The students, a few dozen ninth-grade boys, are sharply dressed in the prep-school classics: khaki pants, purple- and yellow-striped ties and navy blue blazers, though by now, eight days before the end of the school year, there’s rips in more than a few of the elbows.

On a muggy day in early June, they had already slugged through spitting rain and Metro train delays to get to the Ron Brown College Prep High School, a building still in the midst of renovations. In the far reaches of D.C.’s northeastern quadrant, the school sits just a few blocks from the street that marks the city’s Maryland border.

Ron Brown College Prep High School, whose inaugural freshman class became sophomores when school reopened Aug. 21, is perhaps the most visible, and controversial, part of a $20 million initiative to support young men of color by former Chancellor Kaya Henderson and Mayor Muriel Bowser.

On that humid June day, the still-freshman class began the morning like every other, with a community circle. Most start with “shout-outs” that see the boys offering praise for peers or faculty, but today they are quiet, so the leader has them debate social issues instead. They discuss things like whether there are more African-American men enrolled in college or incarcerated, and whether young men of color do better long-term when raised by two parents than by one.

This community circle is used for both practical and pedagogical reasons: to give a time buffer so transit delays and responsibilities like getting siblings to school mean less missed class time, and to place an emphasis on social-emotional learning.

“We want our young men to have a space where they can actually respect each other and provide positive feedback to each other and receive praise from their peers, receive praise from adults, to get used to actually giving and receiving that, which is far too few and far between for young men of their age,” Principal Benjamin Williams said.

No girls allowed

The boys have come around to the idea of no female classmates, Williams said.

Paul Gray transferred to Ron Brown from Wilson, an 1,800-student high school on the opposite end of the city, and the small class sizes and close attention from teachers have helped his grades improve.

“It’s a challenge, but also helped me focus,” Gray said of the lack of female classmates.

That said, the young kings of Ron Brown, as the staff call them, are still 15-year-old boys.

On a spring trip to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, they tried to pick up girls from another school at the butterfly exhibit, Zavian Morgan said.

Morgan, Gray, and two other classmates took a break from an English class assignment on Shakespeare to talk about their school and debate the seemingly essential detail of whether said girls were from Maryland or D.C. What wasn’t up for debate, the boys said, was that the interest was mutual.

The lack of girls has certainly attracted the attention of adult advocates.

The ACLU of the District of Columbia has questioned the legality of the program, saying the $20 million undertaking violates Title IX, which bans discrimination in education based on sex. The group said in a that the school should be open to girls. allow single-sex public schools so long as there is a comparable option for students of the other gender or “if such action constitutes remedial or affirmative action.”

There is no DCPS school just for girls, though there is . There are, of course, plenty of private single-sex options in the city, including the Washington Jesuit Academy, which serves low-income middle school boys of color in an extended day and year program.

(����Ӱ��: Washington Jesuit Academy Leads Graduates From D.C.’s Toughest Neighborhoods to Its Most Elite High Schools)

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship, the only federally funded voucher program, also serves about 1,200 low-income students in D.C., providing up to $12,981 for private high school tuition, including single-sex options.

Ron Brown’s focus on boys only was necessary for a group of students being left behind even as results improved across the district, . Black and Hispanic boys in D.C. have the lowest proficiency rates on most standardized tests and the lowest high school graduation rates of any group.

“If we’re going to get different results from our young men, we have to try different strategies, and this is one that we think is well worth it,” she said.

Staff and students know about the legal concerns, but are leaving the worrying up to district officials, Williams said.

“We’ll let DCPS and their fine lawyers take care of that, and I’m only responsible for what’s happening in this building, and I’ll continue to work to be responsible for that,” he said.

Overcoming stereotypes

The number of single-sex schools aimed at specifically helping children of color has proliferated in recent years, without much research to back up why, said Joseph Nelson, an assistant professor at Swarthmore College.

He helped with a 2010 study of all-boys high schools in New York, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta that found the most important qualities for success at single-sex schools were the same as at any other — excellent teachers, strong leadership, parental involvement, and the like.

“My stance on single-sex or coeducational education is there should be a good school first and then the composition of its students are other factors that you consider in constructing a learning environment,” he said.

https://www.facebook.com/RBHSMonarchs/videos/1848830575376874/

Adults at Ron Brown aim to empower the students, like using a monarch, represented as a lion — essential in a society that frequently stereotypes young men of color.

