Jametrice Powell McAdams, a parent of a charter school student from Hueytown, Alabama, says, “Raising my voice for all charter schools starts with me raising my voice for my son’s charter school. Raising my voice means standing up for my son’s future. Raising my voice means being an active fighter against the school-to prison-pipeline statistics. Raising my voice means my son gets a fair shot at a quality education.”

Julia Rivera-Tapia, charter school parent and administrator from Las Cruces, New Mexico, says, “Advocating for charter schools has become one of the most important responsibilities I have. I believe that every family deserves the freedom to choose the best school for their children, and charter schools offer that option. As a parent myself, I have seen the transformative effect that charter schools can have on children’s academic and personal growth. My three children have been studying in charter schools since the beginning of their academic journey, and I have personally witnessed the positive impact it has had on their lives, enabling them to achieve great success in their studies while retaining their bilingualism and becoming amazing individuals.”

“Raising my voice for charter schools means making sure all families have a choice to send their students to a school that best represents them. When I raise my voice for charter schools, I am doing so for our community and our students, who deserve the opportunities we provide and the ability to navigate and make informed choices about their child’s future. More people need to be aware of the power of community and culturally grounded education,” says Zak Domingello, executive director at Ricardo Flores Magon Academy in Denver.

Former Washington State lawmaker Eric Pettigrew says, “As a member of our state House, I became an advocate for charter public schools — which I believe provide a great complement to traditional public schools, especially for students of color. This past legislative session, as our lawmakers considered what policies to advance, I continued to advocate for these unique public schools and urged my former colleagues to ensure that all students across Washington state have access to a public school that meets their needs.”

Cheryl Stahle, academic administrator at West Virginia Virtual Academy in Parkersburg, says, “My ‘why’ as an advocate for charter schools is deeply rooted in the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to succeed and reach their full potential. Charter schools teach children that anything is possible when they embrace the unknown without fear. I am passionate about empowering young people to shape their own destinies and showing them the unlimited possibilities that are only constrained by their imagination. Through my work in charter schools, I strive to be a quiet disrupter and leave a legacy of transformative change in the lives of students and families.”

“Public charter schools such as the Hmong American Peace Academy are transformational,” says Dr. Chris Her-Xiong, founder and executive director of the Milwaukee school. “The scholars are transformed from at-risk to ambitious, independent thinkers and prepared to succeed in college and in life. The families are transformed through the children taking strides toward success, opting out of the cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity. The communities served by the schools are transformed through shared ambitions and experiences. The cities are transformed through the proof that turnarounds are possible and that education can deliver on its promise of prosperity. To transform a life is to transform our world, and that is why I advocate for charter schools.” 

Daniyal Hussain, a high school senior at Cottonwood Classical Preparatory Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says, “Something that makes me most excited about the future of public education is the aspect of student advocacy. I originally thought that because I was a high school student, no one would want to listen to what I had to say. That was far from the truth. In fact, I was able to attend recent legislative meetings where I could say what I truly thought was important. I am excited for the future where we will have more students speaking out and more people wanting to listen to students about what is truly needed for public education.”

When we raise our voices, more people hear us. That’s why we raise our voices to advocate for charter schools. We need everyone to hear us screaming from the rooftops: Every student deserves a high-quality public education.

Today, more than 35 years (yikes!) after I sat in her classroom, Mrs. Campbell continues to inspire me. I’ve dedicated my career to improving education policy. I wake up every day working to make public education better, not just for students and families, but for teachers like Mrs. Campbell who know that offering options helps all families.

I’m thrilled that National Charter Schools Week coincides with Teacher Appreciation Week this year, because charter schools are powered by teachers and other visionary educators who make a huge difference in the lives of more than 3.7 million students — two-thirds of whom are from low-income, Black, or Latino communities.

is the single biggest in-school factor in determining student success. There’s lots of fluffy talk about how important teachers are, but most of the time they are treated like identical cogs in a wheel. Charter schools do it differently.

Public charters offer an environment that encourages teachers to flourish, treats them like professionals and rewards their excellence through competitive pay and advancement opportunities. This allows them to chart their own course, whether it’s dedicating themselves to the classroom, moving into leadership roles or opening their own schools. Charter schools also rely on teachers’ judgment about what works for students and what doesn’t, providing the flexibility to adapt curriculum and instruction as needed.

One of the key reasons charter schools were created was to give educators the freedom to test new ways of teaching. It’s also one of the reasons the late Albert Shanker, leader of the American Federation of Teachers, supported charter schools. Even Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, is a charter school founder. Today, the sector boasts more than 206,000 teachers — and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is especially proud that these educators reflect the diversity of the students they teach. The most recently available data (2020-21 school year) show that 69.3% of charter school students were children of color, compared with 53.4% of district students.

According to the , during that same time period, 32% of charter school teachers were people of color, versus 19% of district teachers. Similarly, 33% of charter principals were people of color, compared with 22% of district school leaders. And Black charter school students are to have a Black teacher than their peers in traditional public schools.

This matters because having at least can help students of color reach higher achievement levels than students who do not. Teachers who share a similar background to their students may be more likely than teachers who do not to make a personal connection, inspire them to love learning and help them realize that they might lead their own classroom in the future.

This year, during National Charter Schools Week, the National Alliance is proud to honor seven groundbreaking teachers with our for outstanding service to their schools and communities and for going above and beyond for their students:

Andrea Thomas is a passionate educator and community leader from the Diné tribe in New Mexico. Thomas teaches at and is vice president of the Navajo Nation Board of Education, empowering her to act on her core conviction that students of all cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds deserve access to excellent teachers and high-quality instruction in their own communities.

Cielo Acosta is a third-year teacher at . Like many charter school graduates, she returned to teach at the charter school where she had been a student. A passionate athlete and student-sports enthusiast, Acosta incorporates sports strategies and themes into students’ curriculum. 

David Singer started his career in urban education 20 years ago as a high school math teacher, ultimately deciding he wanted to be a school leader and builder. He helped launch Denver’s , which has grown to a network of two public charter schools serving nearly 700 children, with a third campus recently approved.

Tiffany Ortego is the kindergarten lead teacher at One City Schools in Madison, Wisconsin. Beloved by all her students, she helped create the Preschool Garden Space and created the school’s 4K Volunteer Reading and Early Literacy program. 

Third-grade teacher Nathaniel Dunn returned to his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, because he wanted to become the teacher he wanted when he was in school. Outside of the regular school day at i3 Academy, he is an EdFarm Teacher Fellow. This program enhances the learning experience of teachers and equips them to be designers and facilitators of future-focused learning.

Dr. Alissa Russell is a master teacher, instructional coach and math department head at Life School Oak Cliff public charter school, near Dallas. She uses Socratic Seminar, peer partnerships and other innovative instructional practices in her classroom. 

Jermar Rountree is a health and physical education teacher at Center City Public Charter School,

Brightwood Campus. He teaches not only game activities and sports, but also social, emotional and mental growth. He has established in-school, after-school and weekend partnerships with organizations to help kids grow in all facets of life. He was a 2023 National Teacher of the Year finalist.

These teacher changemakers offer just a few examples of how educators can leverage charter schools to advance their passion for helping students, liberate their creativity, inspire their community and expand their impact. We are honored to celebrate their contributions, and those of their 206,000 colleagues across America, this National Charter Schools Week.

Children in Northwest Arkansas who have experienced trauma could soon have the option to attend a charter school carefully designed to serve their needs.

The team that has applied to open wants to create a school to serve children who have had adverse experiences such as losing a parent to death or incarceration, witnessing or experiencing violence, and living in foster care.

Hope Academy is the brainchild of Maury Peterson and Jake Gibbs, the executive director and education director at the Northwest Arkansas Children’s Shelter in Bentonville, Arkansas. The shelter already runs a few classrooms overseen by the local school district for the children who stay at the shelter after being removed from their homes because of abuse, neglect or abandonment. The charter would be separate from those classrooms and open to children from across Northwest Arkansas. Peterson and Gibbs plan to use what they have learned from running the shelter to create a trauma-informed school for children in the community.

“Some kids need a different environment” than the district can offer, said Debbie Jones, superintendent of . “They certainly need more specialized care than we can provide them in our settings.”

The shelter takes in children of all ages from across the state who are removed from their homes because of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Children in Arkansas have more than average exposure to adverse childhood experiences, according to data�� by the nonprofit Child Trends. An adverse childhood experience could include living with a parent or guardian who died or was incarcerated, seeing domestic abuse, witnessing or being the victim of violence and other traumatic events.

Jones said she does not view the potential charter school as competition. Rather, the superintendent encouraged the shelter to apply for the charter and wrote a letter of support for it. A small number of students in the traditional schools — Jones estimated less than 0.5 percent in her district of about 17,000 students —��have needs more severe than the district can meet. She thinks they would benefit from the small classes and the wraparound services the new school plans to offer.

“I know that they can do it well,” she said.

The charter school, if approved, would share a campus and back office staff with the shelter, and Gibbs would oversee both. However, the charter would be separate from the shelter’s classrooms and living quarters to maintain privacy for the students staying there.

Peterson and Gibbs both feel a sense of responsibility to take what they have learned running the shelter school and use it to help more students in their community who have experienced trauma.

“Looking at all of the issues in the community and in the state in terms of maltreatment and kids that have experienced trauma, we decided that we wanted to expand our services and really open up to the community and let them benefit from all of our years of experience helping children who have experienced trauma,” Peterson said.

They will find out in August if the state board will authorize the charter, and they hope to open the school in August 2020.

Hope Academy students would benefit from existing partnerships the shelter has and additional wraparound services, such as a pediatrician and counselors who come to provide care to the children during their stay. Peterson said she is also considering other ways to help the families using resources the shelter already has in place, such as having the�� freeze meals for them to take home or giving parents vouchers to shop at the thrift store the organization runs.

“I really believe that we owe it to our community, to the future of our community, to expand our services and our capabilities to a larger audience,” Gibbs told ����Ӱ��.

If approved, the school will start with one class each of kindergarten through third grade and add a grade each year through sixth grade. The maximum class size would be 10 students per class. The charter notes that if fewer than 10 students enroll per class, the school will still operate while continuing to reach out to other families who may be interested.

One Bentonville parent, Kyle Meredith, said the school would be a good fit for students like his daughter, who has behavioral problems stemming from a traumatic background. Meredith and his wife adopted their daughter, now 9, in 2015 after being her foster parents; she was removed from her biological home when she was 2 1/2. She has some special needs that aren’t always met in a traditional classroom, he said.

“Trauma-informed schooling and care seems really amazing to a family like ours,” he said.

As an open-enrollment charter school, Hope Academy would have to accept applications from anyone and use a lottery if it receives more applications than it has seats. Being clear about the mission will help the school recruit the types of students it hopes to help, the president of the shelter’s board of directors .

In , only the state board of education can authorize charter schools. The shelter is applying for a five-year charter, the maximum length allowed by state law.

The shelter, located a few miles from the corporate Walmart offices, is funded by state dollars and through donations and fundraising. It also receives income from the recently opened thrift store that sells its extra donations. The charter school will live under the same nonprofit as the shelter and will benefit from much of its funding.

Superintendent Jones, who previously served as assistant commissioner at the state department of education and was a member of the state’s charter authorization board, said this school would be the first school of its kind in Arkansas and would be rare, if not unique, in the United States.

Even though children stay at the shelter for a short time — typically 45 days at most —��Peterson said children have often come to love school and feel excited about reading by the time they leave. That excitement is what she hopes to spread with the charter.

“If we can take that and expand that to other children in the community, it’s going to be a wonderful thing, for not only those kids but those families and our overall community as a whole,” she said.

Update: The Arkansas State Board of Education approved the Hope Academy charter application on Oct. 10, 2019. The school is now slated to open for the 2020-21 school year for students in kindergarten through third grade.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation supports both Northwest Arkansas Children’s Shelter and ����Ӱ��.

The new Hall of Fame inductees are trailblazing history by putting the needs of students and the school models that make them successful before the status quo agenda of the education bureaucracy. These educators work tirelessly to do the right thing by students and create schools that help children achieve at the highest levels.

2019 Hall of Fame Inductees

• Margaret Fortune, president and CEO of Fortune School of Education, California
• Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change, Minnesota
• Fernando Zulueta, president of Academica, Florida

For the past 13 years, the annual Champions for Charters Award has also been given to local, state and federal policymakers who have taken real action to ensure that every student has access to a great public school.

This year, as in years past, these legislators and school leaders include Republicans and Democrats who demonstrate that supporting high-quality public charter schools remains a bipartisan priority.

The notion that a child’s destiny should not hinge on zip code, race/ethnicity or the size of a parent’s paycheck is something that leaders on both sides of the aisle agree on. We must continue to unite under our shared belief that each child deserves the opportunity to have a bright future.

Charter schools depend on lawmakers and other officials to grasp the critical role these schools play in the public education system. On the state level, we are recognizing two Utah policymakers who have shown this understanding over the course of their careers: former Speaker of the House Greg Hughes and former state Sen. Howard Stephenson. The two Republicans were instrumental in shepherding a bill to ensure equitable funding to charter schools through the legislature in 2016, and Stephenson is credited with leading the charge on nearly every significant piece of charter school legislation Utah has passed. Today, Hughes is chair of Utah Charter Families, a nascent 501(c)(4) organization mobilizing the state’s charter school parents into a fighting force.

On the federal front, we are recognizing Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), both of whom, throughout their long careers in Congress, have staunchly supported charter schools. This year’s Rising Stars Award goes to new members of Congress on the other side of the aisle: Reps. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) and Salud Carbajal (D-CA).

2019 Champions for Charters:

Federal Legislators

• Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) – Rising Star Award
• Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) – Lifetime Achievement Award
• Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI)
• Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
• Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
• Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) – Rising Star Award
• Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC)

State Leaders

• Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran (R-FL)
• Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN)

State Legislators

• Rep. Earl Jaques Jr. (D-DE)
• State Sen. David Sokola (D-DE)
• State Sen. Manny Diaz Jr. (R-FL)
• Former State Sen. Phil Pavlov (R-MI)
• Rep. Rebecca Roeber (R-MO)
• Assemblyman Marcos Crespo (D-NY)
• Rep. Harold Dutton Jr. (D-TX)
• Former House Speaker Greg Hughes (R-UT)
• Former state Sen. Howard Stephenson (R-UT)

Local School Board Member

• Nick Melvoin, Los Angeles Unified School District

The futures of public school children deeply depend upon policymakers and passionate educators. When our public leaders carry a torch on behalf of America’s students, only then does the next generation of kids have a chance of achieving the American Dream.

is senior vice president of advocacy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. is the senior vice president for state advocacy and support for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

How did we do it? This work has been nuanced and complicated, but when I look at what distinguishes education in New Orleans, 10 things stand out:

Aligned leadership for 13 years

Since Hurricane Katrina, the leaders managing our system of schools have shared a clear vision for local education. We believe that the people closest to children should be making decisions about their schools, because principals know their students better than a district administrator does. We know that schools need real autonomy and families deserve true accountability. We believe great talent is key, so we must recruit and support great educators. We maintain a passionate pursuit of equity and justice, setting these principles as the bedrock of each policy and plan we make. By uniting in these convictions, we have been able to make real, positive change.

High accountability standards: Only schools that meet the bar remain open

Since 2006, no charter operator with a school performing below the state’s academic requirements at the time of its renewal has been allowed to continue running that school. Though it is never easy to close or transition a school, we cannot allow students to remain in classrooms where their needs are not being met. Our community largely stands behind the practice; no parents want their children in a school where they aren’t being supported, challenged and educated. In a , around 60 percent of New Orleanian respondents agreed that “schools that are consistently rated a D should be turned over to a different operator to be restarted.”

