When ����Ӱ�� originally published , Richard Whitmire’s acclaimed history of the high-performing charter schools movement, we also launched an online oral history featuring in-depth interviews with more than two dozen educators, school leaders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists. (.)

Across 2016, our journey took us coast to coast, as we captured the stories of pioneers who came together to nurture the charter networks that would reinvent American education. It’s a living history, an evolving portrait of America’s public charter schools.

In the months since The Founders launched, we’ve asked you to nominate other founders to join the collection — school leaders who are inspiring parents, educators, and students across the country. Today we’re thrilled to launch three new chapters in that archive; we’ll also be sharing more stories over the next few weeks.

Diane Tavenner, Summit Public Schools

Diane Tavenner was working as a district administrator in a traditional public school when she was approached by a group of parents to lead a new charter school they were interested in opening. So began Summit Public Schools, which now serves more than 3,000 students, and which has become known for its unwavering commitment to ensuring that every single child in its schools feels she owns and drives her own learning. .

Derwin Sisnett, Gestalt Community Schools

Derwin Sisnett co-founded Gestalt Community Schools, but he always believed that thriving schools needed to exist in thriving communities. A serial “founder,” Sisnett built on his work launching high-performing public charter schools in Memphis to start the nonprofit Maslow Development Inc., which has worked to develop the communities around Gestalt schools in Tennessee and beyond. In his “Founders” oral history, Sisnett recounts his personal journey to becoming a founder .

Seth Andrew and Katie Duffy, Democracy Prep Public Schools

Seth Andrew and Katie Duffy are the dynamic duo behind Democracy Prep Public Schools, which educates more than 5,000 students in 19 schools. Seth, the founder, recruited Katie, the current CEO, to join the school’s founding team — and the rest is education history. For these two, it’s not just about changing kids lives, it’s about — as their school motto asserts — changing the world. .

The Founders is available and for . To hear the stories of a generation of charter school champions, including Mike Feinberg, Joel Klein, and Dacia Toll, visit the .

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 .

But there’s one more contribution that few would think to include on that list: sponsoring a Denver meeting of key charter leaders that oddly remains somewhat fuzzy in everyone’s memory. Everyone agrees that it was definitely held in a nondescript, boring hotel meeting room. And everyone says it was a snowy winter day. But the date? The hotel? Few participants I talked to, including Walton staffers, could recall the hotel, but Uncommon CEO Brett Peiser dug up an ancient email: It was the Warwick Hotel, and the date was April 26, 2004.

Why dwell on this ill-recalled meeting? Because it marks an important East Coast-West Coast gathering for leaders who before that meeting had lived in separate coastal worlds. Plus, it appears to be a launching pad for the model embraced by most great charters today: becoming part of a network.

This Denver summit played a big part in the development of high-performing charter networks.

Cathy Lund, the Walton senior program officer who helped pull together that Denver event, said the purpose of the meeting was to sort out why some charters succeeded while others failed: Shouldn’t funders like Walton start focusing on getting the great charters to replicate?

And so Walton invited high-performing charters from both coasts to meet in Denver and formulate a way to grow more winners. Chris Barbic from Houston-based YES Prep came, as did Norman Atkins and Brett Peiser, who ran the schools that would become Uncommon charters.

Michael Milkie from Chicago’s Noble Street charters showed up, as did Doug Lemov, Doug McCurry from Achievement First and Kim Smith from NewSchools Venture Fund. Jim Shelton from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was in attendance, as was KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg.

And the indomitable Linda Brown, the godmother of the top charter schools movement, was there as the head of the Boston-based Building Excellent Schools. Naturally. When wasn’t she at a meeting like this?

In this case, Brown was listed as a co-host, as was the then-named New York Charter School Research Center. The guest list was a who’s who of the future networks of high-performing charter schools. At the time, however, that was more of an aspiration than a reality.