Many schools struggle with helping boys figure out what they need to do to break away from negative societal expectations and be successful students, Nelson said.

“That message is so thick and so prominent that it requires almost a daily effort within the school to disrupt it,” he said.

At Ron Brown, one answer to that has been highlighting accomplished men of color.

The building, its first floor freshly refurbished, with the rest set for year two, previously housed a neighborhood middle school, also called Ron Brown. was the first African-American head of a political party and President Bill Clinton’s first commerce secretary. He was killed at age 54, one of 35 people who died in a 1996 plane crash during a trade mission to the former Yugoslavia.

The inaugural class is split into 10 councils that compete over grades and attendance. Each council, which Williams equates to the four houses in the Harry Potter series, is named after a famous man of color, such as Barack Obama, Cesar Chavez, Frederick Douglass, and Thurgood Marshall.

Getting results

Standardized test results for Ron Brown for its freshman-only 2016–17 school year aren’t available. (D.C.’s standardized tests look at 10th grade English and geometry, which students also usually take their sophomore year.) But there have been big social-emotional gains for the school’s 105 freshmen, Williams said. Nearly all of them, 96 percent, are black, and 44 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a measure of poverty in schools. Most live in Wards 7 and 8, those east of the Anacostia River, home to many of the poorest and highest-crime neighborhoods in the city.

“I think they’ve internalized this mission and they’re excited about being able to change their own narrative and to write their own narrative,” the principal said. “You can see that in their faces on a daily basis.”

Williams, who previously was assistant principal at The School Without Walls, a magnet school, said the Ron Brown students have made years of progress in just eight months.

The boys have really embraced the idea of praising others, taking responsibility for actions and figuring out how to overcome challenges, and, more important, going to college, he said.

Tremayne Warren has his eye on a big college prize: Oxford University in England.

His mom was the real force behind him coming, he said, but he’s grown to like the school’s college tours and trips, extracurricular activities, and supportive atmosphere.

“We’re all a family here,” Warren said. “We’re all monarchs. We’re all kings.”

Early projections were that 85 percent of the inaugural class would re-enroll for next year, a number Williams expects will hit 95 percent.

Ron Brown’s gleaming new building has opened its doors to a new class, many of them the middle school friends of the boys who are now sophomores.

There are more than 40 future young kings, freshmen and sophomores, on the school’s waiting list.

The names Michelle Rhee, Adrian Fenty, and Kaya Henderson are perhaps those most associated with the upheaval and turnaround of schools in Washington, D.C., over the past decade, but it’s impossible to tell that story without Vincent C. Gray.

While chairman of the city council, Gray sponsored legislation guaranteeing free preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds in the District of Columbia. The city, which also functions in many ways as a state, now has the highest proportion of young children in state-funded early learning in the country.

(����Ӱ��: Washington, D.C. — The Pre-K Capital Where Nearly All 4-Year-Olds (and Most 3-Year-Olds!) Go to School)

In 2010, Gray famously beat then-incumbent mayor Fenty, who with Rhee implemented huge changes in D.C.’s schools. The race was framed as Gray, defender of longtime D.C. residents and the status quo, versus Fenty, whose platform of big changes, like mayoral control of schools, was seen as favoring the young people moving to the city at the expense of longtime residents.

But Gray, who had supported the move to mayoral control as chairman of the city council, continued the education reform work, appointing Henderson, a top Rhee deputy, as chancellor.

“There was no reasonable conclusion that could be reached, that the governance approach [that was in place before mayoral control] was likely to make any major changes for children in the District of Columbia,” he said.

After Gray’s victory, several of his aides pleaded guilty in connection with a wide-ranging investigation into campaign finance improprieties, a scandal that overshadowed much of his tenure as mayor. Gray always asserted his innocence, and the investigation , but he lost the 2014 mayoral primary to now-Mayor Muriel Bowser. He beat an incumbent to regain his seat on the city council in 2016, and said .

Gray spoke with ����Ӱ�� in his office in D.C.’s John Wilson Building in mid-August. You can also see photos and audio portions of this interview on published in conjunction with David Osborne’s new book, .