Equitable citywide enrollment: Students can apply to any public school in New Orleans

In almost all U.S. districts, a child’s address determines which public school he or she will attend. This perpetuates inequity, as children from wealthier families end up in stronger schools with access to more opportunities. In New Orleans, there are no default neighborhood schools. Instead, families can apply to nearly all city public schools through , our unified enrollment process. Families apply for the schools they feel are best for their children. In the main round of this year’s OneApp, 82 percent of incoming kindergarten and ninth-grade applicants received one of their top three choices.

Thriving band programs: Music fills our classrooms and spills onto our sidewalks

In New Orleans schools, music is not just an extracurricular. It is a part of life. Around 60 percent of our K-12 schools have bands; their directors are heroes and their drum majors are celebrities. Student musicians win awards and go on to national fame. During Mardi Gras, school bands march in more than 70 parades, performing for more than a million revelers. In a nation where arts are often pushed aside in schools, this focus stands out; New Orleans knows that strong academics must exist alongside thriving creative expression.

A requirement to fill open spots: Schools cannot turn students away from open seats at any grade

Charter schools are public schools, and in New Orleans, we believe that public schools must provide a free, high-quality education to as many students as they can. All New Orleans charter schools are required to backfill — accept new students for open seats in any grade, no matter the time of year. This is critical for equity, providing families that are new to the district or desire a transfer with as many school options as possible. Backfilling keeps the highest-demand schools at maximum capacity, so they can benefit the most students.

An engaged community: More than 400 local leaders serve on charter boards

Though the elected Orleans Parish School Board has just seven members, an additional 400 community members are deeply involved with our schools as members of charter boards. They are educators, business and nonprofit leaders, scientists, lawyers, social workers and more, bringing expertise from many fields and experiences to help charter management organizations and school leaders run the schools.

Equitable funding: Resources for our schools are allocated based on students’ unique needs

New Orleans’s public schools are funded not only based on how many students they educate but also on the number of students with additional needs and the intensity of those needs. Schools get more funding if they educate more English learners, students who are overage for their grade and students with special needs. The special-needs funding is also proportional to the specific services each child requires.

District bureaucracy does not make decisions for classrooms: Principals, teachers and networks do

In most districts, many aspects of how schools are run — from bell schedules to curriculum — are determined at the district level. In New Orleans, however, we know that teachers, principals and charter networks, not district administrators, are the experts on their students. For example, if principals believe their students would benefit from a restorative justice model, they are empowered to put that into place. In a traditional district, a principal would need to go through layers of approval to even attempt such a change; here, they can make and implement new decisions more efficiently. Ultimately, this enables school leaders to respond more quickly to their particular students’ needs. When parents send their child to a public school in our city, they know their principal runs that school based on a true knowledge of their child and their classmates, not on sweeping, districtwide mandates.

Clear roles systemwide: School board members, educators and community partners collaborate

Three forces support our school system: regulators, innovators and collaborators. Our central regulator is the Orleans Parish School Board, which manages everything from enrollment to facilities. Our innovators are our teachers and school leaders, who come up with great ideas to improve student learning. And, because students’ needs extend beyond the classroom — including issues like housing, hunger, mental health, early child care and career readiness — we collaborate with nonprofits that provide needed supports.

Steadfast, visionary talent: Our educators work tenaciously for what each child deserves

Beyond all the policy and planning, our schools have dramatically improved — as shown in a — and continue to improve because of our people. Every day, our school leaders, teachers and support staff educate and support our students, setting them up to thrive in college and careers. They work hard all day in the classroom, then show up to band practices, school plays and basketball games to cheer students on. Our educators . They encourage young people to for what they believe. They and . They are the true backbone of our system.

In truth, our progress has been much like a gumbo — there are some basic, familiar ingredients as a base, but our own creative twist sets us apart. These 10 ingredients are a large part of the improvement we have seen over the past 13 years. They will also fuel our progress going forward; New Orleans’s schools are strong and poised to be stronger each day. Together with our engaged community and devoted families, we will move forward for our brilliant, unstoppable students.

Patrick Dobard is CEO of New Schools for New Orleans.

Of course, 2019 wasn’t the first time charter schools would see attacks from the legislature. The 2017 session saw a charter school moratorium reach the floor of the state House of Representatives, only to die after three Democrats broke with their party and sided with Republicans to defeat the measure. But between 2017 and 2019, two of those Democrats were successfully primaried out of their seats. Multiple new union-backed Democratic members in the House didn’t seem to help matters either. This set a foreboding stage for our charter schools, even though public charters in the state have made incredible gains in quality (42 percent of schools received an A or a B in the state accountability system) and displayed exceptional demand from students and parents (enrollment in charter schools has increased 33 percent since 2014).

Fire and brimstone weren’t the only narratives in the run-up to the legislative session this year. It became clear last spring that New Mexico was on the brink of a massive increase in state revenue, thanks to oil and gas. Further, a court had ruled that the state had not provided enough resources for education, particularly for at-risk students. As the 60-day session neared in mid-January, there was a ray of hope: Maybe the real fights would be in determining how to spend $1 billion in new revenue and how much would go toward public education, rather than tearing down public charter schools.

That didn’t happen. Not only was the moratorium on the docket, but a new, more dangerous proposal was also in play: a statewide charter school enrollment cap that would decimate school choice for families. The challenge seemed insurmountable because a provision was placed in a bill that provided nearly a half-billion dollars for at-risk students in the state and salary increases of up to 20 percent for teachers. Suddenly, a landmark omnibus bill that contained provisions the charter community supported also presented serious risk to the charter movement.

With battle lines drawn, Public Charter Schools of New Mexico sought to formalize a coalition that had long held similar interests but hadn’t worked together to fight for them. Excellent Schools New Mexico, the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, Albuquerque Public Schools, New Mexico KidsCAN and Public Charter Schools of New Mexico joined forces to defeat these measures and leverage our resources to educate legislators on these issues. It took a coalition like ours, and the relationships developed by our staff and board members over decades, to galvanize and prepare lawmakers with facts about charter schools.

But those efforts weren’t enough. In a true test of the faith we had in the impact of charter schools, we went to the people. We commissioned a survey from the state’s most reputable pollster to ask what Albuquerque-area families thought of charter school development. Overwhelmingly, across all demographic groups and across all parts of the city, parents wanted more charter schools. The poll revealed that more than two-thirds of parents opposed a moratorium on new charter schools. Further, when asked whether they wanted more charter schools, nearly 70 percent said yes. We published these results with urgency, receiving media and, most importantly, fuel for important conversations at the state capital.

Public momentum supporting charter schools was growing, and the state’s largest newspaper delivered one of its best editorials in recent memory: .

But the real game changer was leveraging our charter school communities to advocate for themselves. We recruited charter school board members and families, and this community dispatched more than 1,000 phone calls and emails to their legislators throughout the session. Our coalition provided multiple avenues to engage with legislators, and we provided easy-to-use talking points and charts to help our broader community fight for itself. In a small state like New Mexico, you likely see your legislator at your local grocery story or restaurant. This makes our elected officials more accountable to their communities.

In the end, acting strategically as a coalition of charter supporters, shining a spotlight on public opinion and empowering our larger community to advocate was successful. Strong leadership emerged from both parties that led to bipartisan action against the measures. The enrollment cap was removed from the education funding bill in its first committee hearing, and the charter school moratorium, largely expected to pass the House easily, stalled in its second hearing despite the support of teachers unions and other advocates of traditional education.

Eight percent of the state’s students attend charter schools, and after 20 years, we have tens of thousands of charter school alumni. We activated the broader community established by our schools to defeat the charter takedown. Our community spoke loudly this legislative session, and we’ll be working tirelessly with our partners to ensure that their voice continues to be heard.

Matthew Pahl is executive director of Public Charter Schools of New Mexico.

During the year I student–taught in Washington, D.C., I was fortunate enough to observe and teach at multiple public schools, both district and charter. The two charters schools where I spent many hours were vastly different from one another.

Washington Latin Public Charter School had a diverse-by-design student body, a classics-based curriculum and a Socratic approach to teaching. SEED Public Charter High School, on the other hand, was a college-preparatory, residential school located in one of the District’s poorest neighborhoods. It served a student body that was 98 percent African-American and over 60 percent economically disadvantaged, utilizing a holistic learning model that customized academic, social and emotional mental health services for each pupil.

Despite their differences, both schools were high-performing, and, unlike the district-operated schools where I student-taught, the educators running these schools had the autonomy to design unique learning models and create school cultures that met the specific needs and interests of their students.

Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the extraordinary amount of innovative school models — STEM, project-based, dual-language immersion, Montessori, etc. — in the District’s charter sector, which enrolls nearly 50 percent of the city’s public school students. This diversity of school designs, combined with D.C.’s universal enrollment system, has created a variety of educational options so that each student can find a best-fit school.

For this series, I decided to visit schools that were strikingly different from one another and used their unique qualities to do great things for kids. Like many of the public charter schools in Washington, D.C., these five “schools of the future” all provide a high-quality education, but the curriculum, teaching style, and school climate vary greatly from school to school. Center City Public Charter Schools Petworth campus has remained intentionally small since its conversion from a Catholic school. Moreover, it has continue to serve students from the community and adapt its service to meet the changing needs of the neighborhood as more English language learners moved to the area.

Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, a diverse-by-design school, serves students from across the District and emphasizes student thinking and creativity with its project-based curriculum. Serving a majority low-income population, Thurgood Marshall Academy (TMA) is the District’s only public high school without a feeder pattern or entrance exam. Prepared to take all kids regardless of their academic level, TMA has a law-themed curriculum, high academic standards and impressive college acceptance rates. Currently in its first year, Digital Pioneers Academy has implemented a “coding for everyone” learning model by integrating computer science class as part of its core curriculum. Lastly, Ingenuity Prep, intentionally located in the area of the District that needs the most additional seats in high-quality schools, uses computer-based learning and co-teaching to maximize the amount of time students spending learning in small groups.

Each of the schools offers a different type of school experience for D.C.’s public school students. And when students land in the right school, they can flourish in surprising ways. Here are their stories.

Center City Petworth: Inside One of America’s First Catholic-to-Charter School Conversions — ‘Intentionally Small,’ Built Around Character & Thriving

Three rows of second-graders stand facing the front of the classroom. A speaker emits sounds. First, a door creaking. Then, footsteps thudding and a wolf howling, all followed by the unmistakable opening riff of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

The students put their hands on their knees and take four big steps forward before swinging their arms quickly from side to side. When they’ve finished performing this simplified version of Jackson’s choreography, many fall to the floor, giggling.

Jordan Daugherty teaches dance at Center City Public Charter School’s Petworth campus. Today, her second-grade class is learning the difference between improv and choreography.

“That’s great,” Daugherty says. “Now face me upstage. That was choreography. Remember, improv is when you feel the music and move with it. Choreography is when you make up the moves in advance to match the song.”

At Center City Petworth, all students take dance year-round as a part of their regular schedule. It’s an enrichment course, along with STEM and physical education, all components of the school’s commitment to providing every student with a comprehensive education.

“We believe that we need to develop good citizens and well-rounded people, as well as scholars,” says Principal Nazo Burgy. “To do that, our students need to be socially and emotionally healthy. Play is really important to early childhood, and this is a place where kids can be kids. We have schedules, procedures, and routines, but our hallways are not silent.”

Center City Petworth is part of Center Public Charter Schools, a network of six intentionally small schools operating in four of D.C.’s eight wards. Each school has between 200 and 270 students in grades pre-K through eight and only one class of about 25 students per grade.

The Center City network began when a group of private Catholic schools, experiencing financial problems, was on the verge of being shuttered. Many of these schools, like Petworth, had occupied an important place in the community for nearly a century.

“Families wanted the school to survive,” says June Felix, a kindergarten teacher at Center City Petworth and the last remaining teacher from the school’s era as a Catholic institution. “Teachers and parents rallied behind it becoming a charter school.”

In 2008, as part of the first Catholic-to-charter school conversion in the country, the Petworth campus, along with five other Catholic schools, became Center City Public Charter Schools.

“It’s been a great change,” says Felix. “As a Catholic school, we could not take all students. Our community had started to change, and community members who wanted to come to our school couldn’t afford it. We didn’t have the funding to help students with special needs, either. As a charter, we can serve all of them.”

Today, Center City Petworth’s student population is approximately 45 percent Hispanic and 46 percent African-American, with 60 percent of students designated as economically disadvantaged. Currently, 25 percent of Petworth’s students are English language learners, a number that has been increasing each year.

“Our schools are like small neighborhood schools, so they mostly reflect our local community. Our size and the supply and demand of the school lottery, as well as the sibling preference, influences that,” says Alicia Passante, Center City’s ESL program manager. “At Petworth, almost all of our Spanish-speaking students’ families come from El Salvador. We also have a lot of families from Ethiopia and the Philippines.”

After the conversion, the schools’ new leadership removed all religious elements, but they decided to keep the schools small so that teachers could continue to emphasize character development and relationship-building, in addition to providing a high-quality educational program.

For the past three years, the D.C. Public Charter School Board has awarded Center City Petworth a Tier 1 ranking. Although the overall percentage of students scoring at or above proficiency on state exams is on par with the average score for all D.C. public schools, a larger percentage of the school’s “at-risk” and Black/African-American students achieve proficiency than the district-wide average, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s newly released school report card system. In addition, Center City Petworth boasts a higher in-seat attendance rate, a higher re-enrollment rate and a lower rate of chronic absenteeism than the district-wide averages.

Following the script — and not following the script

“Because of our size, teachers really get to know students,” says Hannah Groff, the schools’ language access coordinator. “They watch them grow up from kindergarten. Often, they know the family well before they even teach a student, and they often teach siblings.”

Center City Petworth prescribes Common Core-aligned curricula and materials for teachers, like Wit and Wisdom, a K-8 English Language Arts curriculum that emphasizes writing, language, speaking and listening standards by focusing each unit on an essential question and thematic text set, and Eureka Math, a pre-K–12 curriculum that stresses daily fluency lessons, conceptual learning and rigor. While the units and day-to-day lessons are provided, teacher creativity is still valued.

“We want teachers to follow the script and not follow the script,” says Passante. “For instance, Eureka Math was too advanced for many of our kids at first, so teachers had to find creative ways to scaffold it. And Wit and Wisdom is a very rich curriculum, but it needs hooks for student buy-in, and hooks come from teacher experience. They’ve got to make it their own by bringing their personalities into it.”

Because of the low teacher-student ratio, students receive a lot of individual attention. Pre-K to first grade is self-contained, taught by a lead teacher and instructional aid. In upper elementary school, teachers have looped classes — they teach the same students for two grades. From second through fifth, students take humanities with one teacher and math and science with another. In middle school, teachers teach all three grades, and there’s both a science and a math teacher. For all grades, the content area teacher usually co-teaches with an inclusion teacher, who specializes in English as a Second Language or special education, depending on the needs of the students in the class.

“There’s pros and cons to every teaching model,” Passante says. “The pro here is that teachers become masters in their content area, but it’s a lot of work because they prep for multiple grades. The big pro for our students is the building between grade levels. When a second-grade teacher also teaches third grade, that teacher knows exactly where the students need to be standards-wise at the end of second grade to be successful next year.”

Teachers also choose what electives the school offers. Middle school students take a different elective each quarter, usually choosing from three or four offerings. This quarter, some students are taking tap dance while others are taking robotics, where they use Lego Mindstorms kits to build and program their own robots. During the first day of the art elective, P.E. teacher “Coach Sam” Daniel taught students about the minimalist line drawings of Pablo Picasso before they created single-line drawings of their hands, in pen, so that they couldn’t erase. Teachers have to be informed about their elective subjects but not necessarily experts in the subject matter.

School leaders also encourage teachers to make time for their “passion projects.” Fifth-grade humanities teacher Shannon Nuzzelillo loves animals, so she partnered with the Washington Animal Rescue League to provide kids with volunteer opportunities. Her students have learned how to approach animals, and they’ve also practiced their reading skills by snuggling up with, and reading aloud to, a canine friend.

