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Yet we often fail to celebrate some of the most important leaders in the charter school movement. These are the men and women who volunteer their time to serve on charter school boards.

Just like an elected district school board, charter school boards make important decisions about how their schools operate. They decide who will run the school, and they lay out the vision and culture those leaders should support. They oversee the academic and financial health of the school. When problems arise, board members must answer for them.

But charter schools typically have a nonprofit board structure. Unlike an elected district board, charter school board members are selected by existing board members. This proven governance method can make charter boards more collegial, more aligned around mission, and more likely to comprise the range of talent and expertise needed to run a quality school.

We both have experience in this role. One of us is a former charter school board member now serving as the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board (DC PCSB), Washington, D.C.’s charter school authorizer. And one of us is a former chief executive of schools in Chicago who now serves on two charter school boards in D.C.

We know firsthand that charter school boards have a major influence on their schools’ performance, and we were pleased to see this reflected in a from the Fordham Institute. The report analyzes the results of surveys completed by 325 school board members in D.C., representing 94 percent of the city’s charter schools. The responses were then compared to measures of school quality, including the results of DC PCSB’s School Quality Ratings and school re-enrollment rates. The results shed light on how boards should approach their responsibilities.

The report highlights the extraordinary civic engagement unleashed by D.C.’s charter schools: 639 individuals, including 130 parents, serve on charter boards. On the whole they are highly educated, are racially diverse, and represent a broad range of talents. The report finds that most charter school board members in D.C. are focused on the twin goals of “ensuring students achieve strong academic outcomes” and “providing a safe and stable learning environment.” While emphasizing these goals may seem obvious, previous research on elected school boards (outside D.C.) showed much wider variation in what board members thought should be their top priority. On D.C.’s charter school boards, a focus on strong academic outcomes and safe learning environments produces good results.

The survey also shows that D.C. charter board members generally have a good working knowledge of their school’s academic and financial performance. The highest-rated schools have board members who demonstrate the most accurate knowledge of their school’s current academic and financial status.

High-performing schools also have a larger percentage of board members who have received training in strategic planning, budgeting, and legal and policy issues. And they tend to have boards that meet about once a month – frequently enough to establish good working relationships among board members and resolve problems, without getting too deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the school or overburdening board members who are volunteering their time.

Board members of top public charter schools are also more likely to consider staff satisfaction when assessing school leaders. As the report authors note, teacher quality has the biggest impact on student performance, so it makes sense for boards to ensure that their school leaders are doing their best to maintain a great working environment for great teachers.

Finally, the report finds that boards of high-performing schools are more likely to formally evaluate the school leader. In our experience, the relationship between the school leader and their board, especially with the board chair, is a critical factor in the success of a school. It is exceptionally rare to find a high-performing school without finding a strong, supportive, and honest relationship between the school leader and board chair.

Another crucial relationship is between school boards and their authorizer. As an authorizer and a current board member, each of whom has had diverse experiences in education, we tap into each other’s expertise often. Our visions are aligned around giving every student a quality education, yet we know that board members overseeing one school’s operations may have a different perspective than an authorizer ensuring accountability for a portfolio of dozens of public schools.

Proactive communication is important, particularly because formal opportunities for school boards to meet with their authorizer may come about only every few years. DC PCSB differentiates its oversight. All charter school boards get regular written reports on their school’s performance data. But schools that have excellent academic and financial ratings may go several years without a formal meeting with their authorizer, unless they are seeking to amend their charters. Thus the most effective boards ensure that regular communication occurs between more formal meetings.

Effective school board oversight and excellent relationships between school boards and their authorizer are two big reasons D.C.’s charter sector is thriving. As we celebrate National Charter Schools Week, the Fordham study reinforces that the strength of our movement and the success of our students depends on supporting charter school boards in their essential responsibilities.

Scott Pearson is the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board and board chair of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Jean-Claude Brizard is the board chair of Capital City PCS and a board member of Rocketship Rise Academy PCS.

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The finalists are DSST Public Schools of Denver, Colorado; Texas’s Harmony Public Schools; and Success Academy Charter Schools of New York City. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation funds the prize, which will be presented by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools on June 12 at the National Charter Schools Conference in Washington, D.C.

“The National Alliance is thrilled to honor DSST, Harmony, and Success as the country’s top large charter school networks. The best practices that these three school systems are implementing can be successful across public schools, charter or district,” Nina Rees, alliance president and CEO, said in a media release. “We hope that by shining a spotlight on the Broad Prize finalists, other schools can see what is possible for their students.”

The finalists were selected from among 39 candidates by a 10-person review board that included John King, president and CEO of The Education Trust and former education secretary under President Barack Obama; Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute; and Jane Hannaway, a Georgetown University professor and American Institutes of Research fellow.

This was the first year of eligibility for DSST, a network of 12 schools serving nearly 5,000 students, 69 percent of whom are low-income and 75 percent of whom are students of color. DSST runs four of the five top public high schools and five of the top eight public middle schools in the city, according to Denver’s 2016 School Performance Framework.

DSST CEO Bill Kurtz said it was a “great surprise” to be recognized as a finalist, adding that while college readiness is core to the network’s mission, school officials haven’t contemplated yet how they’d spend the prize money.

“To be singled out in this way is a great testament to our team, our students, and our families,” Kurtz said. “It’s great to be recognized in this way.”

Harmony, a system of 48 K-12 college-preparatory STEM schools, is a finalist for the first time.

The second-largest charter management organization in the country, serving 30,500 students, Harmony has a population that is 51 percent Hispanic, 19 percent African-American and 59 percent low-income. In 2015, Harmony Public Schools’ black, Latino, and low-income students graduated at higher percentages than the state average.

Winning the prize, Harmony CEO Soner Tarim told ����Ӱ��, would allow the network to better prepare its seniors for college. “First and foremost, there are so many kids who are not able to pay for their AP courses,” he said. “We want to distribute the money so those students are able to take those courses.”

Success Academy Charter Schools, the largest public charter school network in New York City, was a finalist last year as well. With 41 elementary, middle, and high schools serving 14,000 students, Success Academy has a population that is 76 percent low-income and 93 percent African-American or Hispanic. In 2016, all Success Academy elementary and middle schools were in the top 10 percent of schools in New York state for advanced academic performance in English, math, and science.

“This recognition is particularly meaningful because we are hiring hundreds of teachers and school staff — to open more schools and meet parent demand. Thus, more people will see Success as a force for change and innovation, and a great place to work,” spokeswoman Nicole Sizemore said in a statement.

Nonprofit charter school organizations eligible for the award, now in its fifth year, must operate at least five schools and enroll at least 2,500 students. A third of those students must be of color, and 40 percent must be eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The 2016 prize went to IDEA Public Schools of Texas.

In making its selections, the review board relied on an analysis by the American Institutes for Research, which considered student outcomes, college readiness indicators, and student demographics, among other factors.

Disclosure: The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and ����Ӱ�� receive funding from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, the William E. Simon Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. Campbell Brown, ����Ӱ��’s co-founder, sits on Success Academy’s board of directors.

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She was a law student at Yale, thinking hard about social justice, when she concluded that it all starts “downstream,” in school. So while still in law school, she started pursuing teaching credentials, carrying out her student teaching at Fair Haven Middle School in New Haven, Conn.

There she found seventh- and eighth-graders who were near-illiterate. Told to build 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.