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What would you say are your biggest accomplishments in education when you were on the council and then when you were mayor?

Gray: Well, I think that they’re really inextricably tied. I think the biggest accomplishment, to me anyway, is something that I think will go on for many, many years, and that is establishing the universality of early childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds in the city. I did the legislation that created a commitment to universal pre-kindergarten. That law was approved, I guess in ’08 or ’09, right around that era. Then where I worked especially hard as mayor to make sure it was effectively implemented.

I really don’t have any reservations about saying I think we have the most effective — the most available, let’s put it that way — pre-kindergarten program for 3- and 4-year-olds in the District of Columbia by comparison to any other jurisdiction in America.

Could you talk a little bit about mayoral control of the schools and Chancellor Henderson, and the importance you felt about keeping those reforms in place when you took over from Mayor Fenty?

I was a big supporter of education reform as manifested in that way, and I want to clarify why I put it that way, as manifested under the mayoral control. I helped to move the council in the direction of voting for this because under Mayor [Anthony] Williams [D.C.’s mayor from 1999 to 2007], he had tried the same thing and it was voted down by the council … I really felt that we were at a point where there was no reasonable conclusion that could be reached, that the governance approach that then was extant was likely to make any major changes for children in the District of Columbia. I was happy to support it, happy to work with its implementation.

There certainly were some rough spots along the way …

Again, I was committed to it from the very beginning. I not only voted for it, I moved to help the council …We had a 9-to-2 vote, which was overwhelming. [There were two vacancies on D.C.’s 13-member city council at that point.] The only thing I was disappointed in, I was hoping we’d get an 11-to-0 vote because I thought that would be overwhelmingly dispositive in terms of the sentiments of the legislative body in the city about the need to move in that direction.

Of course, having had such a commitment to education reform as manifested in that way, I wanted to see those reforms continue when I became mayor because I was so committed to them myself. … I moved in the direction of appointing [Henderson] because of her history with the city, her history with education in the public sense in the District of Columbia, and her involvement with education reform as it was being practiced and implemented during that time.

How would you describe the schools in D.C. 10 years ago versus today versus how you hope they’ll look in 10 years?

I think we made major change, and I want to underscore too that simply the governance changes in the D.C. public school system are only a part of the picture. I think the advent, the creation of charter schools in the District of Columbia, is a major form of reform in the District of Columbia. That goes back to the late ’90s, when there was a federal law passed to give the authority to be able to create charter schools … It didn’t have to be the federal government that did that. We would have gotten there ourselves, I’m absolutely certain of that.

I think we have to recognize that a lot of the reform and the achievements thereof also came as a function of the charters in the District of Columbia. They now are probably 20-years-old-plus in the District of Columbia. I think we’re light-years from where we were in 1996. I think we’re light-years from where we were in 2007. We will continue to make gains, in my opinion.

We have an enormous achievement gap, as many big cities do. Unfortunately, you look at it and it’s socioeconomically based, it’s racially based in the District of Columbia, but I think those gaps will continue to close …

I think the lessons that should be learned from the charters is the extent to which we’ve given the autonomy and authority to those schools to be able to function. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. I mean, there certainly are requirements that you perform, that the children demonstrate that they’re making progress. I commend the charters on having put in place an evaluation system. The performance management framework that’s been put in place that I think does a good job of helping to measure the effectiveness of each one of those schools …

I have a piece of legislation now too that I’m working on that I introduced a couple of months ago, three months ago. It’s a bill that focuses on infants and toddlers because I look at this as kind of three pieces. Having good prenatal care is the beginning of this effort. I worked hard as a director of the Department of Human Services to be able to improve outcomes for children around infant mortality … [D.C.’s infant mortality rate from 13.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005 to 7.6 per 1,000 in 2014, which was still above the national average of 6 per 1,000 that same year.]

The prenatal care work is hugely important. The other end of that spectrum, if we can call it that, is what we do with the 3- and 4-year-olds. We just talked about that in terms of the work that we’re doing with early childhood education.