Middle school science teacher Mark Joyner’s classroom is decked out in��Star Wars��memorabilia. A bookcase behind his desk is filled with action figures. Stickers of C-3PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett and others cover bulletin boards. At the beginning of the year, he asks students to decide whether they want to join the Light Side or the Dark Side. Then the battle begins. Each day, they compete in “Science Wars”: trivia questions based on the week’s lessons. A drawing of lightsabers on the wall, with a scale ranging from Sith apprentice to Sith Lord and Youngling to Jedi Master, marks whether the Light Side or the Dark Side is the week’s winner. Joyner’s love for��Star Wars��is apparent throughout his classroom, except for the turtles. They are named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; he let the students pick those.

Strengthening the small school community

“Being a small school is a blessing and a curse for students,” says Principal Burgy. “Everyone gets to know each other very well. The downside is you’ve got to learn to get along with your peers even if you don’t like someone very much. We focus a lot on social and emotional learning to help strengthen our community relationships.”

Each morning begins with a school-wide, student-led meeting. The students play games, talk about character and practice mindfulness. Each week, the meetings emphasize a different virtue that benefits the community, like patience, generosity and honesty. Every Friday, school leaders honor a student who demonstrates that week’s virtue.

Each grade also has monthly social-emotional lessons. Fourth-graders recently had a lesson on “thinking before speaking,” while fifth-graders focused on self-regulation and calming strategies, such as deep breathing, getting a drink of water and internal counting.

Because it can be challenging to have 3-year-olds and 13-year-olds in the same building, students participate in a “little buddies” program to promote cross-grade community. The older students partner with younger students as reading buddies, and together they read a book one month and then complete a project on it the next. At the end of the school year, they also work together on a school beautification project, such as painting the playground fence or creating a mural for the hallways.

“The ‘little buddy’ system helps us improve our social interactions with the younger ones,” says eighth-grader Chelsea Lazo. “It makes me happy. I like how we get to teach them and help out the community. It makes me think that when I grow up, I might like to do something where I help others.”

Her classmate, Nash Campo, agrees. “Even by reading with someone, I can build small relationships, and it helps me get to know my community better,” he says.

Staff members also conduct home visits to strengthen relationships with students and families. For the 2018-19 school year, the staff’s goal is to conduct a home visit to 90 percent of families. Lazo thinks that home visits are especially helpful when a new teacher or student comes into the community. “My mom felt relieved after the new teacher visited because she got to know her and felt better about sending my little brother into her class,” she says.

“Parent buy-in is the first big outcome. I can see that many parents feel more comfortable,” says Mike Bailey, a first-grade teacher and leader of the school’s family engagement program. “Once they see we have the best intentions for their children, they trust us. Once that trust is built, then we can work together to grow the child.”

Throughout the year, the school has many events — cultural heritage nights, family potluck dinners, a visit to a pumpkin patch, family breakfasts and more — that they encourage parents to attend.

“Parents become really trusting of this school because of the small community,” says Groff, the language access coordinator. “If they have issues, even when they aren’t school-related, this school is often the first place they come because they feel safe saying, ‘I need help.’”

“My parents, especially my mom, really like this school,” says Campo. He began attending Center City Petworth in second grade when his family moved to the U.S. from the Philippines. “It took a while for me to speak English, but my teachers were supportive. Over time, my parents got to know everyone at the school — all the teachers and staff — because everyone is really kind. In fourth grade, I had a mild stroke, and Ms. Burgy was really helpful. She took me to the hospital and explained everything to my mom, so she wouldn’t panic.”

The challenge of saying farewell

The transition from the small environment of Center City Petworth to a large-scale high school can be difficult, but the school’s staff works with students so that they’ll know what to expect.

“We really teach our kids how to be their advocates because we know that they’re used to this small school, and that high school could be a rude awakening for them. We hope that by teaching them to advocate for themselves from the start, they’ll understand how to use their voice to get what they need to be successful,” says Passante.

Eighth-grade students have a high school prep class each week with a counselor. The counselors work hard to assist students with getting into the best schools. They do research to match GPAs and test scores with selective and private school requirements to figure out which schools they’re eligible for. The students go on shadow visits to schools where they shadow other students, which helps them find schools where they’re a good fit. Each student applies to five schools through the class. Students participate in mock interviews with counselors. They write application essays and, for private schools, complete scholarship applications.

“It’s nerve-racking,” says Lazo, who hopes to attend either The School Without Walls or Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School next year. “All the applications and the essays, wondering if and where you’ll get in, but it’s also good because when you apply for high school, you’ll get used to how it feels and what to do when you apply for college.”

Counselors also work with families to help educate parents on why a convenient neighborhood school might not be the best option for their child. Many parents don’t like the idea of sending their son or daughter to a school outside the local community. Often counselors have to explain to parents why taking a bus for 40 minutes to a school across town will benefit their child in the long run.

“Our goal is to send 80 percent of our students to Tier 1 charter schools, private schools or highly selective DCPS schools. Last year, we were just shy of that, with 76 percent,” says Passante. “In general, we try to steer our kids away from the neighborhood high schools, but some do go there and are successful.”

Most students are excited about the prospect of starting high school, but they also realize that they’ve been fortunate to have such a homey environment during their early school years.

“Everyone here is a part of my second family,” says eighth-grader Ashley Velasquez, who has been attending Center City Petworth since kindergarten. “Everyone is so open, and the teachers are there whenever you need them.”

Campo agrees: “Years from now, I’ll still remember how we were like a family here.”

Inspired Teaching Demonstration School: A D.C. School Meant to Inspire Teachers and Students

Artwork and projects decorate the light blue walls of Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, an inquiry-based learning public charter school now in its eighth year.

A colorful “body map,” with the organs labeled, covers the door of one prekindergarten classroom. On the wall outside the other pre-K classroom hang drawings of guitars because the class read a picture book about the childhood of Jimi Hendrix when learning about musical instruments. Down the hall, the 3-year-old class has been experimenting with paints, both watercolors and temperas.

Everything displayed on the walls of the three-story building on Douglas Street NE in D.C.’s Ward 5 is student-made.

“Teachers really value our creativity here,” says Takhari Millner, a seventh-grader who has been attending ITDS since kindergarten.

Ranked a Tier 1 public charter school by the D.C. Public Charter School Board, ITDS opened in 2011 and serves 472 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade. There’s two classes per grade, except for seventh and eighth grade, which will each expand from one class to two when the school reaches its roughly 525-student capacity in 2020. For the 2018-19 school year, ITDS received 1,745 applications for 125 spots. Its waiting list currently has 913 students.

ITDS students have consistently outperformed their peers in both the public charter school sector and District of Columbia Public Schools on state exams, yet test prep and standardization are the antithesis of the school’s model. Born out of a partnership with the Center for Inspired Teaching, ITDS operates a demonstration school for the best practices in inquiry-based teaching and active learning methods.

For teachers by teachers

In 2009, the��, a national organization based out of D.C. that’s dedicated to teacher professionalism and experiential learning, brought together a group of educators to create a school that showcased the center’s instructional model.

Deborah Dantzler Williams, the founding head of school, previously worked as the center’s director of strategic partnerships.

“The center had partnerships with public schools around the city,” she says. “I’d talk with principals, wanting to share CIT’s philosophies, but often, they had looked up my background and seen that I came from an independent school environment. They were suspicious, thinking, ‘Well, you worked in schools that test and pick kids, so how can what you know be relevant to us? Where can we see this type of instructional model being done in a public school? On a typical budget?’ We couldn’t avoid those questions anymore.”

“Being a charter school was really our only option,” says Kate Keplinger, ITDS’s chief operating officer and lead author of the school’s charter. “Our mission is focused on public education, but we needed a place where we could be innovative and different. Within DCPS, we wouldn’t have the same freedom and ability to make the kinds of decisions that we needed to make about how we were going to teach within and staff our school.”

The Center for Inspired Teaching wanted to create a school that could be a changemaker in the realm of public education — a place where they could share best practices with educators, policymakers and community members. Part of that goal meant creating a place that could serve as a training site for teachers. Through the Inspired Teaching Residency Program, teachers can earn both their master’s in teaching and their D.C. teaching license through coursework and a residency year spent working in an ITDS classroom, under the supervision of an experienced teacher.

Teacher residents follow a “gradual release” training. First, they observe the experienced teacher; then they begin teaching small portions of the class; and finally, they take over the teaching entirely. During the second year of the program, teacher residents obtain a full-time teaching position in a D.C. public school. After successful completion of the residency, they must work an additional four years in D.C. public schools to receive full tuition reimbursement.

How to think, not what to think

To explain inquiry-based learning, ITDS’s leadership compares schooling to a taking a trip. At a traditional school, teachers decide where the journey (the learning) will start and end, but they also decide the vehicle needed for travel as well as all the sites that will be seen. At an inquiry-based school, teachers still pick the starting point and the destination, but the class helps choose the mode of travel and the route. Teachers navigate (keep students on track) without controlling the entirety of the expedition.

ITDS relies on outside curriculum — including Creative Curriculum, a research-based preschool curriculum that features exploration and discovery as pathways for learning, and Readers-Writers Workshop, where teachers act as reading-writing coaches showing students how to read and write rather than telling them —��but there are no prescribed lesson plans. The curriculum and standards drive what students need to know; teacher and student interests determine how to get there.

For instance, in Ash Moser’s English language arts class, students had to meet a writing standard that required them to research a topic, take notes and communicate what they’d learned by creating a nonfiction text. Moser didn’t assign topics. Instead, he let the students choose. However, their nonfiction text had to be “a product with a purpose.” So one student researched allergies and made a brochure about them, which she is now handing out to doctor’s offices. Another student researched porcupines and created a placard for a zoo exhibit. She’s currently attempting to obtain permission to post it at D.C.’s famed National Zoo.

“When students get to see that there’s value in what they’re doing — a purpose to their education beyond getting a grade of passing a test — they see why education matters. Here, teachers are encouraged to make learning highly motivated and purposeful,” says Moser.

In the inquiry-based learning model, teachers are still considered providers of information, but they are also the instigators of student curiosity and provokers of original student thought.

“Our teachers are really kind,” says sixth-grader Tara Roberts. “They actually care about what you’re doing and how you do it. Before I came here, I was at a school where you could do the work you were assigned, and when you’d finished, you could play with Legos. I didn’t like that at all. The teaching style here is that you can do things in different ways and that your choices matter.”

“A pillar of our school is very much how to think, not what to think,” says Monisha Karnani, ITDS’s director of demonstration and outreach. “For instance, students don’t wear uniforms here. That was an intentional choice. As an adult, most professions don’t require uniforms. You have to decide for yourself, ‘What is appropriate dress in this context, and why?’ For all our rules, we explain the ‘why’ to students and allow room for conversation about that ‘why.’”

This ethos attracted teacher Tamas O’Doughda to the school. He’d gone on several interviews at other D.C. public schools before coming across ITDS. “From many of those, my impression of the culture was: ‘You must follow this lesson plan exactly,’” he says. “Here, the first question they asked me was ‘What’s your educational philosophy?’ And Ms. Dantzler Williams even said, ‘You have a lack of rigidity. That’s great.’ My last administrator would have seen that as a weakness, but here, the leadership sees the value in exploration. Everything doesn’t have to be mapped out. You don’t have to teach students in just one way.”

“The freedom to have some more out-of-the-box ideas in how to let students learn has really kept me here,” says science teacher Jodi Ash. “We’ve had a lot of fun teaching and learning science, and that’s had an impact on me as an educator and how my kids feel about science. They burst into songs when they hear words from the periodic table. There’s a lot of joy in learning here.”

Liane Alves, an ITDS prekindergarten teacher and former teacher resident, agrees. “Teaching here is both very fun and very challenging,” she says. “Because of the inquiry-based model, learning here is bottom-up, based on what students are interested in, rather than top-down, based on what I know. So I have to learn a lot because I have to research what they want to learn. I’ve researched robots, vehicles and city planning. This year, there’s a lot of interest in space.”

This school does everything differently

At ITDS, there isn’t a heavy reliance on technology. From third grade up, each student has their own tablet, but devices are only used if they can enhance learning, never merely to check a box, and the school has no SMART boards — another intentional choice.

Regardless, the����has identified ITDS as an exemplar school. The designation signals that the school uses 21st century learning initiatives that are successfully preparing students for college, career and life. At ITDS, that preparation comes from a school-wide emphasis on project-based learning as a method for enhancing students’ critical and creative thinking.

Each trimester, students complete culminating projects in their core subjects. At the end of the trimester, students show off their projects at “Learning Showcase,” an evening event where families come to see what the classes have been working on. It’s a great community builder, and school leaders say family participation is above 90 percent.

In Courtney McIntosh-Peter’s sixth-grade math class, students finished their study of ratios by examining Cubist artist’s Piet Mondrian’s��. First, they determined the ratios of the colored squares in his art. Then they had to create art using assigned ratios. Finally, they had to create an original work of art and explain the ratios that they chose.

Last year, when��Black Panther��came out, Jodi Ash’s sixth-graders were working on their chemistry unit. As a class, they debated where, given what they knew about its composition, vibranium,��, would be located on the periodic table. Then Ash assigned each student a single element from which they had to derive a superpower. Based on the element’s properties, students created their own superhero franchise, complete with comic books, costumes and theme songs. They paraded through the school, singing their theme songs and wearing their costumes.

Ash Moser’s class also held a funeral procession for all the “dead words” they would no longer use in their writing. On the wall of his classroom is “Moser Hill Cemetery,” where lifeless words are laid to rest, marked by paper cutouts of tombstones that bear names like “Good,” “Bad,” “Awesome,” and “Cool.”

In Matthew Wong’s second-grade class, students created campaign posters for different characters from Roald Dahl’s books. In November, they held an election to determine the school’s favorite character. The winner, in a landslide victory, was Matilda. The standard the class was studying? Character development.

“This school does everything differently than other schools I’ve been to,” says fifth-grader Alexis Brown. “No other school that I know of does intersession.”

Intersession is the highlight of the school year for many students. During the week before winter and spring break, every adult in the building picks a topic they’d like to explore in depth with a small, mixed-grade group of students for four school days. Students then sign up for the session that interests them most. Previous options have included: martial arts, photography, creative writing, cooking, T-shirt design, winter engineering, improv, student newspaper and more.

But can it be replicated?

Many ITDS parents want the school to expand through 12th grade. Numerous community members want it to replicate. However, neither growth nor replication are in ITDS’s plans.

“The demonstration model was not meant to be replicated by us, but to be replicated by other schools,” says Karnani.

“The idea is to get this model perfected to a place where other schools can replicate it,” says Dantzler Williams. “We think we can reach more kids in the District of Columbia that way.”

The school welcomes visitors. This year, they’ve already hosted teachers and principals from DCPS, Montgomery County Public Schools, and the Alpine School District in Utah. However, questions remain about the practicality of widespread replication.

“CIT has always believed that teachers are the key agents for change,” says Keplinger. “But the real question is, how do they compare to the human resource person in a big central office? We only let people work here who are philosophically inclined to our beliefs, and we screen our staff heavily for that. You can’t replicate our model in a school that lacks the ability to make those decisions.”

ITDS is also a member of the��, an organization dedicated to creating racially and socioeconomically diverse charter schools through advocacy, research and outreach. Its student population is racially diverse: 45 percent of students are white, 37 percent African-American, 7 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 9 percent multiracial. Fifty-nine percent of the faculty are people of color. The leadership works via recruitment efforts to keep it that way. However, only 22 percent of the students are designated as economically disadvantaged, a much lower number than both the 77 percent for all DCPS schools and those of many struggling district schools where teachers face challenges specific to educating children in poverty.

However, Dantzler Williams believes that the essential elements of the school — teacher voice and professionalism, the core beliefs and project-based learning — are applicable in schools throughout the District. And former teacher residents bring the training, philosophy and practices that they’ve learned at ITDS with them when they accept positions at the city’s other public schools.

“We still very much believe this model can be replicated,” says Dantzler Williams. “But we are still figuring out a lot of the key pieces. Like our students, we are learning on a regular basis.”

