocking for some kids … Especially if they’ve been somewhere that’s tighter — it’s like, ‘Whoa, all this freedom,’ and so how do you manage that freedom?

The New York City was just as Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014. Your school is a member and you serve on the board. You and others in the coalition visited City Hall several times to talk with the administration about more funding for independent charters, among other concerns. What was that like, and has that relationship been fruitful?

It was frustrating because several of us spent a lot of time meeting and really trying to talk about the charter movement in a different way. … I think that when de Blasio came in, he and the chancellor to some degree, painted all charter schools with a broad brush. And I think several of us came in (to City Hall) saying, ‘There’s many faces of this charter movement, and also several of your critiques of the charter movement may not be accurate.’ Renaissance, for example, does not “counsel out” poor-performing or unruly students and is committed to backfilling each open seat, no matter what grade level it is in. You can audit our records and you’ll see that. … Part of the conversation that we had was, if you really want to weed out the bad apples, don’t just look at charters, look across the board.

(The regular meetings between the coalition and the administration did have some tangible results, although the collaboration eventually dissolved. Charters, including Renaissance, were able to access grant money for middle schools and they were included in the mayor’s pre-K initiative. Gauthier says she was assured that children entering her school’s pre-k could move directly into kindergarten without going through the lottery.)

How has the climate for charter schools — and in particular, independent charters — in New York City changed since Renaissance’s early days?

We’re holding onto our purpose but I think the movement has changed and I think the problem that you have for schools like Renaissance and other smaller schools is it’s not necessarily a climate that’s encouraging these small innovative labs. It’s encouraging replications of what they say are successful models. And I don’t want to say it’s a bad thing … but I think it’s kind of sad that authorizers seem to be approving more of the networks and that (if) somebody has a really good, independent idea, they probably have a harder time (getting approved as a smaller school).

For Renaissance, we still have some friends in City Hall. The friends we have I think really do like us and have tried to help us when they can. But my overall assessment is that this administration really doesn’t care for charters. I think they’re trying to compensate for what they felt was an administration that was too charter-friendly and maybe abandoned the public school system to some degree and (tried) to give charters everything, in their mind.

You worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union right out of college, so you’ve had an insider’s perspective on organized labor. Renaissance is also one of only about 20 unionized charter schools in the city. Yet you’ve tangled with the United Federation of Teachers over contracts (as a conversion charter school, you don’t negotiate directly with the union; the Department of Education does on your behalf). And you’ve expressed frustration that the UFT has not embraced charters. Can independent charters and unions keep up a long-term relationship?

It may not be possible for unions to represent members in both (district and charter) schools because there’s this big political war going on, which to me is silly and unnecessary, and it’s exhausting, and I’ve been around with this for 15 years, watching this battle. It’s “us against them,” it’s charters against the public schools and who can have what and “you’re stealing money.” There’s no money being stolen — the money follows the kids. We should have equitable funding in both schools.

This winter and spring I think you’ll see that being a big part of the Coalition of Community Charter Schools’ efforts in Albany.

A Catholic School Comeback in New York City — Just Don’t Call it That

Mareesa Nicosia — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Corrected Jan. 26

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

(Bronx, New York) — Marianne Kraft moves through the hallways of the St. Athanasius school with an easy vigor, even after an hour climbing up and down the stairs. On a cold January morning, the 71-year-old principal is excited to usher a visitor from one bright, orderly classroom to another, each filled with attentive students.

A second-grade class — girls in plaid jumpers, boys in slacks with shirts neatly tucked in — are studying the War of 1812. Down the hall, sixth-graders are immersed in adding and subtracting fractions. Kraft beckons through the door to a modest auditorium, where students gather to start each day with a “power hour” of stories, songs or teacher shout-outs to do-gooder students.

The library, which houses some 8,000 volumes, is a particular point of pride for Kraft, as are the colorful bulletin board displays lining the walls.

St. Athanasius, located in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, has about 291 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The school looked and felt like a different place a few years ago. With enrollment and financial support plummeting, Catholic schools were closing throughout the city and the state.