The middle piece is the infant and toddlers piece. It isn’t that we don’t have programs — we’ve had programs of one kind or another for a very long time in the city. We just have not had a systematic approach that says, ‘Here’s what we’re aiming to do with very young children. Here’s why we’re doing it. Here’s how we’re going to involve families.’ We want families to feel comfortable being able to take their child to an infant and toddler program and that they will be safe all day and they will learn, that they will have a healthy developmental experience for each one of them, which we think is going on now and will be expanded by the infant and toddler programs that would be enabled by the legislation that I have [proposed] …

We’ve got growing numbers of very young children in the city because the birth rate is growing. We ought to do everything we possibly can to say that there is a place for young children in our developmental and educational systems.

One of the things that we didn’t do, as I’m sure you know, is that we didn’t mandate legislatively or otherwise that children who are 3 and 4 have to go to school. They’re not required to, and there are a couple of reasons for that: One, I felt we could convince parents that this was a good thing for their children. Secondly, just from a statutory perspective, should the day come, and hopefully it won’t, when hard times fall upon the city again and there’s shrinking resources, if you create a mandate that every child who is 3 has to be in school, that then would put the city in a position of being vulnerable to litigation because it isn’t serving every one of those children.

That wasn’t the principal reason for it. The principal reason for it was I believed that we were creating an environment in which parents would want to see their children have the best opportunity to succeed and that we wouldn’t have to mandate that they send their 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds to school, that they would do it because it was the right thing to do for their children.

Is that just a center-based program or is there a home visiting component to it?

Both … Home visiting is very much an important part of that, and that’s why, for example, our health care professionals will have such a continually growing role in that regard. Nurses, for example, who make visitations to homes who can work not only with the children but also work with the parents to be able to care for those children. I look at some of the very youngest of our children in the city and see that they may be in single-parent homes where moms may be the caregiver, where they may not even be 21 years of age themselves, they may be 16, 17, 18 years old, and what we can do to equip them to be able to do an even more effective job with their children.

I have not run into a parent yet who didn’t want something better for their children. The problem is, of course, in many instances they don’t know how to do it, and that’s one of our jobs, to be able to help them become more effective, to carry out a commitment which I think virtually every one of them has. Talking about universality, I think there’s a universal commitment on the part of our parents. Commitment is one thing, but having the characteristics and qualities and skill set to be able to effectuate that, it’s a whole another issue.

Taking it back to the older kids a little bit, you’ve been quoted as saying, “I honestly think that one of the principal reasons for the improvement we’re seeing in the schools is the feeling that if you don’t get better, you’re going out of business.” Could you talk a little bit about sort of the charters and the competition?

Absolutely. I think having created the competitive environment that we have with the charters has sent the message that there’s no entitlement to be able to educate our children. You look at the reduction in the numbers of traditional public schools in the city, parents voting with their feet. Fifteen, 20 years ago, there was virtually no charter movement, and then it’s grown astronomically in the last several years. I’m a huge supporter of the charter movement because I think it creates an environment of competition …

It creates flexibility for the educators themselves in ways that they don’t characteristically have, certainly a number of years ago they didn’t characteristically have in the traditional public education system. Look at the sheer numbers. Again, we’ve gone from, again, back in 1996 virtually no charter schools, then in the last 10 years the numbers have grown exponentially in the charter system. The charters now serve about 44, 45 percent of the children in public education in the District of Columbia. Some of that is because parents have chosen never to send their children to traditional public education or they move them from traditional public education to a charter school because they felt like they would have a better chance of having a quality education. Frankly, I think a lot of parents feel that their children are safer. They look at charter schools as almost like private schools and feel that their children will be safer there.

The reality is that enrollment is growing in the District of Columbia. I think we’re up to close to 90,000 children in the charters plus traditional public schools at this stage, which is very significant growth in the last seven, eight, 10 years. In traditional public education, we had come to the point where we were down to the high 40 [thousands] and even when you added in the charter numbers seven, eight years ago, it only got us up to about 65, 70,000. If you look at where we are now, all boats are rising, and it’s because, I think, people have an increasing level of confidence in public education, and a big part of that is because the charter schools have played such an important role in growing public education here in the District of Columbia.

The day is over when people can assume just because you are the public school down the street that you will exist no matter how well you do or you don’t perform. That day is over, it’s done, and that’s good for our children and that’s good for our families.