Thurgood Marshall Academy: A, B, C, F — Why This High School Never Gives Ds and Teaches Its Students to Think Like Lawyers

“Coats off, scarves off, hats off! Belts on; shirts tucked,” Stacey Stewart, Thurgood Marshall Academy’s director of student affairs, yells at the two lines of students waiting to check in and begin the school day.

“Ms. Stewart, I’m early today,” a student says as he approaches check-in.

“It’s 8:29. You are not early; you are on time,” she says, exasperated and amused. Check-in runs from 8 to 8:30 a.m. After students check in, they head downstairs for breakfast.

Nothing about morning check-in at Thurgood Marshall Academy (TMA) hints that there’s anything exceptional about the school, but a glass case near Stewart, filled with academic awards, reveals the truth: This is an extraordinary school.

Consistently ranked as a top-tier public charter school in Washington, D.C., Thurgood Marshall Academy is a law-themed school that serves about 400 students in ninth through 12th grades. Over 90 percent of students live in Wards 7 and 8, the city’s two poorest neighborhoods. Nearly 100 percent are African-American, and 61 percent are designated “at risk” by the Office of the State Superintendent, meaning they are at greater risk of dropping out based on their receipt of public assistance, food stamps, involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, homeless status, or being older than expected for their grade.

The average ninth-grader enters TMA three to four years behind grade level.

Nevertheless, since TMA graduated its first class in 2005, 100 percent of graduates have been accepted into college, over 90 percent have enrolled in college within a year of graduating from high school, and 94 percent persist in college from freshman to sophomore year. The school’s cohort four-year graduation rate (a city calculation that also includes the status of students who have withdrawn or moved to different schools over the past four years) is 78.5 percent, higher than the statewide average of 68.5 percent, and significantly higher than the neighborhood’s district-run high schools, which have rates of 50 and 55 percent. For the past three years, student scores on D.C.’s standardized exams have been among the highest citywide for nonselective high schools.

“As a nonselective, freestanding high school, we don’t have a feeder pattern,” explains TMA’s executive director, Richard Pohlman. “We’re ready to take all kids who come through our doors, so our program has to be diverse enough to take both kids highly prepared and those significantly behind. Our systems and structures are a decade-plus old, but they’ve produced consistent results over that amount of time. What we’re doing works.”

So, what��are��they doing?

They’re exposing students to law-infused curriculum.

They’re increasing learning by supporting students and teachers.

And, they’re��not��giving Ds. The grading scale at TMA goes A, B, C, F.

Mastering the 5 essential legal skills

TMA’s goal is not for every student to become a lawyer but for all students to gain competency in the skills that lawyers rely on. The “five essential legal skills” — advocacy, argumentation, critical thinking, negotiation and research — are woven into the curriculum for all classes.

“We’re always learning about and growing our law theme,” says Pohlman. “It’s not easy to know what a broad mission statement looks like in practice, so we have to work at it. How do we teach skills that are useful for civic engagement? Skills that get kids into college and careers, but also help them become actively engaged democratic members of society? Our history teachers have been remarkable about that.”

Each year in history class, students must complete a law-related project that emphasizes the five legal skills. Previous projects include mock trials, soapbox speeches, issue-to-action projects and studies of the impact of federal legislation on D.C. Council legislation. In the 2017-18 school year, the social studies department arranged 18 educational trips for students, including a visit to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Students also participate in the school’s law-related programming. In ninth grade, students have Law Day six times a year, when they attend legal workshops hosted at and by local law firms. Sophomores spend eight half-days at Howard University, learning from professors about how law is present in their everyday lives.

During their junior year, students get to know a legal professional through the Law Firm Tutoring mentorship program. TMA partners each junior with a mentor at a local firm. Once a week, students travel to the firm (which provides meals and transportation) and have dinner with their mentor, who helps them with scholarship writing, SAT prep, college research, etc.

“Understanding the law and my rights has made me a better person outside of school,” says Devin Halliburton, a junior at TMA, whose Law Firm Tutoring mentor Yasmine Harik is an associate at Arnold & Porter.

Fellow student Ashleigh Miles agrees. “I’m not going to turn law into a career, and neither is Devin, but the information is good to know,” she says. “The law part, that’s what makes Thurgood unique. We get to meet new people and make connections in that world and learn from them.”

For those students who become interested in pursuing a law career, TMA offers more in-depth law courses. For instance, in Peer Court, students learn about how laws affect school policy, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Act and special education, and court cases, such as��Morse v. Frederick, involving students’ free speech. In the 2007 case, the U.S. Supreme Court found a school official had not violated a student’s First Amendment rights by suspending him for displaying a banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” Another component of the class involves volunteering on a student-run court, which coordinates with the Office of Student Affairs to assign and monitor consequences for students who have committed minor disciplinary infractions.

“We teach students to advocate for themselves, so we want to listen to them when they do,” explains Pohlman. “Peer Court is a way of doing that. It lets students think about logical consequences for behavior.”

Peer Court, portfolio assessments, and food if you’re hungry

“Ms. Odu!” a student shouts. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

“Hmm. Do I want to hear a joke?” Ms. Odu, her ninth-grade English teacher, pauses. “Yeah, OK, go on, Kamani.”

“What’s the hottest place in a cold room?” Kamani asks. “The corner, because it’s always 90 degrees.” The class laughs, but no one louder than Kamani. Ms. Odu laughs with them.

“That was cute,” she says. “But now, we have to settle down and finish this assignment from the last class in 25 minutes because we can’t spend six years on it. And, remember, your quiz is on Monday. We don’t have school on Friday, so some of you will probably forget. But that’s OK. Because that’s your problem.”

Kome Odu came to TMA in 2012 after teaching in Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. “The standards here are so much higher than at my old school. That matters to me. There’s more rigor and organization and an expectation that kids do more, can do more,” she says. “The administration supports teachers. I like teaching literature to black kids, these kids. That’s what keeps me here.”

The school’s leadership believes that too often in urban education, teachers are asked to perform multiple roles beyond teaching, making it impossible for them to focus on improving their craft and, by extension, student learning.

“The foundation of our school is made from what happens in classrooms,” says Pohlman. “Our teachers’ job is to make sure instruction is great all day long. They need to be supported in that.”

At TMA, deans are in charge of managing school culture and student behavior while the heads of school focus on instructional delivery. Instructional leaders are made aware of behavioral issues, but the deans are responsible for handling those issues.

“We have people whose jobs are very distinct. Everyone needs to have a laser focus on their job to do it well, so we don’t expect teachers to be doing everyone else’s job,” says Pohlman. “We all talk and coordinate, but we have a place — a specific person — to send students to for specific issues and questions.”

Stacey Stewart, the director of student affairs, believes that this division helps assuage behavioral problems. “A lot of our kids have a lot of stuff going on at home, and their behavior is not always a reflection of what’s going on in the classroom,” she says.

The Office of Student Affairs supports students outside the classroom so that they’re prepared to learn in the classroom. Stewart anticipates potential causes of decreased motivation or disruptive behavior. Her office has boxes of snacks, toothbrushes, deodorant and other things. “If a kid’s upset because he doesn’t have clean clothes, I get him clothes,” she says. “If a student’s hungry, I get her a snack. I take that stuff away from them so that they can focus on learning.”

When behavioral issues do occur, TMA differentiates consequences based on both the seriousness of the infraction and the student. Peer Court assigns consequences for violations of TMA’s “no-brainers” — chewing gum, using devices in school, uniform violations, etc. — while Stewart’s office handles higher-level violations, such as fighting and willful disobedience.

“Some kids respond well to a call home,” Stewart says. “Others will move for one teacher because they have a relationship, but not for another, so bringing in that teacher to mediate a circle conversation helps. A lot of it is understanding what works to move that kid.”

But TMA’s leadership also expects students to own their behavior. The school uses a merit and demerit system. While students can work off demerits by gaining merits, if, at the end of the year, a student has more than 20 demerits, he or she won’t be promoted, regardless of academic performance. However, because grade-level deans host opportunities for students to earn merits over the summer, like classes focused on community service for the school or building positive relationships, this rarely happens. For the past three years, no student has been held back because of behavioral infractions.

Students also reflect upon their yearly progress through a portfolio assessment. Each spring, they give a formal presentation to three faculty members during which students examine their academic performance as well as their behavioral record and overall contribution to the school. And they turn in a portfolio of the materials they intend to speak about.

“I get so nervous for portfolio,” says Halliburton, the junior. “It can be in front of teachers you don’t know, and you’ve got to talk for, like, 45 minutes. They don’t talk. They just write stuff down and look through your binder. You’re explaining everything you did — like your school work and behavior — and why. But it actually really helps me. I save my portfolio projects and look at them to improve.”

A school without Ds

“When I came here in ninth grade, I was behind in reading,” Halliburton says. “My first semester, I got a 69 in English on my report card. At my old school, that would have been a D, but here I was seeing an F. That was like, whoa, I need to start tightening myself up. I’m supposed to be preparing for college.”

Halliburton’s reaction is exactly why TMA grades on an A, B, C, F scale, where anything less than a 70 is an F. The school’s leadership believes that if students don’t know at least 70 percent of the material, they won’t be prepared to pass at the next level. The lack of Ds is not a punishment; it’s a success strategy.

“It’s stressful for freshmen,” Pohlman admits. “Many are accustomed to always just getting by, and suddenly, sliding by is failing. We have a lot of resources to support kids when they’re failing, but they’ve got to work hard.”

Mills, Halliburton’s classmate, knows exactly what he means. “At my middle school, they just passed you on. It didn’t really matter if you got the curriculum or not,” she says. “When I came here, I failed Algebra I the whole first year. But then when I did get to geometry, I went to office hours. I got more help. I didn’t fail geometry.”

Students are eligible to take up to two courses per summer if they fail their courses. If students do not retake a failed course over summer, they either receive an alternative schedule for the following year, which includes the retake, or they retake the course in a subsequent summer. However, for courses that have a specified order, as in Mills’s case, students must pass the prerequisite before moving on to the next level.

Since most ninth-graders enter TMA below grade level, freshman and sophomores take double-block English and math classes. They have twice as much classroom instruction as their peers at traditional high school programs. These double-blocks are a cornerstone of TMA’s success at raising student achievement. Other academic supports include a Summer Prep program that helps students transition into TMA’s rigorous academic environment, an SAT prep class, and a Senior Seminar in which students receive intensive coaching on the college application process, help with scholarships, and lessons on transitioning to college life. The school has a robust college counseling department, with three full-time college counselors.

“Our college acceptance rate is [far] higher than the national average for low-income communities, so we tell parents what our system looks like and ask them to trust it,” Pohlman says. At the end of the first quarter, many parents call him, upset or angry, because their student has never had an F before. “Well, they have an F now,” he tells them. “Let’s help them get out of it.”

“Our ultimate goal is not to have kids take remedial classes in college,” says Stewart. “Because that’s debt on top of debt.”

One national study that looked at 911 two- and four-year colleges found that��were placed in remedial classes in 2014-15. Remedial classes carry no credits, but enrolled students who cannot pass freshman-level course entrance exams must complete and pay for them before they can enter into credit-bearing courses.����that a large percentage of students placed into remedial courses drop out before graduating college, and often before even finishing the course.

Both Halliburton and Mills agree that “Thurgood is hard,” but, by the second year, students adjust to the rigor. Moreover, they regard the high standards as the manifestation of the faculty’s belief in their abilities.

“Everyone here wants me to succeed,” Halliburton says. “Teachers have office hours before and after school, and they’ll come to you to make sure you’re straight with their class if they think you need help.”

It’s this combination of rigor and support that draws many parents and students to TMA. The school’s success with students, as well as the demands placed on them, are well known in the community.

“We don’t lure families here under the false pretenses that everyone passes,” Pohlman says. “The part of school choice that really matters is that you have a system with a lot of different choices and that you provide families with as much transparency as you can so that they can make a choice. We’re an important part of that system in D.C.”

Digital Pioneers Academy: Creating the Next Generation of Digital Innovators at Washington, D.C.’s First Computer Science-Focused Middle School

“When I finish writing the statement, that cat will move,” promises Deshaunte’ Goldsmith, a sixth-grader at Digital Pioneers Academy Public Charter School. She presses enter on the keyboard and, sure enough, the animated cat on her screen begins to pace back and forth.

Goldsmith is a member of the founding class at the school known as DPA, Washington, D.C.’s first computer science-focused middle school. Opened in August, the school is small, serving about 120 sixth-grade students across four classes, but has plans to build out to 12th grade. Every day, students take computer science as a part of their core curriculum.

Today, in computer science, Goldsmith is learning how to write����—��such as if the space bar is pressed, the cat will jump —��using MIT’s animation-based platform��. First, the students have to identify conditional statements, and then they have to write their own. At the end of class, they have to find and correct the error intentionally planted in the teacher’s code.

“The error’s in the third line of code,” Goldsmith says. “It’s missing part of the conditional statement.”

DPA occupies the second floor of Washington Heights Baptist Church in the Hillcrest neighborhood of the city’s seventh ward. Ninety-eight percent of the students come from wards seven and eight, D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods, and, because DPA’s leadership recruited heavily in the local area, two-thirds of the students went to the neighborhood elementary schools.

“My decision to go to this school was sort of last minute,” says Goldsmith. “I was waitlisted at Friendship Charter School. Then I heard about this school, and I decided I wanted to come here and learn about code. All of the teachers here have really supported me, and this is one of my favorite classes. I’m happy I ended up here.”

Lamontae Allen, Goldsmith’s classmate, or teammate as they are known at DPA, also loves the computer science curriculum.

“Computer science is my favorite class,” he said. “I like to play video games. When I grow up, I want to be a famous YouTuber, but if that doesn’t work out, I might make my own computer game, and learning all of this will help with that.”

Today,��. Low-income families��, and the��.��.

“Our mission is very simple,” says Mashea Ashton, DPA’s founder and the head of school. “We want to develop the next generation of innovators. We want our students not just to consume the digital economy, but to be a part of creating it.”

A veteran educator embraces comp sci

With almost 20 years of experience teaching in and running public charter schools, Ashton knew she wanted to leverage her experience as an educational leader to positively impact Southeast Washington, D.C. — a historically underserved neighborhood she cares deeply about. Ashton began her career as a special education teacher just down the street from DPA’s current location, and her husband, a sixth-generation Washingtonian, grew up in the neighborhood.

Ashton herself has no computer science background. “I took one computer science course at the College of William and Mary back before they even had email,” she jokes. “However, three years ago, when I began thinking about opening a school, I thought about a college prep model, but the more I thought about students and families and options, the more I thought about the importance of being career ready. Then, I saw the data��.”

DPA’s curriculum is a modified version of the academic program developed by��, a network of charter schools throughout the South that teaches computer coding daily as part of its college prep curriculum. With this curriculum, DPA students begin by working on elementary programs like Scratch before learning two of the core internet technologies, the markup languages����and��, or Cascading Style Sheets, which determines the look and layout of a webpage’s content. They eventually move on to��, a more advanced language and the third of the core internet technologies. After mastering JavaScript, students will have the opportunity to explore other advanced programming languages such as����and��.

Although DPA currently holds a charter only for a middle school, Ashton plans to apply to expand the school through high school, building up one grade at a time. During high school, students will be expected to pass the Advanced Placement computer science exam in 10th grade, she said, and become fluent in two coding languages by the time they graduate. Juniors and seniors will also participate in internships and work-study programs that allow them to gain real-world experience in the tech sector.

DPA is already building a pipeline of partnerships with tech firms, like Microsoft and Deloitte, and three times a year, middle schoolers will have “expeditions,” three-day experiences where they demonstrate some of the coding skills they’ve learned to tech experts before visiting the experts’ workplaces.

“When you think about the job quality and the job opportunities that our students will have because they had one hour of computer science each day from sixth to 12th grade … it’s incredible,” says Crystal Bryant, a STEM teacher at DPA. “It’s refreshing to see someone like Mashea come in with a vision to change the trajectory of the lives of kids in this area.”