Not surprisingly, the key speaker was Aspire’s Don Shalvey, who gave everyone a pep talk on this newfangled arrangement that California’s wildly pro-charter law allowed: CMOs, or charter management organizations. As Atkins recalls the meeting: “The Walton people introduced Don, who told how he created a CMO. Then they said they were encouraging people to do what he was doing and would give out planning grants for people to write a business plan that would lead to a CMO.”

All kinds of lightbulbs started going off in Atkins’s head. Soon, those lightbulbs would lead to the Uncommon group of charters. And the other top performers pushed in the same direction: learning and adopting best practices. That explains why so many of today’s top performers can be found in CMOs. And it also explains why the leaders of most successful independent startup charters soon start dreaming of their own CMO.

The dream: Replicate quality at scale.

This Warwick Hotel meeting remains important for other reasons. For perhaps the first time, there were top charter leaders from both coasts sitting around swapping lessons learned. “I think every organization makes a list of the crap they haven’t figured out yet,” said Shalvey, “like getting new facilities green-lighted, or transportation, or special education. And you were sitting around talking about that list and someone would say, ‘Oh, I worked on that,’ and then you do a bunch of sharing.”

For many of the key charter operators, this was the first time they had met one another. Brett Peiser recalls meeting Chris Barbic of YES Prep for the first time. And until that day, he had never met Shalvey. “He was incredibly entertaining,” said Peiser.

At the time, Peiser and Atkins were running separate charter schools in Boston but thinking about combining efforts. They were drawn to Denver by Walton’s offer of $50,000 planning grants to write CMO business plans (Walton’s way of encouraging the best charters to grow) to build upon the innovation pioneered by Shalvey that at this point in time remained somewhat unknown to East Coast charter operators. Peiser recalls the last-minute application he and Atkins worked on: “We worked all night to come up with a business plan for what Uncommon Schools would look like, and then ended up at an all-night Kinko’s to print it out.”

The sharing among charter founders in that Denver meeting, more than any other factor, explains the very wide gap between the top 20 percent of charter schools and the rest of the field. “What I came away with was that there was a group of people out there doing the same thing we were trying to do,” said Peiser. “There was now a group of charters that were philosophically aligned about what a school should look like: longer day, longer year, the use of data, a focus on culture … Michael Milkie was going to do it in Chicago. And Chris Barbic was going to do it in Houston. And there were these very charismatic people in California doing the same.”

This meeting wasn’t the only East Coast–West Coast charter get-together, nor was it the earliest. NewSchools Venture Fund had organized bicoastal sessions before this meeting, and charter funders such as the Broad and Gates foundations were already investing in charter management organizations. But this is the session that charter entrepreneurs seem to remember most — for its content, if not for its particulars — and these were the crucial planning grants they said launched their organizations in new directions.

Walton executives may not cite this meeting as one of their key accomplishments. But they should.

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Reinventing school, for 10 million kids

 

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 .

For Atkins, changing schools was key — but putting philanthropy dollars into traditional public schools made no sense. After all, the Annenberg Foundation had invested $500 million in traditional public schools and was left with nothing to show for the investment.

Atkins moved his family to New Jersey, picked out Newark, clearly a needy city, and searched for a way to open a school. “I was just walking around for two years, literally telling everyone I wanted to start a school. I had no idea what I was saying.” But that all suddenly changed when then-governor Christine Todd Whitman signed a charter school law. “It was a compromise between Democrats who wanted to spend more money on education and Republicans who wanted vouchers,” said Atkins.

Atkins began looking for a startup partner, someone with deep teaching experience. At the same time, Jamey Verrilli, a teacher and school leader at a small alternative school in Newark, was also looking for a startup partner.

When Verrilli consulted one of his board members about starting a new school, he was advised: “‘I met this young fella named Atkins. You should talk to him.’ So I jotted his name down and — this is a true story — the phone rang literally as I hung up and the voice on the phone said, ‘This is Norman Atkins. I wanted to reach out to you about your school.’ So it was really serendipitous.”