Such attitudes about poor kids — that an adequate education was impossible and thus needn’t be sought — 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 adopter in reinventing 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 challenge required a new kind of 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 separately 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, an 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 personalized learning plans that always focus 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: real facts that get absorbed. “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.”

Students learning at Elm City College Prep, a Greenfield model middle school in New Haven, Conn.

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, as well as 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 Character Lab,” said Samouha, referring to the nonprofit that focuses on the practice of character development.

All that came together at the new Greenfield school, also 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 struck 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 for high schoolers, with more mature students welcoming the independence. Here, school leaders had a different challenge with middle schoolers: a need to build more “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 jelling.

Fifth-grader Kiefer Valenzuela found the revised approach 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.”

This is an excerpt from the new Richard Whitmire book The Founders: Inside the Revolution to Invent (and Reinvent) America’s Best Charter Schools. See more excerpts at ����Ӱ��; watch all the videos, download the book and explore the Founders Oral History at .

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Enroll Indy will launch a common enrollment system that will let families fill out a single form to apply to public schools around the city — traditional district schools, magnet schools and charter schools — rather than applying to individual schools with different deadlines. Parents can list up to 10 schools, ranked in order of preference, and a computer algorithm will match each student with one school, taking into account factors including geography and whether a sibling is already enrolled.

The idea for a unified enrollment system in the city, said Enroll Indy founder and executive director Caitlin Hannon, actually began with teachers. As executive director of Teach Plus Indianapolis in 2013, she heard concerned educators talk about a revolving door: Without a solid grasp on the number of students who would eventually fill classrooms in individual schools, the district often had to shift teachers between buildings to meet anticipated demand. The city’s booming charter school sector made for an even bigger challenge.

“This group of teachers said, ‘We need to do something better, and it sounds like a unified enrollment system would make this easier to predict staffing and planning numbers for school districts,’ ” Hannon said.

At the same time, she said, families were overwhelmed by dozens of applications on dozens of different timelines. Even affluent parents struggled to navigate the options, and the challenge was far greater for people who relied on public transportation or had limited English skills. Through unified enrollment, Hannon said, the new system aims to enhance transparency and equity for all families.

As Hannon and other Indianapolis education leaders planned the new system, they looked at other cities for guidance. Denver and New Orleans, for example, launched the nation’s first common enrollment systems that include both district and charter schools — and those systems have made improvements in consistently applying enrollment rules fairly, said Betheny Gross, research director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. Families were no longer able to schmooze their way into a better placement for their child, for example.

Still, Gross said, unified enrollment systems do have shortcomings. In Denver, where participation is voluntary, researchers found that 20 percent of families did not submit applications, and those who opted out weren’t necessarily living in neighborhoods with good schools. In fact, she said, most attended some of the lowest-rated schools in the city.

Common enrollment systems, Gross said, don’t fix the challenge of supporting families with complex lives, including those who are new to the country, may have language barriers and often are not tapped into social networks. “A single application doesn’t fix that,” she said. “A single application doesn’t manage the challenge of finding transportation to a school that’s not nearby.”

But Hannon hopes that arming families with information will help. The city’s public school district is already on board, and Hannon is working to bring each of the city’s charter schools on individually. And though the unified enrollment system isn’t scheduled to go live until next November for the 2018–19 school year, Enroll Indy has already started informing parents about school options in their communities. In November, Enroll Indy launched a “school finder” on its website, allowing families to browse schools across Indianapolis, based on a range of characteristics like transportation options, academic programs and sports.

“People in positions of power are like, ‘Choice is good’ and ‘Let people vote with their feet’ and ‘Bad schools that people don’t want will close,’ ” Hannon said. “But it doesn’t work that way if people don’t know they have options and don’t know what their options are, or don’t know what the right fit is for their child.”

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Addressing an audience drawn heavily from the government and nonprofit worlds, that she was about to get “politically incorrect.” “Many Republicans in the suburbs like the idea of education choice as a concept, right up until it means that poor kids from the inner cities might invade their schools,” she said.

Narrowing her focus, she condemned a Republican legislator in her home state of Michigan for opposing open enrollment — a form of public school choice that allows families from educationally blighted communities to enroll their children in neighboring suburbs — because his district would have to accept children from Detroit. (DeVos added that Democrats undermined choice by capitulating to anti-choice teachers unions.)

Coming from a major GOP donor, these are striking charges, seemingly calculated to make conservatives chafe. (“Betsy DeVos once accused her fellow Republicans of racism,” .)

The question is whether the shoe fits.

Polls have shown declining support among Republicans for some choice programs, notably school vouchers (although party leaders tend to enthusiastically support them); moreover, prominent conservatives have moving poor minority children into better schools through school integration efforts. Should we believe DeVos when she suggests that these attitudes are fueled by racial or class animus?

Martin West, an associate professor at Harvard and editor-in-chief of the policy journal Education Next, argues that there is some truth in DeVos’s remarks. “The biggest driver of racial imbalance in U.S. schools is the sorting of students across district lines,” he wrote in an email. Open enrollment plans could help break down the barriers and unite disparate student populations, but West laments their weaknesses: “They don’t [do more to boost diversity] because they are so rare and, when they exist, tend to let districts opt out of receiving students. I think DeVos’s comment helps us to understand why that is the case.”

Halley Potter is a fellow at New York’s Century Foundation, a progressive think tank that advocates racial and socioeconomic integration as a means of addressing inequality. She agrees that some middle-class districts pull up the drawbridge rather than welcome students from underserved communities. “There has been opposition to school choice programs from higher-income and whiter school districts that don’t want the option of other kids coming in,” she said in an interview.

But she also added a qualifier: “In general, open enrollment laws have facilitated transfers of relatively more advantaged students to more advantaged districts.” That is, whiter and wealthier students from underperforming districts are more likely to benefit from open enrollment than their poorer minority counterparts — perversely leaving the district even more segregated in terms of class and race.

One example of this phenomenon shows the flip side of DeVos’s argument. In Eastpointe, Mich., a racially mixed suburb of Detroit, white families have taken advantage of the state’s inter-district enrollment program . Today, whites account for 40 percent of the schoolchildren living in Eastpointe but only 19 percent of those enrolled in the school system there.

Other school choice initiatives, like vouchers and charter schools, can inadvertently accelerate segregation as well. White, black and Hispanic students are in the national charter sector, but they seldom share individual schools. Even while many , high-performing urban charters have been declared “” than their traditional competitors. Although state-sponsored vouchers could theoretically place minority students in predominantly white private schools, indicates that they are likelier to benefit children from more-advantaged homes. The time and resources required to navigate the voucher bureaucracy put them out of reach for many inner-city families.

In short, Potter summarizes, “A school choice program that doesn’t specifically have access and diversity as part of its mission is most likely to be used by families with the most resources.”

Even in the relatively few communities that have taken affirmative steps to integrate their school districts, racial and class isolation can stubbornly persist. Former Stamford, Conn., superintendent Joshua Starr, who later , spoke in an interview about the difficulty of selling parents on integration. And in contrast to DeVos, he claims that resistance to his efforts was by no means limited to Republicans.

“No matter how they couched it, there were certain white people who were very concerned about their kids being in classes with kids who they did not perceive as being at the same level,” he said. When he , he said, outcry from the community was hard to square with its professed values. “‘Oh, those poor kids need so much help. It’s OK if my kids are in a bigger classroom, so long as they’re not with those kids,’ ” he remembered one parent suggesting. “The dog whistles were out and very, very apparent.”