Founding a school that celebrates science

When designing DPA, Ashton and her team researched broadly to learn about the best models for a computer science-focused school. In the spring of 2017, Ashton taught an elective, “Design the Academy of the Future,” to ninth-graders at Washington Leadership Academy Public Charter School, a technology-focused high school in D.C. She heard from students about the factors of their education that have had the greatest impact on their motivation and learning. Understanding the real-world application of the skills they were learning ranked at the top of the list.

“Students didn’t need to be told about the number of high-paying computing jobs available; they needed to have real-world experiences, to see the real-world connections for what they were learning,” says Ashton. “They wanted to know the ‘why’ for everything. ‘Why am I taking notes? Why am I reading Shakespeare? Why am I doing Scratch?’”

Ashton also spoke with the leaders of the��, a computer science-focused school in New York City. The school’s leaders said they had initially recruited tech experts to serve as the teachers, but they ultimately discovered that they needed people who were experts in instructional delivery, classroom management and working with teenagers. The RePublic curriculum, however, is not expert-dependent, so Ashton could recruit widely for her teaching staff.

“None of our teachers had ever taught computer science as a core part of the curriculum before,” she says. “We recruited educators who believed in our mission, had the best achievement record for working with kids like ours, and who were excited to be on a founding team, which is very different from a regular teaching job.”

What being a founding teacher means, Ashton says, is long, hard hours and owning the successes and failures of the school. “There’s the opportunity for growth, but there’s also going to be some failing forward, which is an important part of growth and a value we attempt to impart to our students,” she says. “I do think our teachers are feeling the success of what it’s like to work together on a team with a shared mission and vision where everyone is accountable.”

Bryant, the STEM teacher, came to DPA because she felt that in urban education, science often isn’t considered as important by school administrations as math and English, the major testing subjects. She wanted to move to a place that celebrated science and computer science, rather than treating it as an elective. At DPA, she was given the opportunity to build a STEM program.

“A lot of people warned me about joining a founding team. ‘It’s a lot of work,’ they kept saying, but I think it’s going to be rewarding to look back and see all of the computer scientists that our school has produced and know I helped create that,” she says.

“No one is just a teacher here,” adds STEM teacher Ashley Pettway. “A lot of times in urban education, you feel like you’re a part of a system where you have no control, but here, anything that we dream up for our kids, so long as it’s mission- and vision-aligned, is supported. We can do it. I’ve never worked in a place like that.”

High empathy, high expectations

DPA’s classrooms have arched attic ceilings and an airy, homey feel. The school renovated the second floor of the building before moving in, creating four large classrooms and some smaller meeting rooms. Backpacks are hung along the classroom walls, and there are comfortable sitting areas for students in addition to more traditional desks.

“Our scholars learn better when the environment is conducive to learning,” says Ashton. “I hope they feel like these are their rooms.”

To minimize transition times, students don’t switch classrooms; instead, the teachers do. Each class always has two adults, the classroom teacher and an assistant, who is often a dean or another member of the administrative team.

The school day runs from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on Wednesdays, which are half-days. Students have study hall, math, computer science, social studies or science, an intervention period for struggling students, two classes of English Language Arts and recess, daily. There’s a break in the morning and a second one in the afternoon. There’s also an a.m. and p.m. community meeting and a mandatory enrichment activity — like kickball, dance, creating holiday cards and more — from 4 to 5 p.m. It’s a long day, but many of the students come in significantly behind grade level, so there’s a lot of work to be done. When the school year began, only 20 percent of the founding class was on grade level in both reading and math.

“We tell our scholars that if they want to achieve, then they have to outwork everyone, and they’re learning and beginning to own that,” says Ashton.

Classmates give each other “snaps,” impromptu snapping, to celebrate when a teammate does something well. There’s also a school-wide hand sign for “giving magic,” which is wiggling fingers at a teammate to send good them vibes.

“We are team, so we want to support one another, but we don’t have a lot of spare time. Our silent celebrations give students a lot of joy, but they aren’t disruptive to learning,” says Ashton.

Students can also earn a “professional” point each class period if they demonstrate behavior, like optimism, empathy, and growth, that reflects the school’s values. Professional behavior earns a point; unprofessional behavior, like talking back to a teacher or putting your head down in class, loses a point; and neutral behavior results in no change. Students can redeem themselves throughout the period; it’s what they’ve done by the end of class that matters. The system promotes the idea that students have control over, and can change, their behavior. Every morning students fill out their daily behavior goals for each period, and every afternoon they reflect on whether they met those goals.

“Professional and unprofessional is language that kids really understand,” says Bryant. “They know adults have to be professional, so they see the real-world connection. It’s very clear cut, which makes it easy for them to articulate reflections on their behavior and even write things like, ‘I was slouching in my seat and not participating yesterday so I wasn’t being professional.’”

If a student has a “community violation” — swearing at a teacher, starting a fight, etc. — then they receive an automatic “unprofessional” and are removed to the “reset room” for the remainder of the period. There, they fill out a reflection on their behavior and brainstorm how to make amends to the teacher and the community before returning to their next class.

Students can spend professional points at the school store. They can purchase dress-down days, Subway cards, a chance to visit friends in another class during break and more. However, the four students who have the most professional points at the end of the week get a pass to “The Lab,” where video games, a movie projector, a basketball hoop and more await. Staff asked the students what they wanted prior to stocking The Lab.

“There are Xboxes and TVs and everything,” says Pettway. “The first time I went into The Lab, I thought, ‘It looks like a Dave & Busters.’ I took photos of it to show the kids. It’s such a positive, consistent motivator for them. Ms. Ashton plays����[a phenomenally popular online game] with them in there. It’s great.”

“School and learning should be fun,” says Ashton. “We do want them to develop intrinsic motivation, but we also want them to understand that hard work and positive actions ultimately have positive consequences.”

“I appreciate that this is a very different experience for our kids than many are used to,” says Bryant. “I have been an urban educator for eight years, and I feel like our kids are constantly being punished for being children or for the things they don’t have. I appreciate that I’ve found a school where the goal is to remove all obstacles that keep kids from learning and then hold them accountable for their learning.”

“It’s called ‘high empathy, high expectations,” says Pettway. “And it’s a model that’s working for our kids.”

Ingenuity Prep:��At D.C.’s Ingenuity Prep, Personalized Learning Hasn’t Replaced Teacher Time; It’s Put the Focus Back on Small Groups

When Aaron Cuny and Will Stoetzer were thinking about how they wanted to structure their own D.C. charter school back in 2012, they kept returning to the same question: “When were we doing the best work for kids?”

“For both of us, it came down to teaching in a small group setting, where you could think about how to reach kids individually rather than spending the majority of time and mental energy thinking about classroom management,” says Stoetzer.

Stoetzer was a special education teacher and Cuny����at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School, a top-ranked elementary school in one of Washington’s middle-income neighborhoods. Both felt the city lacked quality educational options for kids in the neighborhoods that needed them most.

“In pockets across D.C., some schools had shown that when adults got it right, there was success at educating low-income kids,” says Stoetzer. “Schools like KIPP and D.C. Prep have been very purposeful about producing academic results for low-income kids. Their success inspired us, but we had differences in perspective about how that success might be accomplished.”

When they opened Ingenuity Prep a year later with Cuny as CEO and Stoetzer as COO, they located it in Ward 8, Washington’s poorest neighborhood, and built two essential components into the school’s design so that small group learning could be its main focus: co-teaching and computer-based learning.

Computer-based learning and personalized learning are often faulted for taking the teacher out of the equation too much, but in the case of Ingenuity Prep, they have been employed to the opposite effect.

“Digital content became a good way for us to deliver high-level, engaging content to kids, but the end goal was never to deliver content digitally,” says Stoetzer, whose special education background strongly informed his thinking about the school’s design when it came to small group instruction, personalized learning and differentiation. “All of the pieces of our model were driven by finding the best ways to maximize the time spent in small groups.”

Rarely in groups larger than 15

Ingenuity Prep serves 496 students in grades pre-K-3 to 5, with plans to expand to eighth grade. There are two to three classes per grade, each with between 25 and 30 students (24 in preschool). Each preschool classroom has three teachers, and in kindergarten and above, each classroom has two lead content area teachers, one specialized in math, the other in literacy.

There’s also a literacy apprentice who teaches across two classrooms. When students are in literacy class, the literacy-lead teacher and the apprentice co-teach the content. When students are in math class, the lead math teacher from one classroom comes to the other classroom for co-teaching support.

The school hosts resident teachers from the��, and school leadership says the partnership has been integral to making Ingenuity Prep’s group model function. Resident teachers already have a bachelor’s degree, but the program allows them to work toward a master’s in education, including certifications in special education and their specific content areas. After the first year, Urban Teachers places its residents as full-time paid staff members in schools — usually the ones where they had already been teaching — where they can finish out the program’s remaining three years. Ingenuity Prep currently has 11 resident teachers.

Ingenuity Prep incorporates computer-based learning into the curriculum, a practice known as blended learning. In kindergarten and above, each student has access to a Chromebook and a student web portal, which contains different online educational programs like����and��. ��Teachers blend the digital content into the curriculum to target individual student needs and provide students with independent practice in subject-area knowledge.

Aside from the benefits of exposing students to blended learning, the goal of Ingenuity Prep’s learning model has always been more one-on-one time between teacher and student. Students spend less than 10 percent of their time learning in groups larger than 15 students. Maud Cooke-Nesme, a kindergarten literacy teacher, believes the computer-based learning has been important in achieving this.

“The use of technology really helps us as teachers because it gives us the ability to have the differentiated time in smaller groups,” she says.

‘They often feel like they aren’t in class, even though they are’

The implementation of the Ingenuity Prep model looks slightly different depending on the grade level.

In pre-K classrooms, play-based learning takes the place of computer-based learning. Students spend much of the day in “centers,” where they choose from a variety of activity stations like art, music and movement, and dramatic play — in which the preschoolers take on the role of adults in everyday situations and careers. As the students rotate through the centers, the lead teacher pulls out small groups to give them formal, personalized instruction in literacy and math. There are also some large group activities, like “Mindfulness,” a short time after recess during which students practice guided deep breathing and feeling their heartbeats.

From kindergarten to fifth grade, the Ingenuity Prep model for literacy hits its stride. Students spend a significant amount of time in small groups assembled by relatively similar ability level, rotating through different learning activities, from direct instruction to guided practice and independent, computer-based practice. While there’s teacher flexibility in the model’s implementation, all classrooms must have certain components essential to its success: a classroom library, a carpeted open space, a large group instruction area and small group instruction spaces.

In a kindergarten classroom, three groups are rotating through different literacy practice activities. Six students sit in two rows of desk, facing the front of the room, as they practice reading skills using Lexia on their Chromebooks. These students are on different levels from one another, progressing through the program at their own pace.

“Students like having that independent time on the computers,” says Avi Worrell, a second-grade literacy teacher. “They often feel like they aren’t in class, even though they are. They’re learning, but it’s fun and competitive learning.”

A second group of eight students sits at a semi-circle table, facing lead teacher Amber Morales. Morales is conducting guided reading, and she’s targeted both the text and the learning objective to this group’s specific skill level. The students are practicing sight words, with a focus on the word “where.” They follow along, tracking the text with their fingers, as Morales reads aloud and asks them questions about the story.

The last group of 10 students is on the other side of the room in a much more traditional classroom setup. They’re in rows of desks, facing the teacher and the board. Here, Urban Teachers resident Michaura Rivera is using direct instruction to teach phonetics and writing. Students practice drawing their letters on individual whiteboards, and Rivera monitors their progress.

“I really like changing through the groups because we have guided reading and instruction with our teachers, but we also go onto computers to practice on our own,” says Jahari’ Rose, a fifth-grader who has been at the school since kindergarten. “Lexia really helped us learn new sight words, how to read faster and how to find the meaning of a story.”

In a second-grade classroom, there are still designated spaces for small and large group instruction; however, because these students are more capable of self-monitoring their behavior than those in kindergarten, the library area and open space are larger, creating a cozy, independent reading environment.

In this class, one group of students is working on computer-based programs. Another group is around a table, working on a guided writing project with the lead teacher. And the third group of students are lying on the carpeted space in the library area. They’re practicing independent reading; they’ve chosen books from the shelf marked at their current reading level, as well as two books from the level above.

In a fifth-grade classroom, the setup looks more traditional, with the majority of the desks facing the front of the room and the teachers. There’s a Chromebook on each desk because students are working on writing in a large group activity. There’s still an area for small group instruction and a library area with open space. However, both are much smaller than in the lower grade levels.

Overall, math lessons schoolwide involve more large group instruction than literacy; teachers want a more heterogeneous group in terms of student ability level so that struggling students can learn by watching stronger students solve problems. Classes still incorporate the rotational model and blended learning, but often the lead teacher will perform direct instruction with a larger group while the assisting teacher pulls out small groups of students who need extra help.

“The school isn’t super descriptive on how to implement the model,” says Stoetzer, who recently stepped into the interim CEO role at Ingenuity Prep. “We make sure we have excellent teachers who are familiar with the model, but there’s adaptability in how to make the best use of it. After all, they know their students’ needs best.”

Intensive coaching, listening to teachers

“I’ve never been in a school that puts so much attention to detail in terms of content, organization and planning,” says Ashleigh Coleman, a pre-K-4 teacher. “The leadership really values [teacher] feedback here, and they encourage work-life balance. At other places where I’ve worked, teachers are workhorses. They’re expected to do whatever it takes to get the job done, but they aren’t listened to.”

School leadership admits that balance wasn’t always there; they’ve been very intentional about creating it. They use surveys to measure the adult culture in the building. They’ve allotted extra time for planning during the school day. And they have a robust teacher-coaching program in which school leaders observe teachers once a week.

“I worked at another school where I received pretty much no coaching whatsoever,” says kindergarten teacher Cook-Nesme. “One of the main things that attracted me here was the frequency of coaching. The coaching is specialized for literacy or math, so the feedback I receive makes sense to where I am in my development as a teacher.”

The coaching also helps create a uniform culture of high expectations.

“I previously taught at a Head Start program,” says Molly Karsh, a pre-K-3 teacher. “I have really come to appreciate the high expectations for both students and staff here. There, my kids left for kindergarten without being able to write their names. Here, my students talk about paleontology. There, my kids could not sit quietly on the carpet and learn with minimal distractions because we didn’t have that culture set in our classrooms, and I didn’t know it was possible to set it because I didn’t have the coaching or tools for handling distractions.”

This embedded culture of coaching develops a special relationship between leadership and teachers. All of the instructional leaders were once teachers, and many were once teachers at Ingenuity Prep. JaQuan Bryant, the co-principal of kindergarten through second grade, came to Ingenuity Prep as a first-grade teacher. He believes he benefited greatly from the coaching.

“But it’s interesting because some of my cousins are also in education,” he says. “When I first started here, I told them that leadership videoed me, and they freaked out. They said, ‘I would never let them do that. I’d have the union rep come in.’ But I think you need to have that sort of relationship between instructional leadership and staff to move the needle for kids. They’ve got to be able to hop into a classroom at any time. There’s got to be that trust.”

Teaching kids in trauma

“They let us have fun here, like on pajama day I got to wear my Batman onesie, but they ask us to think about our actions too,” says fifth-grader Jaiden Robinson. “The only downside about this place is the food.”

“Especially the pancakes — you can make Play-Doh out of them,” adds his classmate Dajon Walker, who has been at the school since third grade. “At my old school, the food was good. I can’t lie about that. But there was a lot of chaos. There were fights every day; it was a rampage. We didn’t listen to teachers. We just ran around and did what we wanted.”

His peer Marcellus Dyson also came to Ingenuity Prep in third grade. “In second grade, I got into a lot of fights because people kept messing with me,” he says. “There’s less fights here because they take care of it here right away and send kids to behavioral support.”