Principal Marianne Kraft poses with students at the St. Athanasius school in the Bronx, one of the six Catholic schools in New York City run by the Partnership for Inner-City Education. (Photo courtesy Leila Sutton)

Kraft, a former nun who had seen the school through the worst days of crippling student poverty, drugs and street gangs — its location on Southern Boulevard put it at the epicenter of the borough’s 1970s’ arson epidemic — was sure that hers would be next to close. She didn’t know what to tell the families of her 300 pupils.

“We were in survival mode,” Kraft says. “I knew we were going to have to be closed. There was no way. How can you continue to operate when you can’t pay the teachers?”

Instead, St. Athanasius and five other struggling Catholic schools were thrown a lifeline. In 2013, they became part of a school turnaround project created through an agreement between the New York Archdiocese and an independent nonprofit group.

The , as the network is called, runs six schools throughout the Bronx and Harlem: Immaculate Conception, Mt. Carmel-Holy Rosary, Our Lady Queen of Angels, Sacred Heart, St. Mark the Evangelist and St. Athanasius.

A superintendent and Board of Directors oversees finances, academics and building operations under an 11-year contract while the Archdiocese continues to own and govern the schools. Since it entered the schools three years ago, the Partnership has invested $10 million in student scholarships, building renovations, a math and English curriculum overhaul and staff training.

The mood these days when Kraft walks through the halls, poking her head into classrooms, is noticeably more positive.

She didn’t do much of the daily checking in on students and teachers before the Partnership came in and hired operations managers for each school. She was too crazed making sure the boiler got fixed and payroll was set, not to mention scrounging together fundraising dollars.

“I’m more involved in the teaching and learning and it’s so wonderful,” she said. “That’s the exciting part.”

This shift hasn’t taken place without some serious growing pains.

The teachers, who are unionized, were wary that the Partnership was there to transform them into a charter school. Some worried that the qualities that make urban Catholic schools safe havens for so many poor, immigrant children — the high value placed on service, humility and building good character, for example — would be squeezed out in favor of academic perfection.

There were also questions from staff and parents about what the network was and how it would look.

Though the Partnership shares some features with Catholic school turnaround projects in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia, it was the first of those efforts to actually get up and running. Its operational independence from the Archdiocese also makes it different, officials said.

“As a person who knew financially this would be good, I was happy. Skeptical just because … it was an unclear model. It was hard to say it’s going to look like that, or that,” said Francine Rogers, a fifth-grade teacher who has spent most of her career at St. Athanasius.

And certainly, concepts borrowed from the charter model, such as data tracking and interim student assessments, were among the first initiatives Superintendent and Chief Academic Officer Kathleen Porter-Magee introduced when she joined in August 2014.

At the same time, Partnership leaders said one of the major realizations they had when they started meeting with staff was that preserving and championing the schools’ Catholic identity had to be held sacred — or it was not going to work.

Porter-Magee said her experience in the charter sector, at Achievement First in New York City, and in Catholic schools, which she attended and later taught in, both influence the vision for the Partnership.

“We are drawing lessons from (charters) but we are not becoming them,” she said.

Porter-Magee and other network leaders view the Partnership as contributing to a burgeoning renaissance in urban Catholic schools after decades of decline.

Two-and-a-half school years in, there are signs of progress throughout the network, and lots of room left to grow, officials say. The 2,100 students made year-over-year gains on New York state ELA and math tests in 2014-15, the year the new curriculum was introduced. They also outperformed the surrounding public schools in their respective neighborhoods.

Compared to the average proficiency scores for all city public schools, Partnership students performed a few points below for ELA and math. Their 2014-15 scores were on par with charter schools like KIPP and Achievement First, according to data provided by the network.

Teachers who may have once cringed at how poorly their students performed on a test, then stuffed it in a drawer and never looked back, are now proudly reporting incremental gains from the weekly quiz to their supervisors, said Jessica Madio, 27, a sixth-grade math teacher and academic dean. Having the same Common Core-aligned curriculum in all schools and the resources to help teachers use it correctly makes a big difference, she said.

“Our professional development meetings used to be, for lack of a better word, useless,” Madio said. “And now when you go to a professional development meeting as a teacher, you walk out with something to do on Monday and that just changes the game. You’re just growing every day.”

The staff’s enthusiastic buy-in after the initial skepticism faded has been instrumental to the network’s success getting off the ground, Porter-Magee said.

Parents are also pleased.