“These were self-proclaimed progressive liberals — some of them stalwarts of the Democratic Party. It was not a Democrat-versus-Republican issue. It was more, frankly, a class issue. The wealthier people tended to be much more entitled about it.”

According to researchers and practitioners, then, DeVos is both right and wrong. Many white suburbanites jealously guard their local schools, battling fiercely to exclude outsiders. Some recent integration efforts, triggered by the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability mandates, have provided telling examples, of middle-class parents refusing to welcome black and brown children from neighboring districts.

But this tendency is shared among members of both parties. And school choice programs, at least as they’re currently practiced, have proved unable to cope with it.

At the forefront is state Board of Education President Andrew Smarick, a federal education official under President George W. Bush who has spent much of his career on school reform. (Smarick has also published essays with ����Ӱ��.) At the board’s , Smarick called for a larger emphasis on fixing low-performing schools and suggested that lawmakers expand the voucher program and create new charter schools. That conversation is expected to resume Tuesday, when the board reconvenes for its January meeting.

The push comes amid a heated debate over the voucher program, which the state teachers union and local officials contend pulls money away from traditional public schools.

Unusual for a traditionally Democratic state, the Maryland school board is dominated by appointees of a Republican, Gov. Larry Hogan. These include Smarick and Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank.

Finn has recommended that Maryland establish a state-run recovery school district, similar to the one created in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, for the lowest-performing schools.

“We’re really thrilled to see some of the state leaders talking about providing real solutions for these thousands of Maryland families who are trapped in schools that, quite frankly, just don’t prepare children for college and career readiness,” said Jenese Jones, deputy director at MarylandCAN, an education-reform advocacy group.

Last year,  a $5 million private-school voucher program as part of the state’s $42 billion operating budget — a surprising move for a Democratic-controlled legislature. For about a decade, state lawmakers, including Democrats, have pushed for an education tax-credit program totaling up to $50 million. In the governor’s  for fiscal year 2018, released last week, overall K-12 spending would grow to a record $6.4 billion and the voucher program would increase to $7 million as part of a plan to double the program’s funding over three years.

In the program’s first year, however, the students who benefited from the vouchers have become a flashpoint.

Of the more than  through the program this school year, about 1,900 were already enrolled in private schools. The program “merely subsidizes private schools with taxpayer dollars that could be going to public schools,” Sean Johnson, the Maryland State Education Association’s legislative director, told The Baltimore Sun.

In Baltimore, school officials say to the voucher program this year. The drop in students, and the attendant loss in school funding, came as the city district faces a . Hogan’s proposed budget includes in school funding for Baltimore.

But Jones said vouchers allow low-income families to escape the “injustices” of low-performing schools. Although a final state plan for ESSA isn’t due to federal education officials until the fall, she said early proposals are “definitely looking to be a strong and bold change for the state.”

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• , introduced by Linehan, would create the Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act to allow state and local funding to follow students from low-performing public schools to private schools. Districts whose students seek to move to a private school would pay either 75 percent of the per-pupil cost or the cost of regular tuition, books and uniforms at the private school, whichever is less. Any unused funding would be placed in a property tax relief fund.
• , introduced by Republican Sen. Robert Hilkemann, would allow students and families to open education savings accounts and accept contributions of up to $2,000 annually for education-related expenses from individuals and businesses, which would receive tax incentives for donations.

Washington, D.C.

“I think it’s time to plant a flag here in Washington, D.C., in the same way that we have planted flags in other states around America. I’m not telling you that I know this is going to happen in six weeks or six months, but there is an opportunity” for a new federal choice program, the Indiana Republican said.

The selection of Betsy DeVos, a longtime school choice advocate, is an “enormous signal” of Trump’s and Republicans’ commitment to the issue, Messer said at a panel on new options for federal school choice, hosted by the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.

He also echoed Senate education committee chairman Lamar Alexander’s opening statement at DeVos’s confirmation hearing Tuesday night, that despite opponents’ characterization, her beliefs “are in the mainstream, and the folks that are criticizing her are the folks that are out of step with where most Americans are on these issues.”  

(����Ӱ��: DeVos Pledges Not to Gut Public Schools or Force School Choice During Confirmation Hearing)

Trump proposed a $20 billion school choice program on the campaign trail. Republicans have for years pitched various school choice proposals, with only a very few becoming law.

(����Ӱ��: GOP Education Priorities: 13 Stalled House and Senate Bills That Could Now Make It to President Trump’s Desk)

Any federal money going to private schools raises thorny issues about civil rights and access — would the schools, for instance, have to abide by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, an issue that came up at DeVos’s hearing? What about LGBT students’ access to religious schools? Would faith-based schools be prohibited from teaching religion?

Those civil rights questions have been one of advocates’ and Democrats’ biggest concerns with DeVos’s nomination. A coalition of civil rights groups held a call Tuesday to highlight their opposition, and Senate Democrats during the confirmation hearing questioned whether she would require private schools receiving federal funds, to, say, report instances of bullying and harassment.

Panelists at Wednesday’s session, however, saw opportunity in DeVos’s nomination and discussed three ideas for expanding school choice programs at the federal level: a competitive grant program to help with startup costs for new private options; allowing the funds in the anti-poverty Title I program to “follow” children through schools via parent-directed accounts; and changes to the federal tax code.

• Competitive Grant Program: Andy Smarick, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, proposed different iterations of a grant program that would aid new private schools with startup costs.

Smarick envisioned it as similar to the federal charter school program, which helps charter operators with facilities and other costs they incur before they start receiving students and the per-pupil funding that goes with them.

Short-term grants and deference to state policies should assuage concerns about federal intrusion, and Smarick also suggested adding what he called the “Lamar Alexander rule” — putting limits and prohibitions on the department in the authorizing law, as Alexander did in the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new K-12 education law.

Joanne Weiss, who served as chief of staff in the Obama education department, said any such program should ensure families have access to and information on all options. Although some conservatives have proposed that a free market of parental choice is enough to ensure high-quality schools, Weiss argued that “families voting with their feet alone is not enough to ensure quality” and that more accountability is necessary.

• Title I Portability: McKenzie Snow, a policy analyst at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, proposed changing the Title I program so that it follows the low-income children it aims to help as they move among schools, including private options. The $15 billion currently spent each year now goes directly to public schools with high concentrations of poor students.

Conversations about Title I portability often start — and stop — with the premise that it’s simply too difficult to implement, a posture Snow called intellectually lazy.

“There’s a lot of creative solutions to make portability work, should states have the political will,” she said.

Specifically under her proposal, the threshold for eligibility would change from 185 percent of the poverty level, the figure most districts use, to 100 percent. Serving fewer children with the same amount of money would mean more money to provide additional services to children in need — about $1,400 per student versus about $600 now, she said.

That would mean more money per child, but serving fewer children is a political risk, moderator Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, noted. It would also require changing the recently reauthorized Every Student Succeeds Act.

Snow proposed putting the money in an account for parents to direct toward private school, tutoring or other education expenses, with students’ eligibility judged through a form similar to the federal form used to determine financial aid for college. Under her proposal, states could opt into the program, and those that chose not to wouldn’t see a reduction in their federal aid or other penalty.

Critics of Title I portability say it will devastate funding to traditional public schools, still left to serve large numbers of high-needs students, and undermine the program’s aim of targeting large pockets of poverty.