Ingenuity Prep has six full-time behavioral support specialists. If a student causes a disruption in class, the teacher texts one of the specialists, who then removes the student. The aim is to return the student to class as quickly as possible. However, there is a “reset room,” which students call behavioral support, for those who aren’t ready to go back to class immediately. There, students reflect on their behavior.

“I’ve been to behavioral support, and it’s effective,” says fifth-grader Zainah Williams. “They ask you why you’re in there, and you have to complete this worksheet about what you’d do better next time. Then, they ask you if you’re calm enough to go back to class. It helps me calm down so I can go back.”

Ninety-seven percent of Ingenuity Prep students are African-American, and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education has designated 60 percent of its students as economically disadvantaged. The state office also labeled 66 percent of students “at risk,” meaning they are more likely to drop out based on their receipt of public assistance, receipt of food stamps, involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, homeless status, or being older than expected for their grade.

Many of the school’s students experience trauma at home, and their behavior is not always a reflection of what’s going on in class. Every teacher at the school has been trained in crisis intervention management. Student and family support specialists, special education teachers, the speech therapist and counselors also complete a deeper-level training. There’s also a full-time social worker and psychologist, and there are no security officers. The school screens staff during hiring to ensure that their values align with the school’s mission to educate low-income students with empathy and understanding.

“I grew up low-income in this neighborhood,” says third-grade teacher Davian Morgan. “But then my mom went back to school and then I went to school, so I understand the power education had in lifting us above the poverty line and into the middle class. I want for these kids to see how many doors open if you take your education seriously.”

Bryant, the K-2 co-principal, grew up in a similar neighborhood in East Oakland, California. “What keeps me at this school is that we believe every kid deserves access to an education equivalent to that of their affluent peers, an education that will allow them to be the architects of their own futures.”

The problem with replication

Back in January 2012, around the time Stoetzer and Cuny were talking about starting a school, the Illinois Facilities Fund published��, an extensive analysis of public school locations and performance in Washington, D.C.

After categorizing the District into 39 neighborhood clusters, the authors of the report concluded that to provide all public school students, both district and charter, with a high-quality education, the city would need to add an additional 39,758 seats in high-performing schools. Ten neighborhood clusters — three of them located in Ward 8 — would need 68 percent of those seats.

After reading the report, Stoetzer and Cuny intentionally opened Ingenuity Prep in Bellevue, a Ward 8 neighborhood in the center of the cluster that the Illinois Facilities Fund had declared the District’s highest-need area. Ward 8 needed 10,087 additional quality seats, and the Bellevue cluster alone needed 5,969 of them.

Eighty percent of Ingenuity Prep students live within a mile of the school. Ninety percent live in Ward 8, and 95 percent live east of the Anacostia River, in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods. On the 2018 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams, 38 percent of its students tested proficient or above in English and 34 percent in math. The two neighborhood elementary scores had pass rates of 8 and 6 percent for English and 13 and 9 percent for math.

When compared with the other 35 schools in Ward 8, Ingenuity Prep ranks second highest in terms of PARCC scores, with student scores in the 95th percentile for the ward. Of the District’s 113 schools where more than 50 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, Ingenuity Prep’s test scores ranked seventh.

In general, D.C. schools with more at-risk students have lower student proficiency scores than the citywide average. However, on the 2018 PARCC exams, Ingenuity Prep students scored slightly above the citywide average for both math and English. Their combined proficiency scores were in the 74th percentile citywide, and student growth scores were in the 92nd percentile.

Despite its success and the overwhelming need for more seats in high-performing schools, Ingenuity Prep cannot replicate under the current regulations of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the District’s charter authorizer. To do that, the board requires that a charter school have a Tier 1 ranking on its performance measurement framework. Ingenuity Prep currently has a Tier 2 ranking. When judging school performance, the charter board compares charters citywide, which presents difficulties for schools like Ingenuity Prep that serve a larger percentage of at-risk students than many of their charter peers.

“It’s a more challenging experience on this side of the river, and I think our colleagues who run high-performing charter schools elsewhere would agree with that,” says Stoetzer.

For instance, Ingenuity Prep has one of the lowest in-seat attendance rates in the city for charters, at around 89 percent, slightly below the 90 percent citywide average for all public schools. However, the two traditional neighborhood elementary schools, which serve similar student populations, have attendance rates of 89 and 92 percent. There’s a high correlation between the number of at-risk students and absenteeism, according to Ingenuity Prep’s leadership.

Because the school is located 1.5 miles from the closest Metro station, about one-third of students take the bus, which is not as reliable as the Metro, and cold winters also negatively affect attendance among those students who walk from either home or the Metro station. Moreover, many of the students come from single-parent households with multiple siblings. Often, when one child is sick or has a doctor’s appointment, the parent will keep all of the children at home because it’s not easy or convenient to take the others to school.

Ingenuity Prep has done a variety of things to increase attendance: free Metrobus passes to parents (in D.C., kids ride for free), internal incentives for students, phone calls home to students chronically absent and listing the amount of instructional time lost because of absences on each report card. Regardless, attendance rates have increased by only 1 percent.

“I respect and appreciate that the board wants to hold a high bar for low-income students, but I think demanding that a school be Tier 1 to replicate ignores the reality of the limited options available to kids in neighborhoods that are historically underserved,” says Stoetzer.

“The reality is that if more D.C. Preps, KIPPs and Ingenuity Preps don’t open on this side of the river, only a few of these kids are going to travel incredible distances to go to quality schools. We are doing a disservice to our kids by not being more open to considering schools without a Tier 1 ranking for replication,” he said. “These kids need a better educational experience. What we’re providing here is drastically different than the neighborhood schools, and we’ve got to consider that in how we think about schools and replication.”

Lead Image:��Inspired Teaching Demonstration School student Mark Hopwood glues tiles together to create a mosaic for winter Intersession, a weeklong opportunity for students and adults to dive deep into a topic of learning outside of the normal academic program. (Inspired Teaching Demonstration School)

A former English teacher, Emily Langhorne is an education policy analyst and project manager with the Progressive Policy Institute.

Nearly half — 49 percent — of all adults surveyed said they favor charter schools, while 46 percent oppose them. However, the margin of error was 3.5 percent, just over that spread.

An overwhelming majority — 75 percent — said it is very or somewhat important for low-income parents to have the option of sending their children to charter schools. Among public school parents, that figure rises to 81 percent.

However, 64 percent of adults were concerned about charters diverting state funding away from traditional local public schools. Those in Los Angeles were the most likely to express that concern, at 71 percent.

The statewide 2019 Californians & Education����was released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California and is the organization’s 15th annual K-12 survey. It polled 1,512 Californians in English and Spanish between April 5 and 15. It was PPIC’s first fully online survey, which the researchers said allowed them to examine more issues and go into greater depth than telephone polling.

“Charter public schools get mixed reviews,” Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO, said in a news release. “Many Californians say it is important to have the option of a charter school, but there are concerns about the fiscal impacts on traditional public schools.”

Among public school parents, support for charters is somewhat higher, with 59 percent in favor and 38 percent opposed. About half of Latinos and whites are in favor of charter schools in general, over Asian Americans (43 percent). African Americans are the group least likely (36 percent) to favor them, the survey found.

When asked to name the biggest issue facing the state’s K-12 public schools, most adults and public school parents say they are concerned that the level of state funding for local public schools is not enough, followed by large class sizes, standards/quality of education, limited/poor curriculum and low teacher pay.

Following teacher strikes in multiple school districts including Los Angeles and most recently in Oakland seeking higher pay, 61 percent of adults and 58 percent of public school parents say teachers’ salaries in their community are too low. In Los Angeles, 65 percent hold this view.

But while most respondents wanted more funding for schools, when asked about a state ballot measure that would lower the threshold — from two-thirds to 55 percent — for passing local parcel taxes for public schools, less than half of Californians (44 percent of adults, 39 percent of likely voters) approve.

Those findings are especially significant in Los Angeles, where voters in June will be considering an L.A. Unified parcel tax that would raise about $500,000 annually. Only half of Los Angeles respondents said they would vote yes on a parcel tax.

“Majorities of California likely voters favor a state bond and higher taxes on commercial properties to raise school revenues, while lowering the local tax threshold receives less support,” Baldassare said.

Other key findings:

●��Nine in 10 adults say it is very or somewhat important for charter schools to operate with the same transparency and accountability as traditional public schools.

●��At least 7 in 10 adults — across all regions and across age, education, income and racial/ethnic groups — say K-12 should be a high or very high priority in the state.

●��Four in 10 Californians (38 percent) and half of public school parents (49 percent) give their local public schools a positive grade of A or B.

●��Majorities (55 percent) say their local public schools are doing an excellent or good job preparing students for college; fewer than half (48 percent) say the same about preparing students for jobs and the workforce.

●��Many adults (43 percent) say they are very concerned that students in low-income areas are less likely than other students to be ready for college when they finish high school.

●��Majorities (61 percent of adults and 71 percent of public school parents) are either very concerned or somewhat concerned that increased federal immigration enforcement efforts will affect undocumented students and their families in their local public schools.

●��More than two-thirds of Californians (70 percent of adults and 80 percent of public school parents) are very concerned or somewhat concerned about the threat of a mass shooting in their local schools.

●��More than half of Californians (55 percent of adults) would like Gov. Gavin Newsom to change to different K-12 policies, rather than continue those of his predecessor, Jerry Brown.

●��Majorities of Californians approve of the Common Core State Standards and the Local Control Funding Formula.

Weslaco, Texas

A handful of high schools from the Rio Grande Valley among the most challenging high schools in the nation. Such distinctions seemed improbable in 2000 when JoAnn Gama and Tom Torkelson applied for a charter to open up a new elementary and middle school in the region.

Nineteen years and 45,000 students later, the fast-growing network and its tough-talking leadership have garnered both accolades and resistance, being dubbed both a “Bright Spot in Hispanic Education” by the Obama White House and a “Texas Sized Destroy Public Education IDEA” by anti-charter advocates.

To all the skeptics, the network answers with results: 100 percent college acceptance rates in schools where at least 85 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. Students passing an average of three AP exams before graduation. Parents want it. Foundations want to fund it.

The U.S. Department of Education has shown similar enthusiasm for IDEA, awarding it $117 million in the 2019 round of charter school expansion grants announced . It was the largest award given in the grant’s history.

From its inconspicuous headquarters in Weslaco, Texas, on the border with Mexico, IDEA is becoming one of the most recognizable names in the national charter landscape. Now with nearly 20 years of experience, its founders say they plan to stick with the philosophy that got them here.

What’s the big IDEA?:��What’s the big IDEA?

The network is growing at blinding speed, applying for expansion after expansion to their original charter with the Texas Education Agency. What began in 2000 as 150 fourth- through seventh-graders in Donna, Texas, has grown to 79 schools and 45,000 students throughout Texas and Louisiana, with plans to expand into Florida in 2021.

The network’s co-founders, Torkelson, the CEO, and Gama, the superintendent, were inducted into the National Charter School Hall of Fame in 2018, and the network won the $250,000 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools in 2016, given to the network that has done the most to boost student outcomes, close the achievement gap and increase graduation rates.

“[Enrollment] will reach 100,000 students by 2022,” Torkelson said. This would make IDEA the fifth-largest school district in Texas. He thinks it’s realistic to expect that number to double by 2028. In a recent interview, the 44-year-old quipped that he has at least 30 more years in him and would like to see enrollment hit 1 million by the time he retires.

IDEA frames its growth in competitive terms. While some charter networks file expansion applications by referencing zip codes or counties, IDEA is among those that list the school districts where it plans to operate. They aren’t the only network to put districts on notice, but they are the most prolific.

Such ambitions, articulated with Torkelson’s frank delivery, have raised the hackles of district administrators. In September, two area superintendents and the local teachers union unsuccessfully petitioned the San Antonio City Council to disincentivize the charter network’s growth by not allowing IDEA to claim tax-exempt status for a $220 million bond issue.

The Rivard Report’s Emily Donaldson that “City CFO Ben Gorzell said this is the first time he has seen traditional school districts weigh in on this ‘very narrow procedural approval.’”

In public hearings and interviews, superintendents and union representatives characterized IDEA’s growth as detrimental to public schools.

“If you vote in favor of this, you’re supporting the expansion of privately run charters, and further diversion of funds from our public school districts and the children they serve,” said Shelley Potter, president of San Antonio Independent School District’s union. “You will be helping IDEA to expand their privately run, unaccountable school district.”

As school districts in El Paso braced for the arrival of IDEA — spurred in part by a nonprofit headed by Amy O’Rourke, wife of presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke — Socorro ISD Superintendent José Espinoza , “I tell the team — our assistant principals, principals, the board — that we’ve got to step up our game. They’re going to try to take our kids.”

Public showdowns aren’t necessarily new to IDEA, but neither are they something Gama and Torkelson would necessarily have imagined 20 years ago. Especially not conflict over rapid growth strategies. It took seven years for IDEA to launch its second campus. In fact, Gama explained, they had not originally envisioned going beyond fourth through eighth grades.

“Parents really made a pitch and compelled us to start a high school,” Gama said. Then a group of lower elementary parents approached them, Gama explained: “They said, ‘If you can do it in high school, you can do it in elementary.’”

The first school grew as families drove to Donna from Raymondville, La Joya and other tiny towns in the Valley with small independent school districts. In 2005, demand reached the point that opening a second and third school seemed viable. It was. A three-year, $3.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2009 accelerated their growth, and there are now 23 IDEA schools in the Rio Grande Valley.

At the invitation of the and San Antonio Spurs legend David Robinson, IDEA moved into San Antonio in 2012. Robinson wanted to convert his private Carver Academy to a charter school.

“We get to be the beginning of an incredible movement,” Robinson said . “We at Carver will be the first in a line of schools that will transform San Antonio.”

The growth in San Antonio has been prolific, with many of the city’s major philanthropies sponsoring new campuses. National�� and the U.S. Department of Education also invested in IDEA, speeding its growth. As of 2017, IDEA the following lifetime giving totals: Texas Education Agency — competitive grants to fund program innovation: $12.8 million; Charter School Growth Fund: $12 million; Ewing Halsell Foundation: $10 million; Michael and Susan Dell Foundation: $7.7 million; Walton Family Foundation: $5 million; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $4.3 million; Brown Foundation: $1.5 million; George W. Brackenridge Foundation: $1 million; and KLE Foundation: $17.9 million.

The big figures fuel expansion, Torkelson explained, but not operations. Once a school is opened, it becomes self-sustaining. New buildings and school leader residencies are the primary cost drivers of expansion. Charter schools do not have access to public funds for the full cost of facilities in most states, including Texas. To ensure consistency across the brand, future school leaders spend one to three years in a “principal in residence” program at a school in one of IDEA’s largest markets — the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio or Austin.

The million-dollar figures and fast pace look aggressive, Torkelson said, but it’s based on demand. “I don’t ever hear parents on our waitlist saying we’re too aggressive,” he said.

In 2012, he and Gama learned a lesson when they contracted with Austin Independent School District to operate one of the district’s struggling campuses. Protesters eventually killed the deal.

From then on, Gama said, they never considered a new city until parents invited them in, as they have in El Paso, Fort Worth and Baton Rouge. When IDEA came back to Austin in 2013, they did so at the request of interested parents and philanthropic backers, not a struggling school district. That model of growth continued to work. In 2019, IDEA is set to add four more schools in Austin, for a total of 14.

IDEA thrives where school choice has been lacking, Gama said: “I don’t think that anybody knew what a charter was in the Valley.”

At the same time, families in the Rio Grande Valley have had access to some form of school choice far longer than most parts of Texas and rest of the United States. South Texas ISD, a public school district that overlays five other Rio Grande Valley districts, was founded by the Texas Legislature in 1964 to offer alternative high school choices for students with learning differences. It has evolved into a series of magnet high schools for advanced learners.