Jose Montanez, a 1985 graduate of St. Athanasius, said he and his wife decided to send their son Bradley to the school starting with pre-kindergarten, despite the long commute from their home in the north Bronx. He's in second-grade now. They like the tight-knit feeling and the high standards for discipline, personal conduct and academics, as well as the arts and music programs, Montanez said.

Montanez, who volunteers on the parent association, said he knows the Partnership’s funding infusion has an expiration date. But he believes the recent progress should help the school remain viable in the future. Besides, it’s already survived the toughest years, he said.

“We know we have something good going there,” he said. “You just feel this vibe that we know it’s going to carry us through. I think our feeling is that as long as we continue producing great (academic) results … we think that’s what’s going to make a difference for us. So when it comes time that funding is lost or something like that happens, I think some other door is going to open up just based on that and we’re going to be able to continue.”

Faith in the future of Catholic education got a huge boost last fall, when Pope Francis made his debut in New York. By coincidence, or divine intervention, he decided to visit one of the Partnership schools, Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem.

Figuring out how to define the Partnership’s intentions in the context of the charter-inspired elements — while keeping the schools’ Catholic identity front and center — has been a bit of a public relations minefield at times.

But Porter-Magee and her staff seem to have found a lighthearted way to make that distinction, at least when it comes to branding.

On social media, the staff has playfully appropriated the LL Cool J-inspired meme #DontCallItAComeback, which references the song “Mama Said Knock You Out.”

“Don’t call it a comeback/we’ve been here for years …” — a slightly modified version of the song’s opening lyrics — is emblazoned on sweatshirts the staff took home from a recent professional development retreat. Each Partnership school’s inaugural year — the oldest, Immaculate Conception, opened in 1854 — is listed in bold.

“The idea is that we believe that there has been real rich, interesting and important work happening in urban Catholic schools for generations and we are excited to be part of a renaissance but we also want to honor the tradition and commitment that our schools have shown to their communities for years,” Porter-Magee said.

She laughed.

“But mostly we were just having fun with an LL Cool J reference.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Partnership has spent $200 million on the schools since their opening three years ago. While the organizations that formed the Partnership have invested $200 million in a wide array of projects, the amount of money specifically allocated to the network of schools is $10 million.

Opinion: Whitmire: The Secret to Building the Next Gen High School? Forget All Your Middle School Successes

Richard Whitmire — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Seventy Four marks School Choice Week (Jan. 24-30) with a series of stories celebrating educational options and innovation. Read our coverage here.

(Cumberland, Rhode Island) — Watching a 15-year-old fiddle with his laptop in this out-of-the-way parish school converted into a charter school seems like an odd place to catch a glimpse of education’s future.

But that’s what Ray Varone is revealing as he fires up his Chromebook to demonstrate.

A lot went into this auspicious moment.

You start with the school, Blackstone Valley Prep, already a standout for of middle-class and poor students. Then you stir in a sizable grant from (think Gates Foundation) to experiment with ways to rethink high school.

Finally, and I suspect this may be the most important development, you wrap it all together with software, a learning tool just released by perhaps the most innovative charter group in the country, California’s Summit Public Schools. Their ideas were given wings with a team of top code writers donated by Facebook. Only a few schools got chosen as early adopters, including Blackstone.

And so it all comes together with Ray, who is proudly skimming through the Basecamp program. And as anyone who has watched any teenager demonstrate software knows, your first reaction is to say: “Wait, slow down! Show me that again!”

Glimpsing the Next Gen high school

Blackstone’s charter high school is at the pointy edge of the search for the the high school that will point us toward the future:

In theory, the search shouldn’t be that hard. For the past several years, some of the country’s and have joined hands with the to solve one of America’s most remedy-resistant problems: High school is boring.

I know, I know…you knew that already. From first-hand experience. Only things have gotten worse.

If you look at test scores, school improvement efforts turn up in elementary and middle schools, but not high school. High school is the place where kids drop out, especially 9th grade just as students get their first taste of it. High school is where they get diplomas that too often prove worthless when they try to take college placement tests. .

Sure, there are private schools and wealthy suburban schools where the quest for getting into top colleges is so intense that some , under the pressure. Trust me: They are the exceptions.

For most high schoolers, the problem lies on the opposite side of the intensity scale. , who now make up half the nation’s school population, either don’t make it to college, get quickly disqualified from taking for-credit classes or drop out mid-way through.