• Tax Changes: Changing the tax code is likely the easiest to pass Congress, because it wouldn’t require new money like a competitive grant program, and it could be part of a larger tax code rewrite, a GOP priority.

Specifically, Congress could extend the existing 529 college savings accounts to K-12 expenses. That might limit its applicability to low-income kids, though there might be ways to help low-income families participate, said Virginia Gentles, senior policy advisor at the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by DeVos. She pointed to New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio to help low-income families save for college through 529s funded by both the government and a private nonprofit.

A more expansive option would be to create a federal tax credit for contributions to existing state scholarship-granting organizations. Under those, businesses or individuals donate to nonprofits that then award private school scholarships, usually to low-income children. The donor then receives a tax credit — essentially a refund — equivalent to their donation.

Congress would have to write the specifics, including whether residents of one state could donate to another state program if one doesn’t exist in their state, or whether there would be limits on how much a donor could claim per year. The law would probably also have to include a national cap so congressional committees could appropriately calculate the impact on the federal budget from the lost tax revenue, Gentles said.

Any regulations beyond that aren’t necessary, she argued. Most state laws require participating schools to meet basic standards, like health and safety regulations, financial solvency and staff background checks.

“There’s no need to add on an extra layer of federal regulations. I don’t think you’re going to want these existing scholarship-granting organizations and private schools to have to adhere to an additional level of regulation,” she said.  

The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation provided funding to ����Ӱ�� from 2014 to 2016. Campbell Brown serves on the boards of both ����Ӱ�� and the American Federation for Children, which was formerly chaired by Betsy DeVos. Brown played no part in the reporting or editing of this article.

In the years before I was born, drugs and alcohol infiltrated the community. Crime rates soared. Drug abusers and police interventions became normal sights. The Eastside became a place people avoided at night.

The Eastside has become the focus of many urban projects in the City of Jacksonville, but statistics tell a sad tale. The median household income in the ZIP code where I grew up is about half the citywide average. According to the latest , 41 percent of Eastside residents receive food stamps, compared with 16 percent of Jacksonville residents overall.

Now that I’m in graduate school, I can look up statistics that suggest I’ve beaten the odds. I’ve read about the studies showing that students who don’t are four times as likely to drop out of high school as those who do, and those in poverty are 13 times less likely to graduate on time than their more proficient, wealthier peers.

That was me. I failed third grade — twice.

I’ve written many times about how a school choice scholarship helped me turn my academics around and escape the pull of generational poverty. But as I work toward a master’s degree in social work and reflect on my experiences, I’ve come to understand how multiple community institutions helped me get where I am today.

The Eastside is full of abandoned homes and stores. People walk the neighborhood aimlessly with seemingly little hope. There are three zoned schools for the neighborhood, which were underperforming when I attended and still are, despite the best efforts of Duval County Public Schools. There are few real school options on the Eastside, though there are some in other surrounding neighborhoods. There are hardly any job opportunities for adults, and it feels like there is no way out for many who live there.

People from the Eastside know one another by name. Community members proudly chant “Eastside” while throwing up a hand symbol representing the letter E. Gatekeepers, or those who maintain Eastside culture, claim “status” if their family name is chanted in the same manner.

It seemed the Merriweathers had status. My family had lived in poverty for at least four generations in the same place, which isn’t uncommon on the Eastside. My relatives had earned a reputation for defending their own.

While the name may have protected me in the neighborhood, it also followed me into the classroom. One adult at school might turn to another and say, “She’s a Merriweather.” The name seemed to justify my behavior and hold me to a stereotype. Many teachers on the Eastside had been around a long time. I guess some of them assumed I was destined to drop out of school as a teenager, like my mom and her brother.

The earliest memory I have of school was in the second grade. I remember being puzzled and angry because I didn’t understand the lessons being taught. I remember wanting to ask my teacher to repeat herself, but I got the sense that she didn’t want to help me understand. I feared being ridiculed by the other students. My classmates were very critical. I did my best to just fit in.

It was during that time I began to hate school. The next couple of years felt like I was in a daze. Things at home were unstable. The time I spent with my biological mother was often in a Jacksonville hotel room. We moved more than five times over the next few years.

With every move, I’d wind up in a different school. With every new school, I had to meet new teachers, administrators and classmates. I never expected to stay in one school for very long, so I often assumed the rules didn’t apply to me.

I remember days when I would walk into the classroom and everyone would sigh, including my teacher.

I grew disheartened. To hide my hurt, I often lashed out in physical fights with my classmates. The principal’s office became my new classroom, and I got used to being suspended. D’s and F’s filled my report cards.

Despite my facade, I wanted to learn, to be accepted, happy and motivated.

In fourth grade, I had a gleam of hope. I was admitted into the school district’s STAR program. Its name stands for Students Taking Academic Responsibility, and it’s designed to help students get back to grade level. I was told the program was competitive and that if I behaved and got my grades up, I could be promoted to middle school, with other students my age.

I started writing myself letters in the voices of teachers, who reprimanded me: “Denisha, don’t talk today.” “Be good.” “No playing in class.” “Come on, you can do it.” I wanted to beat the teacher to it.

At the end of the year, I received notification that I wouldn’t be promoted to middle school. That news wrecked my self-esteem. But the summer before my sixth-grade year, the trajectory of my life began to change. I began living permanently with my godmother. We moved into a Habitat for Humanity home. She enrolled me at Esprit de Corps Center for Learning, a small, private school on the Northside of Jacksonville, using a Step Up for Students tax-credit scholarship.

Now my life had something it hadn’t had before: stability. I had my own room at home, which provided me a place of solace. I didn’t have to change schools anymore. Living with my godmother didn’t separate me completely from my life on the Eastside. But she had a job at a Brooks Rehabilitation facility, made an honest wage and set a good example for me.

Esprit de Corps is affiliated with the church I attended with my godmother. On the first day of school, I was racked with nervousness and embarrassment. I decided I was ready to defend myself no matter the cost. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew some students from church, and I was anxious because I thought they’d find out I was dumb. However, to my surprise, I never had to defend myself or my intellect. Esprit de Corps was unlike any school I’d ever experienced.

We had chapel every Tuesday and assembly every Friday. The faith-based environment taught me that God was interested in all my actions. I gradually gained confidence and consistently made the honor roll. I joined the basketball team, served in student government and participated on the yearbook committee. Administrators chose me to become a cadet — a designation reserved for student leaders who wear red sweaters and help out on campus. It seemed like I finally had a normal life.

Before coming to live with my godmother, I’d play with friends in the neighborhood after school or watch television without doing my homework or preparing for the next day of school. My godmother enrolled me in an afterschool program at the Police Athletic League on Jacksonville’s Northside. PAL provided me with structure after school. We had times for activities, homework, a snack and dinner.

Some occur between 3 and 7 p.m. on school days, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. done in Chicago found that low-income students who participated in after-school programs increased academic performance, saw misconduct decrease and were more likely to graduate from high school. Also, low-income students who became involved in after-school activities saw an increase in motivation and hope.

One day at PAL, I was approached by a woman whom I now call my mentor. She invited me to participate in a leadership program called the Youth Directors Council, which helped organize community service events. The program taught me to take responsibility for my actions because my grades, community service involvement and leadership skills all helped determine who got to go to Disney World during the summer, which was the program’s annual highlight.

Regional, state and national meetings connected me with PAL students across the country. Through my community service work, I earned the award of National PAL Girl of the Year in 2009. I was suddenly surrounded with people who pushed me to look beyond the world I was familiar with, beyond the Eastside of Jacksonville.