There were no such choices for elementary school children or children who were not already identified as high-performing.

The opposite is true too, Gama said. Where school options increase — such as they did in San Antonio, where charters are booming and the San Antonio Independent School District launched its own choice schools, partly to compete — they see their waiting lists shrink.

Gama says she’s not bothered. It’s more options for families, and that, she said, is the whole point.

Parents know what they’re getting:��Parents know what they’re getting

While Torkelson is often the public face of IDEA’s growth — known for boldly saying in public what many would only say behind closed doors — Gama is considered by many to be the taproot of IDEA.

Her eye is on brand loyalty. Parents love IDEA, she said, because “they know what they are getting.”

The engine that runs IDEA Public Schools is fairly basic — at this point in 2019 it almost qualifies as vintage. Its “college for all” and “no excuses” model has gone out of fashion in many markets. However, rather than abandon their founding philosophy, Torkelson and Gama have continually refined the application of those core ideas.

To get students college ready, IDEA began “AP for all” in 2014. The results the first year were not good, Torkelson said. Rather than scrap the program, dismissing it as “a reach too far,” he said, IDEA revisited the teacher training for AP instruction and “we beefed up support.”

When a school doesn’t perform up to standard, as happened at IDEA Eastside Academy in San Antonio, intervention is swift. With test scores, morale and attendance at the K-5 academy lagging at the midyear point, network administrators moved to make the campus’s 6-12 grade principal Janie Gomez one of IDEA’s first executive principals, overseeing a full K-12 pipeline on the shared campus. Gomez has data plastered around the school, and administrators monitor progress daily.

Torkelson made a surprise visit to IDEA Eastside in March to see how the turnaround process was going. Gomez was confident that the academy was on track to earn a “B” on the state accountability report, which will depend on test scores from this spring. The grades will debut for the first time in August. A “B” would be a marked improvement from the “D” IDEA Eastside would have received last year had the state been converting campus scores into letter grades as they are now. Data charts hanging in public spaces around the school showed that academic progress was trending for that “D” until Gomez took charge.

College for All

Criticized as impractical and even paternalistic, the college-for-all movement has gotten pushback from those in favor of career preparation. Critics say that college prep charters impose middle-class values on low-income students and belittle working-class families. Torkelson and Gama argue that low expectations are far more problematic.

“Kids will do the work you put in front of them. Unfortunately, if you’re a low-income child in America, the work that’s put in front of you is minimal,” Torkelson said. Kids from low-income homes and children of color are often given less challenging work than their white middle-class peers, he explained. Research backs his claim.

College should be an option for every student, Gama said, because it is still the pathway to the most secure and empowered future.

To help their students get into college, the network had to find a workable, replicable model for low-income families. Data show that no matter how much SAT/ACT prep a general education, high-poverty school does, it won’t see the kind of scores that higher-income students achieve through expensive private test prep.

However, AP courses and the tests that follow have allowed IDEA students to reap the benefits of increased rigor in school. Their coursework translates directly to their college applications. College for all has become AP for all. The network uses the entire AP curriculum created by the College Board, and it gives the tests as early as eighth grade to begin internally monitoring student progress.

Though the network boasts of its 100 percent college acceptance rates, only 50 percent currently graduate from college, Torkelson said at the San Antonio fundraiser. That’s a high number compared with their socioeconomic peers. Roughly 11 percent of students from the lowest-income quartile nationally graduate from college in six years, according to .

But 50 percent is not high enough, he argues.

Some students cannot attend college right out of high school, and others have to leave college for family and financial reasons. For those students, IDEA created IDEA U, an accredited extension of College for America through Southern New Hampshire University. In these storefront, café atmospheres, students can pursue college credits with access to technology they might not have at home and the support of a tutor/counselor. Some will earn their degree through IDEA U or eventually transfer to a four-year university.

The network also has its own counselors on the campus of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, a commuter college where many IDEA students enroll. Torkelson sits on the board, and the two college counselors IDEA maintains on campus keep its graduates on track to getting their diplomas.

No excuses

“No excuses” became the hallmark catchphrase of high-performing charters in the early 2000s, with networks like KIPP and Uncommon Schools embracing stringent discipline policies and a culture of high expectations very much in line with Bush-era rhetoric. The Department of Education under President Obama favored restorative justice and positive behavior interventions, and many of the “no excuses” charters faced increased public scrutiny,��

IDEA’s understanding of the “no excuses” philosophy was always somewhat different from other networks, Gama said, and it’s nothing she plans to scuttle. In fact, it’s still embroidered on the school uniforms. When IDEA says “no excuses,” she explained, she is referring to the adults — teachers and administrators — who are tempted to let students’ poverty dictate the limits of their achievement, rather than going above and beyond to help them graduate and attend college.

“It’s an adult core value, an adult behavior,” Gama said. “We will do whatever it takes.”

At IDEA, that means bringing in . The case management nonprofit helps IDEA address the social and emotional needs of students, which can otherwise derail their success.

The demands of educating students living in poverty were not a surprise to Torkelson and Gama. The two met in 1997 as Teach for America corps members working with fourth-graders in Donna ISD. They quickly saw the need for a more rigorous, college-focused culture. Students were capable, Gama said; they just needed the opportunity. The district let them start an afterschool program that grew to what Gama characterizes as “a school within a school.”

After their TFA stint was up, Torkelson and Gama went their separate ways to gather the support and know-how they needed to come back together and start a school.

In 2000, IDEA was authorized by the Texas Education Agency and began as a school to serve the colonias in Donna — small unincorporated areas where impoverished, Mexican-American families live without plumbing or paved roads. The pair walked door to door in the colonias, recruiting students —��a tradition that continues to this day, Gama said.

Their signature recruitment strategy in the colonias leads Gama to scoff at the often-heard accusation that charter schools get better results than their district counterparts because they “skim” the brightest and most motivated kids. When IDEA moved into mixed-income suburbs in the Austin area, it placed its campuses in the lower-income neighborhoods, according to the network’s��.

Gama does admit that IDEA has expectations of student conduct that might make for a difficult adjustment, not only for students but also for their families. High expectations mean more friction, more infractions, more reasons for parents to come to school and butt heads with administration. That can be irritating for some parents, Gama acknowledged, especially if they weren’t expecting the rigor. One charter critic at the University of Texas used Texas Education Agency data that between 2007 and 2012, 11 percent of IDEA would-be graduates left the school.

“It’s important that we talk about onboarding families,” Gama said.

Torkelson isn’t pushing on anyone else’s kids what he wouldn’t want for his own kids, he explained. That’s why his three kids are in IDEA schools as well, he said: “They are thriving. They are thriving with the structure. They are thriving with the academic demands.”

Per the the charter network also does not have to admit students with criminal records or “other disciplinary problems.”

Some parents of special education students have had mixed experiences with IDEA’s approach.

Several interviewed in April 2018 credited IDEA’s intensive literacy focus with helping their kids overcome dyslexia and ADHD. One even said that what presented as their child’s dyslexia seemed to completely disappear once they were reading at grade level.

However, in November 2018, the school psychologist at that same campus, IDEA Mays in San Antonio, was sanctioned by the state for failing to deliver required services to a student diagnosed with emotional disturbance. An IDEA spokesperson said the employee was fired after the student’s parent filed a complaint.

That parent and two others whose children had autism and emotional challenges said the school was ill-equipped to handle those types of disabilities.

“I often hear from special education parents that they want us to do more,” Torkelson said, but he points to the many who have been successful. By focusing on intensive reading, math and teamwork, he said, IDEA is preparing students for life after school, where federal protections don’t guarantee them a job or housing. He wants those students to be “independent and successful.”

On a recent surprise visit to one of IDEA’s lowest-performing campuses, Torkelson wanted to check on general progress. He also stopped by the school’s special education classroom for students with the most individual needs. Two teachers worked with the 10 students, each moving at their own pace. Torkelson said he liked the individual instruction he saw as well as the peaceful environment. Each student was concentrating on their work, despite the visitors in the room.

Although IDEA is willing, and he believes able, to educate any student, Torkelson knows that the intensity and structure of IDEA isn’t going to appeal to every family. “I’m not looking to convince anybody of my point of view or my philosophy. I want to be a school for people who already have that point of view,” he said.

And there are plenty of them.

There seems to be no end in sight for the growth of Texas’s largest charter network, which could well be on track to surpass KIPP, which educates more than 100,000 students in 224 schools, as the largest national network. Expansion into choice-friendly Florida initially came through the 2018 Schools of Hope initiative, which brought charter operators in to start schools within five miles of “persistently low-performing” Florida public schools.

To operate Schools of Hope, the networks had to have proven success with children in the same demographics as the area where they would be planted in Florida. The program was the first state authorization mechanism for charters in Florida, where charters are typically authorized by school boards. IDEA plans to open four schools in Tampa Bay in 2021, once the leaders and initial staff have been trained.

As it grows, both co-founders acknowledge that certain campuses will have missteps and some will perform better than others. None of that, they say, gives them pause on the quality of the IDEA model. They have too many college acceptance letters to prove it.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to IDEA and to ����Ӱ��.

Lead image: IDEA Public Schools

Community circles, a high-volume mix of cultural pride and on-your-toes academic quizzing now routine in charter schools across the county, have their origins at North Star, one of the most famous charter schools in America. (For more on the origins of community circle, see my with North Star co-founder Jamey Verrilli.) Visitors to North Star in the early years numbered up to 100 per month, including many aspiring charter startup leaders who walked away with memories of watching Jackson in action — and a determination to do something similar at their school.

Long regarded as one of the highest-performing charter networks in the country, Uncommon — with 53 schools and 19,000 students in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts — may have the highest college success rate of any district or charter network serving low-income students.

Jackson has been chief schools officer K-8 at Uncommon; she now becomes one of the highest-ranking African-American charter school executives in the country. Her replacement, Juliana Worrell, is also African-American and is best known for her successful track record at Newark’s North Star Academy Alexander Street Elementary, Uncommon’s first turnaround school.

Recently, I had a chance to talk with Jackson.

����Ӱ��: When I was researching my book The Founders, about charter school creators, it seemed like every single one had visited North Star, admired those morning community circles and devised something similar for their schools.

Jackson: Community circle was my favorite part of the day, hands down. They were an opportunity for me, as principal, to inspire kids but also check their learning. I treated it like a classroom.

Our visitors, from 50 to 100 per month, were district and charter teachers and school leaders. I’ve seen the circle adopted across the country. Sometimes someone will send me a video just to say thank you. It makes me so proud. There’s the joy of it — parents would drop off their students and then ask to stay for community circle. So it became a ritual for students, parents and teachers.

I’ve been to charter schools that have community circles in the morning where the school leaders seem to have no idea where the idea originated.

A lot of schools have no idea it came from us. That’s the beauty of it — as long as we are able to impact kids in a positive way, that’s OK.

What does the near-term future look like for Uncommon?

We’re looking at how our students move from elementary to middle school, and from middle to high school. We know those are pivotal transition points for both students and families. We want to make sure, both in terms of culture and academics, that we are setting our students up to make a smooth and strong step-up to a new phase of their school experience.

Why?

When parents have students at middle school, they want it to be like elementary school. That is in conflict with how the students see it. The students are done with elementary school and want it to be about middle school. So we want to make the transition stronger.

For grades 8 to 9, we want to look at the curriculum in grade 8 and ask: How is that is preparing them, for example, for ninth-grade algebra and algebra II? It’s planning backward to keep our promise of to and through [college]. What experiences do the students need to have so that we keep that promise?

It’s my observation that, compared to other charter networks, Uncommon puts more of its college success emphasis on strengthening the K-12 years, less on tracking the alumni through college.

I was part of forming the vision. We want to give the students a strong academic foundation and also build character. Character is really important. That’s what will get you through college when you are struggling.

As for college supports, that [emphasis on K-12] allows us to deep-dive into the students still having difficulty transitioning from their high school years to the college years. If you need the help, we’re going to give it to you, showing up to talk to your college counselor, going into a counselor’s meeting with the students. If they are struggling with financial aid, we will make sure they make it into the right office. Everything to make sure you’re on track.

Give me an example of what Uncommon does to boost its college success rate.

We are obsessed with data. We have broken that down at all levels of the organization. We take high-level data to the school level, showing principals how to look at data in short periods of time. Every six weeks, we give the interim assessments, and based on what that tells us, we inject curriculum changes and schedule changes. In addition, every other week, a manager comes in to walk the school with the principal, giving feedback on what would make the school better in the next two weeks.

Also, everyone says you can’t teach kids you don’t love, and that’s true. For me, you have to see the kids for who they are, and have to see them [for] who they can become. And you have to show love. Kids really know. It doesn’t matter if you’re 5, 10 or 17. If you do not love them, they know that, and it impacts them in ways that doesn’t lead to the highest bar of achievement.

In California, bills pending in the legislature would put a moratorium on new charter schools and threaten the existence of current ones. In New York City, where more than 50,000 students are on charter school waiting lists, no more schools can be opened because the city has hit an artificial and arbitrary cap. Despite support from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, it’s unclear whether the legislature will lift this cap on opportunity. In other states, lawsuits regularly pop up to prevent charter schools from opening or rob them of their rightful funding.

Why?

It would be one thing if charter schools were a failed experiment, but they are a tremendous success. Just this spring, we’ve seen more evidence that charter schools are delivering on their promise to students and to society.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas studied charter schools in eight major cities, examining funding, achievement scores and how higher achievement translates to lifetime economic gains. They that “On average … public charter schools are 40 percent more cost-effective and produce a 53 percent larger [return on investment] than [traditional public schools].”

In his investigation of how charter schools are preparing students from low-income backgrounds for college, author Richard Whitmire found that some of the larger charter networks — KIPP, Uncommon Schools, IDEA, YES Prep and others — are producing college graduates at a rate two to four times as high as the average for students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. These are students graduating from college, not just getting to college.

Of course, not every charter school is hitting grand slams. But the overwhelming evidence shows that charter schools are producing historic gains for students. By replicating those that work, we could make even more progress on closing the achievement gap between rich and poor students and between white students and their minority counterparts.

If you had told policymakers 28 years ago that the charter school experiment they were launching would lead to low-income urban students gaining months of additional learning each year, as CREDO researchers have found — and that some of these schools would help more than half of their graduates succeed in college, and that the return on public education investments would rise by 50 percent — they would have assumed they’d finally found the answer to the problems afflicting public education.

But that’s not where we are today. Parents love charter schools and want more of them. Yet defenders of the status quo stand in their way. Charter schools account for 6 percent of public school nationwide, but to hear some people tell it, they account for 100 percent of the problems school districts face.

No doubt, in some districts like Los Angeles, where charter enrollment is around a quarter of all students, district bureaucracies have to get more nimble in how they respond to parents choosing charters. Unfortunately, that’s not what they’re doing. They’re looking to charter schools as scapegoats rather than partners.

The bottom line is, we’re seeing results in charter schools that should make every politician proud to support them. But the money and power of charter school opponents persuades a lot of politicians to blame charter schools for district financial distress rather than praise charter schools for finally delivering on the promise of public education for black and brown and low-income students.

That’s why this National Charter Schools Week is so important. The only way the charter school community can stand up to the educational Goliath is by telling our stories from the perspectives of the people who most benefit. And no, it’s not billionaire businessmen, as some cliché-happy opponents claim.

It’s students who are finally getting a shot at college and proving all the doubters wrong. It’s parents who thank God every day that a good school found its way to them. It’s teachers who feel the pride of helping their students beat the odds. It’s dedicated school leaders who have the freedom to do school differently and are making profound change happen. And it’s local business and community leaders who have seen neighborhoods transformed by the presence of a public school that parents are eager to send their children to.

Our 3.2 million students, 219,000 teachers, and countless champions and supporters should be proud of what they’re accomplishing. This week is an opportunity to shout their stories from the rooftops, confident that a lot of good people are listening.