You mentioned how high the percentage of kids here who go to charters is — one of the highest in the country. Do you think it’s hit a saturation point? Is there a saturation point?

I don’t think there is one. I think there is such a thing as a saturation point. You’d only hit it because, let’s say, when comparing charters to the traditionals, it’s because the traditional public education schools have gotten better and people are choosing to keep their kids there. We’ve got improvements that we’ve got to make. Middle schools in the District of Columbia continue to need improvement. The charters have basically figured out how to fill the gaps that exist and the needs that exist. You look at some of the charter expansions in the recent past, it’s been in substantial part through the middle schools. The charters are growing on the east end of the District of Columbia, in Ward Seven and Ward Eight. We know that our children have historically failed in those areas when you start to talk about the achievement gap. The achievement gap is widest in those areas that are on the east end of the District of Columbia.

No, I don’t think there’s going to be a saturation point, and if there is a saturation point it would be one where we can all stand up and celebrate and say, ‘All of our kids are doing well. There is no more achievement gap, that kids are accomplishing in ways that we had hoped that they would be. Every child is graduating. The dropout rates have been eliminated.’ We’re not at that point yet, so we can talk about the reality of a saturation point when we hit those numbers.

How would you rate Mayor Bowser’s handling of the schools so far?

Well, very different than mine. I was very much of a hands-on mayor because I was very involved in early childhood education. When education reform in the traditional public schools was approved by the mayor and the council, one of the features in there was that the mayor would meet on a regular basis with the chancellor. I accepted that as it was stated and that there is an expectation that I will be involved with the chancellor. It doesn’t mean I’m going to try to dictate education policy or philosophy, but it means that the chancellor, who was running, continues to run the traditional public schools, will have an expectation of a direct relationship with the mayor, who is designated to be able to be the governing authority for schools.

I took that very seriously. I continue to take that very seriously. I don’t believe it’s something that should be delegated down to the deputy mayor for education. I think the deputy mayor for education has a very important role, but the mayor’s role, there is no substitute for that. It sends a powerful message to the city also that the principal city governing authority is involved in the continued growth, development, assessment, improvement of public education in the city. I took it seriously then, and I take it seriously now.

The students at Monument Academy get two lessons in every class: academic and emotional.

One August day early in the school year, a seventh-grade English class lesson, on how the setting of a novel affects character development, came with a side of gratitude and empathy.

“Stuff doesn’t define your character, actions do,” DaShawn, one of the students, said, summing up the lesson on being kind to others who don’t have the same material advantages, taught by one of what’s known here as well-being coaches who give “positive action lessons” every day before the teachers take over.

That type of social-emotional learning is key at Monument Academy, a charter school in its third year, serving 127 children in fifth through seventh grades, most of whom have touched D.C.’s foster care system. The students live on campus from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon with house parents, a setup that provides essential life skills and helps them form the bonds with caring adults that are key to long-term success.

Emily Bloomfield, the school’s CEO and co-founder, was inspired to start Monument both by her work in education reform, including as a member of D.C.’s Public Charter School Board, and how the issue of children without caregivers had played out in her own family. Bloomfield said her young relatives in California were facing a lifetime in the foster care system when their grandparents had to weigh their own health concerns and diminished financial resources with the need to take them in.

Bloomfield looked at the statistics and was horrified: Students in the foster care system move one and a half to two times a year, ripping up relationships with friends and teachers; they’re twice as likely to drop out of high school; and only 2 percent earn a four-year college degree.

“Not only can we not have that for our own family, but it shouldn’t be the outcome for any child,” Bloomfield said during a visit by ����Ӱ�� and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools in mid-August, already the second week of school at Monument, which has only a six-week summer break.

There were 2,454 children under the supervision of D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency as of Sept. 21. They’re split between the 905 children in foster care and the 1,549 being monitored by the agency while still at home with their parents. Nearly all of Monument’s students, 85 percent, have come in contact with the foster care system.

Bloomfield dug into research to find out what does work for children in foster care, and found out that an excellent, personalized education and relationship with a caring adult were essential, as were life skills that children in foster care often miss, from cooking and cleaning to the financial skills necessary to prevent .