As I got older, I enrolled at my local community college to take dual enrollment classes. My school had become a major support system. When it was time for me to apply for college, Esprit helped me research scholarships and apply for waivers to take my college entrance tests for free. On June 5, 2010, I graduated from Esprit de Corps with honors, becoming the first in my immediate family to earn a diploma. I resolved that I would go on to pursue every degree I could.

Education allowed me to create a new path for my future. A healthy school culture gave me the strength and courage I needed to embrace my new life and develop goals for my future. There are many paths to escape the dead end into which many students like me are born.

I was given the opportunity to attend a private Christian school on a tax-credit scholarship. Some find their way using traditional public schools. In Duval County, a growing number of parents are choosing to teach their children at home. The year after I graduated, a new KIPP charter school opened on the Northside, and though it’s at least a 15-minute drive for parents on the Eastside, it provides a new option for low-income students in the city.

I believe all these venues and more need to be accessible to kids growing up in poverty, who need more high-quality school options. But I also believe they need healthy community support, stable home environments and individuals who can serve as mentors.

Too often, the education system views black children, their community and its challenges through a deficit-based perspective that emphasizes their alleged shortcomings inside and outside the classroom.

I want the beneficiaries of school choice to advocate for a strengths-based perspective that focuses on the potential of every child and that ensures schools and other community institutions marshal the resources necessary to help them achieve it, while considering the interrelationships between individuals and their environments. In my graduate studies, I have learned about the concept of person-in-environment, which is the guiding principle of social work. It means that in order to totally understand a person, you have to understand the environment they come from and tailor services based on that knowledge.

I hope to see all schools serving children in poverty embrace a wraparound model, providing not only education but also health, social, dental and other community services such as after-school programs. Families should be able to customize these resources for their children, the way my godmother did for me.

As I’ve gotten more involved in education reform advocacy, I’ve seen many people who advocate for more educational options like the scholarship I received. But I’ve also seen a separate political tribe that argues against those options. It’s frustrating to me that there are still groups who are fighting to end tax-credit scholarships, which would effectively kick out nearly 98,000 low-income students in Florida, including my younger brothers and sisters, from the private schools that work for them. Those same groups then turn around and argue that we should create community schools instead, as if these private schools are not grounded in their local communities.

I’m confident that if these groups would stop and listen to the thousands of school-choice alumni like me, they would learn that if we truly care about breaking the cycle of generational poverty, we need all hands on deck. We can’t afford to take any options off the table.

The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation provided funding to ����Ӱ�� from 2014 to 2016. Campbell Brown serves on the boards of both ����Ӱ�� and the American Federation for Children, which was formerly chaired by Betsy DeVos. Brown played no part in the reporting or editing of this article.

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Walking past wire fences threaded with weeds and weaving her way in between large pickup trucks parked in driveways, she peers over a gate and waves at family members standing on a front porch.

“Hi! Are you Emily’s parent?” Ducey asks.

The dad descends the stairs warily. “Yeah. How do you know?”

Ducey, armed with a list of every fourth-grader in Tulsa Public Schools, tells Emily’s dad about a new 5-8 charter school, a free college prep middle school that just opened in their neighborhood in 2015. Would he be interested in sending his daughter to Tulsa Honor Academy for fifth grade?

The dad takes an envelope with an enrollment packet in both English and Spanish from Ducey, agreeing to take a look.

Tulsa Honor Academy, which teaches three hours of literacy and two hours of math each day and has a strict code of conduct, is trying to level the playing field for children whose lives and educations are literally precarious. When a tornado touched down here not long ago, families were forced to flee the trailer park to seek shelter in a local church. It was the night before the state tests, Ducey said.

Sitting for the exams the next morning on little sleep was yet another challenge for the kids from East Tulsa —many of them immigrants and English-language learners whose families struggle to make ends meet.

The Hispanic population in this heartland city of roughly 400,000 people in northeastern Oklahoma is growing fast. Three years ago, Hispanic students became the majority in Tulsa Public School classrooms, at 31 percent. Blacks and whites follow, each accounting for some 25 percent of the student body, while the rest are mostly students who are mixed-race and Native American.

Math teacher Sasha Ducey speaks Spanish with a parent in an East Tulsa neighborhood as part of a canvassing effort for the school she teaches at: Tulsa Honor Academy.

Photo: Kate Stringer

Driving home that evening on Highway 169, Ducey pulls out her red sunglasses to block the glare of the setting sun and gestures emphatically with her hands.

“We just saw the neighborhoods that we went to — those are poor neighborhoods, but those are the students that I teach, and they’re quite capable of doing anything that they put their mind to,” she said. “But a lot of them haven’t been given the chance or even laid out [those] expectations.”

Raising expectations for students too often dismissed is what drew Ducey’s boss, Elsie Urueta, back to her hometown to open Tulsa Honor Academy. The school serves 206 students, almost all of them Latino and 98 percent of them qualifying to receive free or reduced-price lunch. Urueta, 31, dressed in brown knee-high boots and a blazer, stood before Ducey and 19 other adult volunteers earlier that Sunday getting ready to go out and canvass for 2017’s fifth-graders.

“We kind of profile in the sense that we take a map of East Tulsa and we go to the neediest areas, even within East Tulsa, and we start there, so we start with the trailer homes and we start with the apartment complexes, and we look into the rest of the neighborhoods,” she said, holding up a map. “We want to make sure we’re serving the students of highest needs because a lot of times those are the students that don’t have access to a lot of opportunities.”

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Urueta returned to the 42,000-student Tulsa Public School system that is run by Deborah Gist, who was also raised here and also came back in 2015, determined to make a difference after a career in education that brought her national attention.

These two Tulsa educators grew up in the classrooms they’re now fighting to save from budget cuts and teacher shortages.

Teacher pay in Oklahoma is among the worst in the country — 49th out of 51 states (including D.C.) — and voters crushingly defeated a November ballot measure that would have given teachers a $5,000 raise this year.

All education funding is hurting in Oklahoma, where dropping oil prices have crippled budgets in this energy-dependent state. Since 2008, per-pupil funding has been cut 27 percent here, more than any other state, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One third of the state’s 1,803 public schools now operate on a four-day-a-week schedule.

(����Ӱ��: 5 States in Crisis: Budget Battles, Court Challenges, Political Bickering Leave Schools Millions Short)

“I think teachers were just sick and tired of being disrespected and sick and tired of education being treated so shabbily,” said Karen Gaddis, who is Gist’s former teacher and one of 26 educators so incensed by the situation . (Only five were elected.) “You can’t make changes just standing on the sidelines.”

Urueta and Gist do not intend to.  If not full-on partners, they also do not see themselves as rivals across a district-charter divide that has grown wider and more bitter in many cities.

“The public charter schools that are authorized by our Board of Education, we consider them to be a part of the Tulsa Public Schools family,” said Gist, who has visited Urueta’s school and provides facilities support to the charters in her district.

Linda Brown, who runs the Boston-based Building Excellent Schools, a group that offers intensive fellowships for school leaders interested in creating high-performing charter schools, has worked with them both.

(����Ӱ��: Meet Linda Brown, the Grandmother of America’s Best Charter Schools)

“Deborah does not stand up and shout. Elsie does not stand up and shout,” Brown said. “Their shouting is soft and effective. Their shouting is dedication, commitment and persistence … I think that both of them want to see change in their own time. They’re not in the business to make things better 75 years from now.”