Nina Rees is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Tucked away in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a little-noticed program called the , which could bring much-needed financial investments to some of the nation’s most distressed communities. While most attention has focused on the benefits for housing development and new businesses, the program could also spur needed investments in education, particularly charter school facilities and skills training programs.

The recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was not widely felt across the country. During the first five years, half the national job growth came from just 73 of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States. Five metro areas were responsible for half the national increase in the number of new companies. Meanwhile, more than 52 million Americans live in that are still losing jobs, suffer from higher-than-average rates of , and have lower labor force participation. They have became poverty traps, with less economic mobility for workers and their families.

The Investing in Opportunity Act aims to help by incentivizing needed private capital investments in projects crucial for revitalizing these communities. The program grew out of bipartisan work by the led by Jared Bernstein, a progressive chief economist to former vice president Joe Biden, and Kevin Hassett, a conservative economist and currently President Trump’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. A bipartisan congressional coalition led in the Senate by Republican Tim Scott and Democrat Cory Booker, and in the House by Republican Pat Tiberi and Democrat Ron Kind, quickly introduced the program in legislation that eventually became part of the final tax bill.

The program has two components. First, governors had until the end of April to designate up to 25 percent of their states’ as Opportunity Zones. These are the areas within which projects qualify for investment through the second part of the program, a new private investment vehicle called Opportunity Funds. The Treasury Department has already zones in 18 states.

What’s unique is the pool of capital available for reinvestment. Investors are allowed to defer paying capital gains taxes if they sell appreciated investments and reinvest that money in Opportunity Funds. This would entice investors to put some of their roughly $6 trillion in unrealized investment gains toward areas that need it. While there are smaller tax incentives for those who sell after five or seven years, the program is aimed at creating patient capital invested in communities for the long term. There are no capital gains on any appreciation if the investment is kept in an Opportunity Fund for at least a decade. Even a fraction of this reinvestment would make Opportunity Zones/Funds the largest economic development program in the United States.

This should bring needed capital investments to help rebuild the main streets of many communities left out of the recovery. It should also provide a source of funding for a number of human capital projects.

For example, costs associated with can present an expensive hurdle for public charter schools. According to the , charters are forced to spend operating dollars on facilities, cutting into the funds that should be spent on students. Local and state capital funding programs do not provide enough to meet the need.

One could imagine groups such as the Charter School Growth Fund or NewSchools Venture Fund creating charter-specific Opportunity Funds to scale new schools to high-needs areas. Perhaps the funds would focus on charters specializing in career and technical education or providing alternative pathways for students in these areas.

Beyond charters, emerging workforce programs, such as coding boot camps, are also seeking capital to expand their offerings. Shut out from traditional federal financial aid, these organizations have instead turned to , in which investors provide funds up front toward students’ tuition and other associated costs in exchange for a fixed percentage of student earnings after graduation. These agreements allow colleges and training providers to share risk with students by underwriting tuition costs based on the amount of likely student earnings. They’re an in aligning quality and outcomes for students, providers, and employers; what they largely lack is the initial up-front capital to help finance several cohorts of students.

Next-generation workforce programs like in Alabama and in Arizona, and technology apprenticeship programs like in Indianapolis, could take advantage of the Opportunity Fund structure to support income-share agreements for their students in Opportunity Zones. Or perhaps new apprenticeship programs would be financed out of Opportunity Funds to provide the skills training needed to complement new jobs in those regions.

There are also creative options for governors who could task their economic development agencies with building out an Opportunity Fund investment strategy. For example, Pennsylvania could leverage its expertise and staffing with the Commonwealth Financing Authority and New Pennsylvania Venture Capital Investment Program to create an Opportunity Fund aimed at charter school facilities or workforce programs.

Governors might also want to combine investments from an Opportunity Fund with federal E-rate discounts to pay for broadband in rural schools. The “” could be closed, and students would have access to new opportunities through , , and .

State chiefs could also layer additional incentives or benefits for schools in Opportunity Zones, giving them preference when competing for state grants or federal funding under the Every Student Succeeds Act or using the zone designation as another way of identifying need.

There is enormous room for creatively using these funding mechanisms to spur improvements in education and workforce systems in areas that have the most need. Americans have had the option to invest in emerging markets around the world for decades; now they have the opportunity to invest in emerging markets here at home.

John Bailey is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Walton Family Foundation adviser, and a former White House domestic policy adviser.

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Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

Washington, D.C.

Teacher Nicole Battle was deliberately playing devil’s advocate with the second- and third-graders gathered in her classroom after school on a sunny Monday in April.

Why should girls go to school when they just grow up to stay home and take care of kids? she asked. Why does it matter if immigrant families are split up? It’s fine for some people to have dirty brown water come out of their taps. It’s safe, right?

The seven students gathered for her section of ESL After the Bell, an English language enrichment program at the Brightwood campus of Center City Public Charter Schools, had other ideas.

Girls should have the same rights as boys — after all, boys wouldn’t be here without girls, Seiey Ruiz said. The U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents shouldn’t have to give up their mothers and fathers. And, one of her classmates piped up, some strangers are kidnappers. The brown-water comment roused a universal “Ugh!” from the students.

When discussing each of the problems, the students also talked about young women leaders trying to solve them: Malala Yousafzai, who became the youngest Nobel Prize laureate for her work on educating girls, for instance, or Mari Copeny, also known as Little Miss Flint, the 10-year-old advocate whose community’s water was poisoned by lead.

The ESL After the Bell program serves 70 students at three of Center City’s six campuses with large populations of English learners —��and for the first time this year, a district public school. All the students are studying human rights issues this year. Each group invented a different product — T-shirts were a popular option, as was homemade slime — to present at a May 9 “universal exchange market” with the aim of raising both awareness and dollars for charities that support human rights causes.

“It’s pure enrichment. It’s lively classrooms with students talking. They love it. They want to come back,” said Isabella Sanchez-Pimienta, lead teacher for ESL After the Bell at H.D. Cooke, the district public school implementing the program for the first time this year.

Though traditional district and charter schools are often portrayed as being in conflict, competing for the same students and public resources, it hasn’t been a problem in this case.

In D.C, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education chose Center City Public Charter Schools to receive a $172,800, two-year federal grant designed to encourage the sharing of charter school best practices and promote district-charter collaboration. Part of that money went toward expanding ESL After the Bell to DC Public Schools.

Sanchez-Pimienta knew Alicia Passante, the charter network’s ESL program manager, and how successful the after-school initiative had been at Center City. She saw it as an opportunity for Cooke as well.

“The data that she showed us was what made me really think, ‘Wow,’ ” Sanchez-Pimienta said.

The grant also pays for shared professional development for teachers from Center City and H.D. Cooke, stipends for curriculum development, and Spanish-language programs at two Center City campuses.

At Center City’s Brightwood campus, about 30 percent of students are English language learners, more than double the citywide average. Of those ELLs, Spanish is the first language for 60 percent, and Amharic, the , is the first language for the remaining 40 percent.

The program started at the network’s Petworth campus six years ago, Passante said. Though the school was getting top ratings from the city’s charter school board, there was a wide gap in performance from its English language learners.

Center City — — is small enough that it��has only one class per grade.

“So when you consider what that really meant, these kids are sitting in the same class, receiving the same instruction, as kids that are getting it, and they’re performing great. There’s some sort of disparity as to why. There’s obviously some sort of barrier,” Passante said.

After the first year of the now-six-year-old program at the Petworth campus, participating students’ English and math test scores increased by 30 percentage points, and half of participating students exited the formal English-language-learner classification, according to a ��by New American Foundation analysts Amaya Garcia and Conor Williams, who is also a 74 contributor.

Now, English learners across the network are outperforming their peers: 32 percent reached grade-level standards in math and 19 percent in reading in 2017, compared with 21 percent and 17 percent for English learners citywide, .

The program changes curriculum every semester — often, lately, with a political bent. Last year focused on the environment. The first semester this year, the students wrote self-reflections that embraced their immigrant heritage. The second semester used the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, including rights of immigrants and refugees, as base material.

The project-based learning model allows students to pick up language and additional background knowledge that isn’t part of the school’s standard curriculum but is often related to it. Second-graders this year, for example, made connections between slavery in a class lesson on the Civil War and human rights issues that are part of the after-school program, said teacher Alexis Fields.

Getting the students speaking in English is also an important focus, Fields said.

Elsewhere at Brightwood on that Monday, fourth- through sixth-graders were focused on refugees. After wondering why refugees can’t “just break in” to other countries, and discussing why receiving countries might not want them — fear of differences, for instance, or danger that could follow refugees — they focused on T-shirt designs. They debated between a logo of joined hands over a heart, with a slogan of “Everyone Is Human,” and a new contender of an open birdcage.

Seventh- and eighth-graders were deep in the product design process, researching new recipes for the slime they planned to bring to the market.

Some slime recipes were too colorful and needed more water, which also helps make the product less sticky, Ivan Quintanilla, a seventh-grader, explained.

Ivan has “really learned a lot” and mentioned finding out more about women’s rights, his mom, Esmela, said later through a translator. Ivan has taken the initiative to look up information on his own, she added.

The program has morphed several times over the years: One early iteration required teachers to write their own curriculum for four days of enrichment, which was too hard on educators already working a regular school day. But school leaders have stuck with it after seeing the kind of results it achieved.

Now Passante, who was one of the original teachers working those long hours, writes a new curriculum every year that teachers across the three Center City campuses (and, this year, H.D. Cooke) can use.

The teachers at Cooke haven’t gone through the data yet to see if there have been changes so far, but anecdotally, it’s working for the 60 students it serves, Sanchez-Pimienta said.

One student who has been in the U.S. only a year rarely speaks in class, and she set a goal to speak to three people who came by to see her self-portrait and personal narratives during the first-semester showcase.

In the end, she spoke to every person who came by, Sanchez-Pimienta said.

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Teacher strikes have dominated education headlines over the past month. At the recent Reagan Institute Summit on Education, Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, was asked about the topic and offered an answer you don’t often hear from conservative Republicans. Foxx, a former university teacher and community college president, she believes K-12 teachers are paid less than college professors “because the majority of elementary and secondary teachers are women and the majority of college teachers are men.” She called for reversing that pay dynamic and treating K-12 teachers as professionals.

This week, we celebrate two pillars of American education during National Charter Schools Week and National Teacher Appreciation Week. While union activists may see the two events as being at odds with each other, I believe that no sector stands to empower and elevate teachers more than the charter school movement.

Michael Milkie relied on his experiences as a teacher when he, with his wife, started Chicago’s Noble Network of Charter Schools. “The essence of charter schools is giving power to those closest to the students — the teachers,” Milkie told me. The outgoing National Teacher of the Year, Sydney Chaffee, teaches at Codman Academy Charter Public School in Massachusetts. She spoke with ����Ӱ�� about making sure people understand what charter schools are and about how proud she is to be a public school teacher. She will be a keynote speaker at next month’s .

Today, nearly 3.2 million students attend a little more than 7,000 charter schools, many led by former teachers who left the traditional system to start something different. The freedom and flexibility that come with running one’s own school offer charter school leaders the ability to test new ideas and pedagogies without having to contend with a centralized bureaucracy that typically favors the status quo over anything innovative. Leading one’s own school also inspires greater care and responsibility — a personal investment in the future of the school and its students.

Teachers, school leaders, policy advocates, parents, and students are the change makers we’re celebrating during National Charter Schools Week. As part of the festivities, we’re announcing three new inductees into the National Charter Schools Hall of Fame: Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, IDEA Public Schools, and Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, and the respective leaders of all three schools. They are testament to how this movement empowers educators.

Ana Ponce, founder of Camino Nuevo, and JoAnn Gama and Tom Torkelson, the founders of IDEA, were all teachers before they took the plunge into starting and running schools. What united them was the desire to take the good work they were doing in their own classrooms and grow it, so that more students would benefit. Camino Nuevo now serves 3,200 students near downtown Los Angeles, and IDEA is on its way to serving 100,000 students across more than 170 schools.

At Yu Ying in D.C., Maquita Alexander leads a school with a fully immersive dual-language English and Chinese curriculum designed to develop “culturally fluent and well-rounded global citizens.” The school was started by parents who wanted their children to attend a public school with broad horizons.

The divergent paths of these schools reflect the diversity of the charter school movement. Some schools maintain a local focus in one school or a handful of schools. Others go big, expanding across districts and states to reach into new communities. There is no single formula for charter school success, just as there is no single formula for student success, and no single formula for excellent teaching.

Supporting teachers and other education visionaries who want to shake up the system requires political courage. This week, the charter school movement also honors policymakers who support our schools at the federal, state, and local levels. All three are vital to its success.

Congress recently increased funding for the federal Charter Schools Program to $400 million for fiscal year 2018, the largest amount ever devoted to the program. The program is essential to starting and replicating charter schools, because most states don’t provide funding until students actually enroll. Encouragingly, many state leaders have recently shown their commitment to charter school students by closing the gap in per-pupil expenditures between district-run schools and charter schools. Some states are also beginning to provide funding to help charter schools cover the costs of school buildings, or, at a minimum, giving founders access to facilities no longer used by districts — a commonsense idea that too many districts fight tooth and nail.

Through good policy, federal, state, and local leaders make it possible for visionary teachers and principals to turn their ideas and experiences into high-performing schools. As we celebrate charter schools and teachers this week, we urge policymakers everywhere to embrace and expand charter school freedoms so more educators have the opportunity to become the leaders and innovators our students need.

Nina Rees is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, the William E. Simon Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and ����Ӱ��.

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Former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who championed a host of education reforms during his eight years in office, now comes at it from a different role: that of university president and charter school operator.

Daniels, who has been president of Purdue University since 2013, wants to help improve K-12 education to diversify the students who meet the school’s admissions criteria, he told the American Federation for Children’s national policy summit in Washington Thursday. The group, founded and previously led by now–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, advocates for charter schools and private school choice programs.

Only about 135 African-American students in the whole state this year would meet Purdue’s general admissions targets in terms of grade point average and standardized test scores, Daniels said. The middle 50 percent of this year’s freshman class had GPAs between 3.6 and 4.0 and SAT scores of 1160 to 1360, .

The number meeting benchmarks for the top 15 percent of this year’s class is even smaller: about nine African-American and 25 Latino students, he said. Purdue, a public land-grant university, enrolls about 31,000 undergraduates at its main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. It’s known for its engineering and science programs.

“If we were to wait on the K-12 system to produce the numbers of first-generation and lower-income and minority students that we are seeking to educate and prepare for better lives, we would wait forever,” Daniels said.

The former GOP governor helped found Purdue Polytechnic High School, a charter school in Indianapolis serving mostly low-income students of color. It opened this school year with 150 freshmen, and it will have 600 students when it reaches capacity in fall 2020.

“The assignment is to take young people who have spent eight years in a struggling — I’ll be kind —��school system, and four years later when they walk across the stage somewhere, I want there to be an admission to Purdue University in their diploma,” he said.

The goal is to prove that this charter model, which is STEM-focused and has “lots of business involvement,” works in Indianapolis, and then expand it elsewhere across the state, he said. Daniels hopes to expand to Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Evansville, and the school has partnered with businesses as varied as the city zoo and the Indianapolis Star newspaper, .

Daniels’s speech was also part call to action for the dozens of school choice advocates assembled in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel.

The term “social justice” has often been used — and perhaps misused — in public debate in recent years, Daniels said.

“I can’t think of a more crystalline example of social justice than enabling poor families to have the same rights, the same power, the same decision-making over their kids’ education, as rich people,” he said.

Of all the “socially just” causes, school choice is perhaps the “noblest and the hardest,” Daniels said.

He also touted other education reforms he pursued while in office, including requiring students to read by third grade in order to be promoted to fourth, shifting standardized testing from the fall to the spring, and giving college scholarships to students who finish high school in three years.

Disclosure: The Dick & Betsy DeVos Foundation previously provided financial support to ����Ӱ��. The Walton Family Foundation provides funding to Purdue Polytechnic High School and to ����Ӱ��.

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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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