(����Ӱ��: #FosterMyEducation: New Campaign Urges States to Embrace ESSA Rules Protecting Foster Kids)

A boarding system allowed all of that to come together. Students live in single-sex houses of no more than 10 children with house parents, usually a married couple, some of whom have their own children and pets who also live on campus.

“The boarding component was so important to this because it anchors so much of this work, the relationship builds other pieces. The other reason it’s so important is we have adults in this building who are talking to each other day and night about the student and the student’s needs,” Bloomfield said.

That caring adult makes all the difference, said Sharyl Dormus, the head of student life.

“A student walks through the halls of Monument Academy knowing that they’re loved and cared for, knowing that they belong and that they have that foundation behind them in anything they’re going to do, that makes all the difference in the world,” Dormus said.

Jeanne Peacock Davis had some hesitations about sending her grandson Elijah Miller to live at Monument as a fifth-grader because he was so young, but felt better after meeting his first set of house parents, she said.

“I began to loosen up and felt he’s going to be OK. The environment was so different than D.C. public schools that once I started coming here, seeing how things were going, I said ‘Oh, he’s going to do well.’ He has done exceptionally well here. I’ve seen a big turnaround,” she said.

Elijah “has had some trauma in his life,” and Monument has helped him deal with that, she said.

Charles W., a seventh-grader at the school, said sometimes he misses his family but living at Monument is better than staying at his mom’s house; his brother goes to Monument, too. (School officials asked ����Ӱ�� to use first names only for some students because of privacy concerns surrounding the child welfare system.)

“I like the atmosphere,” Charles said. He particularly likes his house’s trips to local stores, and the students in his house often help each other with chores, he said.

There were few examples of schools specifically serving children in foster care or in a residential environment for Bloomfield to look to.

(����Ӱ��: NYC’s Haven Academy, a Bronx Breakthrough Serving Kids in Foster Care That Carmen Farina Has Yet to Visit)

One of the few was the in central Pennsylvania. It was founded a century ago by the famed chocolatier to educate orphaned boys. Now co-ed, it’s still funded by a trust started with his personal fortune, and currently serves more than 2,000 low-income pre-K-12 students  from across the country. Leaders there provided invaluable help, Bloomfield said, including lending the school a pair of experienced house parents for Monument’s first year — and covering their salary.

But by and large, “there’s no road map. We are building the highways right now,” she said.

In terms of academics, students come into the fifth-through-seventh-grades school anywhere from on grade level to as far behind as kindergarten or first grade, she said. A little more than half of the students have special education needs.

But teachers at Monument set high expectations for their students, emphasizing that they believe they can do the work — something many haven’t experienced.

“What they’ve heard is they’re failures, they’re bad, they’re not worthy, and they carry so much of that anyway from their own personal experience, loss and rejection, that school can become this other pile-on factor of loss and rejection that builds the narrative,” she said.

It can be hard for teachers, too.

Ogo Nwaneri, the teacher of the seventh-grade English class, said when she first started at Monument, she felt like she couldn’t do it, despite several years’ teaching experience in Baltimore.

Now, though, she and her husband have become house parents in addition to her teaching job, an opportunity that she says lets her work with the students in a less pressure-filled environment than the usual 80-minute academic block.

Monument is located in the former Gibbs Elementary School in Northeast Washington, a D.C. public school that closed several years ago. Student housing is in a different wing of the three-story red brick building from classrooms; each “house” is more like an apartment, with several shared bedrooms for students, a communal kitchen and living room, shared bathrooms for the students, and a private bedroom and bathroom suite for the house parents.

“I always say that this job teaches me more than I think I teach the kids,” Nwaneri said.

The school had to be a charter to work, Bloomfield said. Beyond the per-pupil education expenditures, D.C. provides additional funding to schools that also house students; Monument also solicits philanthropic dollars.

Autonomy and the ability to make decisions very quickly “is absolutely vital to our success,” she said.

Success for Monument’s students often involves a lot of quick changes in schedules, spaces, and the way staff do their work that “when you’re in a bigger system, it’s just really hard to do,” she said.

School leaders, who will add an eighth grade next year and hope to expand to high school after that, have learned a lot since they started three years ago, including what has become “blindingly obvious” — the importance of trusting relationships between adults and students.

“Building those relationships is the foundation on which you can then move forward,” Bloomfield said.