At 7:28 a.m., a walkie-talkie beeps.

“It’s 7:28,” a crackling voice says.

The voice belongs to Urueta. And the teachers who hear it know what the message means. It’s time to take their places inside the school. Feet move. Papers shuffle. Doors open.

Office manager Gus Ibarra walks through the school’s blue front doors, where two lines of students are perfectly filed in gray quarter-zip sweatshirts and backpacks. He slowly makes his way down the middle, hands outstretched like a football coach, collecting high fives from all his players.

Office Manager Gus Ibarra greets every student with a high five or handshake before the school day starts at Tulsa Honor Academy.

Photo: Kate Stringer

In the parking lot, he serves as the school’s official greeter, opening every car door with a “Good morning” or a “Buenos dias” to the parents and students inside. He shakes the students’ hands or gives them a high five before they line up.

For the students who don’t ride the bus, Ibarra is their first point of contact before sitting down in the classroom. And he’s a familiar face not just for students, but also for their parents. Ibarra spent his early childhood in California but for the past 16 years has lived in Oklahoma. He knows many of the Tulsa Honor Academy families personally.

“Have a great day, hon — high five,” Urueta says as a student passes the check and walks through the door.

The third and final interaction with an adult before school starts is with the classroom teacher. Students line up outside their classroom, where their teacher also shakes their hand and quizzes them on something they’ve been learning, in this case units of measurement. Once they answer, students grab a white bag on a tray with their breakfast — an apple, a milk carton, juice and a muffin — and make their way to their seats.

These three early-morning conversations are meant to teach students how to interact and speak professionally to adults: shake hands, make eye contact, speak clearly. It’s also meant to make the middle schoolers feel seen and known by their teachers and school leaders.

Tulsa Honor Academy’s firm code of conduct would fall into the “no excuses” model favored by some charter schools. One of the first signs a scholar sees as she enters the school building is a large white poster with some of these rules: “Walk on the tape all the way to your destination. Do not cut corners. Remain silent.” The tape is thick and purple and runs along the floor with arrows pointing in different directions through the hallways and classrooms.

Elsie Urueta checks student uniforms every morning before school.

Photo: Kate Stringer

The model is not without its critics. Some argue that it continues to oppress the low-income students whom many charter schools serve with rules that aren’t always present outside of school. Others say students aren’t given the preparation to think for themselves, unlike their wealthier white peers.

Urueta explains the system with an analogy: It’s like driving on a road. People don’t feel secure if the lines dividing the highway are faded or missing.

“[Students] don’t see it as oppressive, because they see it as a structure that supports them, and that’s what it’s meant to do,” Urueta said.

If the school’s 85 percent retention rate in its second year is any indication, parents agree. Gabriela Yllescas said she “loves” the rules because it teaches her daughters about manners and not just academics. Parent Rigo Mireles said the rules prepare students for higher education, life and a serious work ethic.

Rigo’s 11-year-old son Yadier also sees the benefits.

“I think it helps me stay more focused to remind myself that I’m supposed to be doing this or that,” he said.

Parent Rigo Mireles chose to send his son Yadier to Tulsa Honor Academy because he hoped it would provide a more challenging academic environment for his son.

Photo: Kate Stringer

Parents expressed hope that the code of conduct and commitment to academics could help keep their kids out of trouble outside of school, away from drugs or dropping out. There has been dramatic improvement in the national dropout rate for Hispanic youth — going from 32 percent in 2000 to 10.6 percent in 2014 — but it remains higher than for both black students, at 7 percent, and white students, at 5 percent.

To promote a college-going culture, the teachers at Tulsa Honor Academy tout their universities, christening their classrooms after their alma mater. They familiarize their students with the college’s name and story and give them a team to cheer on during sporting seasons. In the hallways, pennants from seemingly every college hang on the wall between the lockers and the ceiling.

The days are longer at this school. Students arrive at 7:30 a.m. and leave at 4:30 p.m. Rather than recess, students get 15-minute breaks every two hours, which most use to chat with their peers, draw or play games. Students stay in the same classroom all day; it’s the teachers who rotate, to maximize learning time.

Yadier and his parents are seeing the results of this intensive instruction. In one year, he got straight A’s except for one B. He also received a science award from his teachers, loves social studies and has taken a liking to a new engineering class offered this year.

“In the beginning, we built rafts and then bridges, which we’re testing,” Yadier said. “It’s fun.”

On the latest state test, 77 percent of Tulsa Honor Academy students scored proficient in math and 60 percent in reading. That compares to 52 percent proficient in math and 62 percent in reading for Tulsa Public School students.

Eventually, Urueta said, the school has plans to relax the rules as students get older and have learned from them. But for now, the results are immediately obvious. Students are silent in the hallways and the classrooms. Well, most of the time. Every morning, for a few moments, they get really loud.

“Who wants to lead the chant today?” a teacher asks her class. The teacher shares the room with Ducey, who spent her Sunday recruiting and who graduated from Villanova.

“This is my favorite part,” Urueta whispers.

A small girl with a big white polka-dot bow in her hair raises her hand from the back of the classroom. She slowly gets up, grips the back of her chair and stands on her tippy toes.

“Villanova!” she yells, in a voice that fills the room.

“W�����峦���ٲ�!” the class yells back.

“Villanova!” she screams again.

“W�����峦���ٲ�!”

Photo: Kate Stringer

Beautiful, exciting, cutting-edge. Those are some of the words Deborah Gist uses to describe Tulsa. Oh, and home.

“Tulsans are people who will do anything for their neighbor and who deeply care about public education,” Gist said.

That may be, but Oklahoma teachers right now are not feeling the love. Their poor pay has had real consequences for students and administrators like Gist trying to keep their districts fully staffed. As the 2016 school year began, more than 500 teaching jobs in Oklahoma remained unfilled. That’s after 1,530 jobs were eliminated the prior school year, according to the Oklahoma State School Boards Association.

(����Ӱ��: Why Oklahoma Is Racing to Put Nearly 1,000 Uncertified Teachers in Its Classrooms)

“I think what I learned, or came to understand better once I was here, was how badly our teachers are compensated and the effect that has on them,” said Gist, who was able to begin her school year with no teaching vacancies but was still disappointed when the salary measure was defeated at the polls.

Tulsa Public Schools Superintendent Deborah Gist reads to a student.

Photo: Tulsa Public Schools

Teachers are being lost to states like Texas, Arkansas and Kansas, according to a state school board association report. Texas can pay teachers 16 percent more than Oklahoma can. The starting salary for a first-year Oklahoma teacher is $31,600. In Tulsa, it’s $32,900. Even after 20 years in the classroom, a Tulsa teacher with a bachelor’s degree earns $44,430, or $46,736 if they have a master’s degree. In Urueta’s school, teachers make 20 percent more than district teachers but also have a longer workday. Urueta’s salary is $85,000.

(����Ӱ��: Oklahoma’s Teacher of the Year Makes Just $35,419 — and He Won’t Get a Big Raise Anytime Soon)

Gist said she’s heard a lot of feedback about teachers feeling that the district was not concerned about them or not supporting them. In the 2015–16 school year, only 34 percent of educators agreed that the district showed concern for their school’s needs, according to district data.

“We have had to do some real hard work here in the district office to confront that and to say we are an organization that exists only to serve our teachers and schools,” Gist said.