So what do all these genius high-tech school reformers have in mind? There are a few places around the country where you can get a glimpse. I visited two charter schools: Achievement First’s “” school in New Haven, Connecticut and in Cumberland, Rhode Island.

Charter schools aren’t the only schools getting retooled for the future. I chose charters to profile for several reasons. The first research pinpointing key problems — and suggesting possible solutions — came from a charter, KIPP, whose leaders were disappointed with the data revealed in a done several years ago. Students they thought were well equipped for college work dropped out at higher rates than expected.

Put simply, culture-intense charter schools that dramatically bumped up K-12 learning discovered that once their students sailed past the gravity field of that intense classroom culture they found themselves ill equipped to survive on their own.

In short, they lacked “grit.”

That research led to a lot of dramatic changes at charters, with KIPP . What was needed, the charters concluded, was a full speed shift to personalized learning, building the sticky, gritty independent learning skills that would propel them through an often-lonely college journey. The term of art: self-directed learning.

Also, charter schools seem most capable of making the quick technology shifts needed for this personalized learning. That’s why I chose Rocketship charter schools for my last book: Rocketship was known for pushing online learning to immerse students in personalized learning. If this new form of high school is going to get discovered, I’m betting that charters will create the first rough cut.

So what does this new learning style look like?

Banishing boredom with Basecamp

Not surprisingly, the “Basecamp” software Ray Varone is using arose out of Silicon Valley. There, Summit charter schools, already pushing the edges of personalized learning, caught the attention of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he visited in 2013. Zuckerberg lent Summit a team of code writers, and thus was born Basecamp, a “Personalized Learning Plan” (PLP) for all subjects, grades 6-12.

The package comes loaded with about 200 “deeper learning” projects as well as 700 Playlists, such as videos and articles. Basecamp is also adjustable, so schools can add and subtract what they think is important. Blackstone did a lot of that, especially with math. For this school year, 19 schools got chosen as early adapters, including Blackstone.

Everything seems like a blur as Varone cycles through his subjects, showing all his projects — those in red are still due; those in blue completed.

The Basecamp software turns learning upside down. Actual learning time is up to the student, to do at designated times within school, or at home. Classroom time is more for projects, group collaborations and advice from the teacher on how to manage the PLP.

The heart of the software, everyone agrees, is the steady, vertical “pacer line” that cuts through all the projects. That shows students where they stand on each assignment and whether they are ahead or behind.

Pointing to the pacer line in subject, Varone proudly points out where he was far ahead in completing work. “We’re getting used to doing this on our own, so we’ll be reading in college. In college you’re not going to have teachers there asking you questions all the time, so you have to learn by yourself.”

I agree: His answer sounds canned. But there was nothing canned about what he was demonstrating on the Basecamp software: This was self-directed learning, the holy grail of any next generation re-invention of high school.

‘Un-teaching’ middle school

Blackstone Executive Director Jeremy Chiappetta tells the story of visiting a KIPP school in Houston and coming away impressed by the tight instruction, the perfect discipline, the 100 percent focus of each student in every class. As he was complimenting them, the answer he remembers hearing: “We’re opening our high school in a year, and for these kids to be successful in college we’re going to have to un-teach everything that has made this middle school successful.”

That’s how far ahead KIPP was in this game. Not only did KIPP leaders suspect they might see lower-than-hoped-for college persistence rates among their graduates (this was before the official research), they had settled on a probable cause: their airtight classroom culture. None of that exists in a huge college lecture hall.

So when Chiappetta and others set out to design a high school for rising Blackstone students, they drew on KIPP’s lessons-learned. “We knew our middle school model, while a great foundation of academic skills and discipline and focus and habits, would not be the driving foundation for our high school.”

Blackstone’s search for a new model drew a $450,000 grant from Next Generation Learning Challenges, followed by the decision to apply for early adapter participation in Basecamp. That status triggered liberal supports from Summit, including Blackstone staffers traveling to Summit for training, and Summit providing a former teacher for personal assists.

All that, in turn, led to Ray Varone sifting through his PLP, coming away satisfied that he was on top of things and ready for college work. And it didn’t seem to be boring him at all.