Some of that came directly from Gist, who earns $235,000 a year and receives an end-of-year performance bonus. In May, she donated that $25,000 to the Foundation for Tulsa Public Schools, given “the indefensible salaries we provide teachers in Oklahoma right now.”

Facing a limited budget, Gist, who says said she’s always been a believer in maximizing resources, has found other ways to support her teachers. The district has raised private money to fund professional development on classroom management. It also reorganized how the district assists schools on social and emotional learning by creating network teams of psychologists, social workers and behavior specialists that are assigned to one set of schools so principals always knows whom to call when they need help.

Tulsa Public Schools Superintendent Deborah Gist has been passionate about education since she was a student.

Photo: Kate Stringer

Gist, 50, remains strongly connected to her own teaching roots. In her district office stacked with books and festooned with whimsical memorabilia, she keeps a project on her desk that she completed in junior high, when she and her classmates had to chart their careers. Hers was preschool teacher, and she interviewed her own preschool teacher for the assignment.

Now that she is back home, she keeps in touch with her old teachers, including Gaddis, her high school algebra teacher, who ran for the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Gist credits Gaddis with giving her the necessary enthusiasm and skills to blaze through her graduate school math.

And Gaddis, who has about 30,000 students to keep track of from nearly 40 years in the classroom, has been proud of Gist’s work so far.

“She has such a big heart for children, for education,” she said. “She’s going to be highly successful in her career.”

One could argue she already is. Gist has served as a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Education, as the state education officer for Washington, D.C., and as Rhode Island’s education commissioner.

In 2010, she was named among Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” and one of The Atlantic’s Brave Thinkers for her work in Rhode Island, which included raising test-score requirements for teacher training and establishing annual teacher reviews. At that time, she also approved the firing of all the teachers in the very low-performing , a sweeping step supported by President Obama and then–U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The controversial action also brought Gist much criticism from the public and the teachers union.

Before all that, Gist was an elementary school teacher in Texas, after studying early education at the University of Oklahoma. She also worked in a Florida school district designing a literacy curriculum. In addition to her undergraduate degree, she holds master’s degrees from both the University of South Florida and Harvard University and a doctoral degree in education leadership from the University of Pennsylvania.

Even as Gist traveled the U.S. exploring education, she kept her eye on Tulsa. When the former superintendent announced his intent to step down, several people from Oklahoma quickly contacted her, Gist said.

This was near the same time the Rhode Island Board of Education allowed the deadline for renewing Gist’s contract to pass without taking action. It had been 30 years away from home, but this felt like the right time to return, she said.

Brown, founder of Boston’s Building Excellent Schools, was shocked when she first learned of Gist’s decision to move back to Tulsa. But she ultimately understood.

“I think it’s the same draw Elsie had,” Brown said. “Family.”

When Urueta’s mom, Elsi Flores Walkabout, first heard her daughter wanted to start a school, she was hesitant.

“Oh my God, now what? You told me you were going to be a lawyer,” Walkabout recalls, laughing. Now Walkabout is Tulsa Honor Academy’s biggest recruiter, attending canvassing events, conversing with parents in Spanish and pulling families with young children aside after Sunday Mass at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in East Tulsa.

Her daughter and namesake was born in Texas, but the family lived on both sides of the border between Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. The Uruetas moved 11 times before settling down in East Tulsa.

“My mom always told me that I had to work — because I was an immigrant, a Latina woman — that I had to work twice as hard to be able to reach my goals,” Urueta said. “She told me this from a very young age. So when opportunities were given to me, I always took them. But the problem is so many of our kids don’t even get those opportunities to begin with.”

Elsie Urueta stands outside Tulsa Honor Academy, the middle school she founded several years ago to encourage her East Tulsa neighborhood of immigrants and English-language learners to attend college.

Photo: Kate Stringer

One of those chances came in the person of Donneva Bennett, Urueta’s second-grade teacher. Urueta smiles at the memory of the woman who took time at recess and after school to sit with her and teach her English. That kind of focused attention, Urueta said, put her on track to earn good grades and take advanced classes.

Not every student struggling with English has a Ms. Bennett. By the time she was in AP courses in high school, Urueta observed she was one of only a few Latino students in the room. She attended the University of Oklahoma but was troubled by the thought of all her friends and neighbors left behind.

Of the 18-to-24-year-olds living within Tulsa Honor Academy’s ZIP code, only 2.5 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher, while 27 percent of those 25 and older have a college degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, 37.7 percent of Tulsa City residents 25 and older have college degrees.

So as a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, Urueta began translating financial aid information into Spanish for local high schools in Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

“And through my work there, I very quickly realized this was a systemic problem,” Urueta said. “It was more than just language and cultural.”

After graduation, Urueta joined Teach for America, where she worked in charter schools in Chicago and St. Louis. There, she had a conversation with a student that changed the way she thought about her dream of starting her own school. A sixth-grade boy was explaining to Urueta the appeal of local gangs: the chance to acquire reputation and honor, he said.

“And I remember saying, ‘No, what brings you honor is an education, and what brings you honor is ensuring that you go to college so that you can get a better quality of life and better support your family,’ ” Urueta said. “That’s what honor is.”

From that moment, Urueta knew her school would have the word “honor” in its name.

Urueta’s fellowship at Building Excellent Schools was critical to her making that school real. The program accepts two out of every 100 applicants, and potential fellows must show local support for their proposed school by submitting signatures and letters of recommendations. Most, Linda Brown said, collect 200 to 300 signatures and 15 letters; Urueta gathered 2,500 signatures and 30 letters, more than any other applicant since the program began in 2003.

“Elsie competes with the best, and most of the times she wins,” Brown said. “That’s what she wants for her children and the school.”

Parent Gabriela Yllescas was one of the first to sign on to the new school, enrolling her oldest, Gabriel, in Tulsa Honor Academy’s inaugural fifth-grade class. Yllescas wanted more academic rigor for her daughters. She didn’t like when they came home without homework. At first, Gabriel didn’t want to go. She didn’t like the sound of the strict rules or having to leave her friends. But Yllescas insisted that with the school’s higher expectations, Gabriel would perform better.

Yllescas said she wants her daughters to graduate from college and have the educational opportunity she couldn’t as one of eight children growing up in Mexico. Her husband, who works in an auto-body shop, tells his daughters that he doesn’t want them to have to work as hard as he does.

College banners decorate the hallways and classrooms of Tulsa Honor Academy. The middle school’s mission is to prepare every student for college.

Photo: Kate Stringer

Gabriel is in sixth grade this year, and while she tells her mom she won’t admit to “really liking it,” she said she’s getting used to it and making friends. Her sister, Michelle, is a fifth-grader at Tulsa Honor Academy, and Yllescas said she loves it.

“Sometimes they talk to me, my kids, they talk to me about ‘When I’m in college,’ and I like it when they talk like that,” Yllescas said. “They do it because they told them in school.”

At Tulsa Honor Academy, 85 percent of students are Latino and 10 percent are African American. Of the Latino students, 67 percent speak Spanish at home and 16 percent are English-language learners.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, the new K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, places increased emphasis and accountability on the progress of English-language learners. It abolishes the Title III category, which previously tracked ELLs, and places their English proficiency into Title I, which provides educational oversight of other vulnerable learners, such as special education and low-income students. The test scores of ELL students will be excluded from state results for the students’ first school year in the U.S., used only as a measure of student growth in their second year, and included in the state’s overall results in their third year, according to the .

In November, the Oklahoma State Department of Education of its new ESSA accountability plan. The state is considering setting five years as the goal for English-language proficiency for ELL students, depending on their English skills when they enter school. ESSA also requires states to intervene in their lowest-performing districts. Oklahoma plans on keeping its A–F school-grading system, but it will have to revise it to include English-language proficiency and to fully take into account high school graduation rates.

Oklahoma picked chronic absenteeism as the nonacademic measure it will use in determining school quality. In Oklahoma, chronic absenteeism is defined as or more days of school. In Tulsa Public Schools, poorer students are more frequently absent, and Native Americans are more chronically absent than other racial groups, Gist told the school board at a November meeting. The findings were part of a larger report on racial and economic disparities facing the district. On state tests, 80 percent of black students and 70 percent of Hispanic students are performing at the lowest level in math, compared with 50 percent of white students. In reading, 35 percent to 40 percent of black and Hispanic students perform at the lowest level, compared with 20 percent of white students.

Gist and Urueta face those gaps every day as they pursue similar educational missions at different scales — Gist running a sprawling district with ever-shrinking funds while inspiring talented teachers back into the classroom; Urueta pushing all of her students, despite cultural expectations, to graduate college during the four years she has them.

“We as a school focus so much on closing the academic achievement gap, but we know we’re not ignorant,” Urueta said. “We know this academic achievement gap is a result of an opportunity gap.”

The Walton Family Foundation provides funding to ����Ӱ�� and to Building Excellent Schools.

In the city’s Third Ward, Nikki Knight’s sixth-grade daughter, Dreu, attends class in a temporary, modular building that has so little parking nearby that parents sometimes miss events or teacher meetings because they can’t find a place to leave their cars. Dreu loves dancing and performed in the KIPP Liberation College Prep talent show in December. But because the school has no auditorium or stage, rehearsals were held in the cafeteria, which doubles as a performance space for the school’s 400 students. The students, Knight said, could also use a larger library.

“The waiting list is long because it’s a great campus, [but] the kids, I believe, are a little bit limited in what they’re able to do because they don’t have a full experience because the campus doesn’t allow for that,” said Knight, whose three other children attend both charter and district schools. “In some instances, you give up facility for the benefits that charter schools offer. You give up space for academic exposure, academic opportunity.”

Using modular classrooms or repurposing existing buildings for charter schools is not unusual in Texas because by law, charters don’t have the access to state and local funding for constructing new schools that local independent school districts have.

Charter operators and school choice advocates are hoping to change some of that this legislative session, which begins January 10. But since the Texas Legislature meets for only 140 days every two years, if charter schools are to get the facilities funding they need to meet growing demand, they’ll have to work fast.

The building of YES Prep West in Houston, Texas.

Photo: Courtesy of Yes Prep Public Schools

Parents, charter operators and advocates say the nearly nonexistent funding that Texas currently provides for facilities has hamstrung their rapidly growing networks. While some charters, like YES Prep, have found creative ways to expand, others struggle to scrape together resources to accommodate the thousands of students lined up to attend.

“The largest inequity for charter schools is the lack of facilities funding,” David Dunn, executive director of the Texas Charter Schools Association, told the in July. “In 2013–2014, ISDs received $5.5 billion in facilities funding. Charter schools received $0.”

Unlike traditional school districts in the state, charters don’t have local property-tax bases to draw from for building new schools or funding renovations. They don’t get state funding for that purpose, either, unlike regular districts, which received $6.3 billion in state facilities funding in 2015–16, a Texas Education Agency spokeswoman said.

Traditional districts can get local tax revenue to cover debt service on bonds sold to build school facilities, as well as state aid to help poor districts with those debt service payments, she said. But charter schools in Texas get just $250 per pupil from the state for costs associated with opening a new facility, such as purchasing furniture — not for actual construction, and only for two years after the facility opens.

“That has put us into a position with less funding. The only way we can continue to grow is to work specifically on fundraising and philanthropy,” said Keith Weaver, managing director of operations for YES Prep, which has 16 schools in Houston.

The other main source of support is a program offered as part of the Permanent School Fund, in which the state guarantees bonds issued by charter schools and school districts for building costs, and helps ensure reasonable interest rates, thanks to Texas’s sterling AAA credit rating.

“We’re working to get facilities funding for all charter schools, regardless of size, regardless of location,” Dunn told ����Ӱ��. “We feel like providing facilities is a fundamental necessity for providing a good education.”

Several key initiatives that could advance those efforts during the 2017 legislative session in Austin:

— Property tax relief: Rep. Jim Murphy has filed House Bill 382/House Joint Resolution 34, seeking to exempt charter schools that lease facilities from real property taxes for the duration of the lease.

— Increased borrowing capacity for construction costs: Murphy also filed HB 467, seeking to expand the capacity of the bond guarantee program, which was created in 2014. Fourteen or so charters have maxed out the fund’s $900 million capacity, said Al McKenzie, director of state funding at the Texas Education Agency. “It’s a relatively new program, and there has been a lot of demand for it,” he said. “It’s pent-up demand, as charter schools can now refinance previously issued debt at more favorable interest rates.”

The state Board of Education approved a stopgap measure of sorts in late 2016 to expand the bond fund by $850 million in 2017, but sustaining the fund indefinitely requires legislation.

— Charter school advocates are pursuing other measures that haven’t yet been introduced. One priority, Dunn said, is issuing an updated version of Senate Bill 1900, which seeks to drive tax dollars toward charter schools for facilities needs based on a per-pupil formula.

—Another hoped-for initiative would require the state to consider the financial interests of charter holders when a charter is revoked, a charter school association spokeswoman said.

The association hosted Gov. Greg Abbott at its annual conference this fall, the first time a sitting governor had attended the state’s largest gathering of charter school proponents. Before an audience of about 1,600 in Austin, Abbott complimented the “efficiency” and “effectiveness” of the charter schools he had toured and was direct about his support for their growth, though he didn’t go into detail about facilities funding.

“It is time to open more charter schools in Texas and to fund them with the resources they need to succeed,” Abbott said. “It is time to empower all parents in Texas to choose the education pathway that is best for their child.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at the 2016 Texas Charter Schools Conference.

Photo: Courtesy of Texas Charter Schools Association.

Another key change is the departure of Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, Republican chairman of the House Public Education Committee, who is retiring. Aycock spent the last two sessions resisting school choice measures that groups like the charter schools association supported.

Aycock’s replacement will be selected later this month. As he was packing up his office in 2016, the House education committee was researching school choice programs at the direction of Speaker Joe Straus, who has said he will on school choice initiatives.

(����Ӱ��: After Years of Stifling School Choice in Texas, the Speaker of the House May Be Singing a Different Tune)

Charter schools may also have an ally in newly elected San Antonio Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, who co-founded a nonprofit to help at-risk youth in 1991 that became one of Texas’s first charter schools. Now known as the , it serves pre-K through 12th grade.

“I want to see how traditional public schools and public charter schools can coexist so we can educate all of our children,” Gervin-Hawkins said in a radio a week before the November election.

Meanwhile, in the Texas Senate, which has passed several charter facilities funding bills in recent years — only to see them quashed in the House — Education Committee Chairman Larry Taylor believes debates over funding and a separate voucher proposal will resurface this year.

“School choice will be one of the things we’ll be discussing,” he said at a previewing the 2017 session. “Which is the best way for Texas to provide more opportunities for all of our students?”