Engineering a complete do-over

When it comes to charter schools, Achievement First’s Dacia Toll qualifies as an early adapter of a network of charter schools. She was a law student at Yale, thinking hard about social justice, when she concluded it all starts “downstream,” in school. So while still in law school, she started pursuing teaching credentials, carrying out her student teaching at New Haven’s Fair Haven Middle School.

There she found seventh- and eighth-graders who were near illiterate. Told to carry out a lesson around the book “Johnny Tremain,” Toll found the task impossible. How can you teach lessons from a book the kids can’t read? The answer from her mentor teacher: Well then, show them the movie.

That attitude about poor kids, that an adequate education was impossible, prompted her to create the Achievement First network of schools, starting with New Haven’s landmark Amistad Academy. Today, Achievement First operates 30 successful schools in Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island.

So, it should surprise no one that Toll has once again become an early adapter of the need to reinvent a charter model that was already working pretty well for poor kids. As with the leaders of other top charters, she realized that boosting academic achievement in K-12 wasn’t sufficient to carry poor students through college. That required a new school.

Asked Toll: What would such a school look like if you started with a greenfield? A complete do-over. Answering that question took Toll and her team on an unusual journey. Essentially, she set up a skunkworks operation — independent research that operated separate from her other schools — and hired outside school design experts to do the work.

That work began with a limitless “blue sky” phase led by IDEO, the international design firm founded in Silicon Valley (think Apple’s first mouse). Overseeing all the design work was Aylon Samouha, someone I first met when he was chief of schools for Rocketship charters. Samouha, a former senior vice president for Teach for America (where he came across Rocketship) teamed up with Jeff Wetzler, who in the beginning of the project straddled his innovation work with Teach for America to join the greenfield experiment.

The team visited some of the best charter groups in the country and pulled something from each:

— From Summit came an emphasis on a personalized learning plan that always focuses on learning content. “In order to do project-based learning, the kind of stuff that Summit is doing, you need to actually have information in your working memory,” said Samouha. “You can’t just have the skill of being able to synthesize.”

— From BASIS, the team absorbed more lessons about the need to master actual content. “There’s probably no other place I‘ve visited that has such a commitment to content,” said Samouha. “Studies suggest that if you know something about baseball you can read a text about baseball that’s two years ahead of your reading level.”

— From California’s High Tech High they took away lessons on how to do project-based learning. “Their culture is very student-driven. They are in charge of the learning in a way that you really rarely find. We took some inspiration from that.”

— From a Montessori school in Austin, they absorbed lessons about playing the long game. “They were building the executive function of kids by allowing them to make their own choices.”

— From the Brooke charters in Boston, they drew lessons about instilling a love of reading among the students. Also from Brooke, some lessons about the limits of blended learning. Brooke, perhaps the most successful charter group in the country, shuns online learning.

— From Rocketship, they drew lessons about parent involvement — and the promise of blended learning.

— From KIPP founder Dave Levin, they borrowed lessons on how to build character, the “grit” that will see students through. “We continue to partner with the ,” said Samouha.

All that came together at the new Greenfield school, formally known as Elm City College Prep in New Haven. Most of the middle-schoolers here came from a traditional Achievement First elementary school, which falls more into the “no excuses” charter mold.

I visited Elm City soon after it opened. What stuck me was the special challenge of applying the self-directed learning model to middle school students. At Blackstone, the self-directed model seemed a natural fit, with more mature students welcoming the independence. Here, school leaders had a different challenge: building in the “scaffolding” — eduspeak for support systems — to help less-mature students slide into an unfamiliar role.

The greenfield model appears to be on the way to working, but with a lot of tweaks, as in: lots more scaffolding. “We can give kids a lot more freedom, but the fact is these are 10- and 11-year-olds who have been their whole lives basically responding to whatever someone told them to do. They haven’t been living in a personalized environment where they have autonomy and agency,” said Samouha.

But it seemed to be gelling. Comparing last year to this year, fifth-grader Kiefer Valenzuela said it’s more demanding. “You have to concentrate so you don’t get distracted, but I like SDL (self-directed learning). I enjoy using technology to work, rather than writing on a piece of paper.”

My prediction: In the near future what you can see today at Blackstone and the Greenfield project is what you will see in nearly all schools.

Emerson fellow Richard Whitmire is the author of several education books.