Atkins watched Verrilli teach a lesson, and then the two talked. “Norman is a former journalist; he just riddles you with questions. So we had a three-hour talk and I answered about 10,000 questions. He was feeling me out to see where we were aligned.”

Verrilli, who came to Newark as part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, was motivated by the social justice movement. He wanted the school to include a strong community mission. Atkins was driven by academics. “It was a nice marriage,” said Verrilli. “We put the two together and called those the two pillars of North Star.”

To gather instructional ideas, they visited several schools in New York, including Dave Levin’s school in the Bronx. Oddly, the best sharing advice came from a school that launched in a tough neighborhood and was struggling. “They started out with what they thought was a state-of-the-art curriculum — project-based learning, interdisciplinary,” Verrilli said. “They wrote the curriculum for an entire year. Then the district sent them fifth-graders, none of whom could read, so their whole curriculum went out the window and they started over from scratch.”

Norman Atkins and Jamey Verrilli launched North Star in 1997. That school’s struggle proved to be invaluable to Atkins and Verrilli, who were preparing for their first crop of students, almost all of whom probably would be reading several grade levels behind. “We designed a curriculum that was going to meet their needs.”

One of the distinguishing features of any Uncommon school is the morning Community Circle, a spirited school-wide gathering involving African drums, call and response, academic exercises and awards — pretty much everything, all done loudly and at full speed. That Community Circle, which has been copied by many other charters, came from Verrilli watching the documentary Eyes on the Prize about the civil rights movement.

“I watched the Black Panthers do these meetings out in the parks where they’d gather and share inspirational messages,” said Verrilli, “so I thought that was something that could be replicated.” He tried it out in his alternative school, and it succeeded. Atkins added African drums to the mix, as well as values education through folktales, and thus was launched the widely imitated North Star Community Circle.

Norman Atkins and Jamey Verrilli, who launched North Star Academy in 1997, work to educate the next generation of teachers.

Photo: Relay Graduate School of Education

With Verrilli taking primary responsibility for teaching and curriculum and Atkins taking over operations, it fell to Atkins to find a building.

“We must have looked at 50 or 70 buildings in Newark, and we finally found one in downtown where all the bus lines met. We were working with a group of parents who picked the name, North Star, for its symbolic precedent: The North Star was how slaves found their way to freedom, and it was also the name of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper.” North Star launched in 1997 with 72 students, fifth- and sixth-graders.

Early on, Atkins pioneered a practice that has proved key to the expansion of top charters: borrowing from the best. He met with KIPP’s Dave Levin. He met with Brett Peiser, who was running South Boston Harbor Academy (later renamed Boston Collegiate Charter School). He met with John King (currently Secretary of Education) and Evan Rudall from Boston’s Roxbury Prep. Then came Doug Lemov from Boston’s Academy of the Pacific Rim. Soon, Atkins and North Star became a touchstone for top charter leaders on the East Coast. Dacia Toll and Doug McCurry, the Amistad Academy founders who went on to build the Achievement First network, came to visit in his second year.

As Atkins describes it, from the very beginning he had two circles to wrap himself in. The first was the network of school entrepreneurs that would become Uncommon Schools. And the second circle was the fellow school leaders in the New York area, Toll and Levin. “I would say that Dave Levin was Teacher Zero of our movement. He was the teacher who really started to instruct in a culture that was new and positive.”

In 2000, PBS captured some of this early charter history in a documentary narrated by syndicated columnist Clarence Page.

But Atkins’s role in the broader movement goes beyond North Star; he became a seminal member of this band of reformers, joining with other top charter entrepreneurs to form the celebrated Uncommon Schools. His key collaborators: Peiser, Rudall and Lemov.

The son of teachers who both became principals in New York City schools, Peiser became a New York City teacher himself. After several years in the classroom, he decided to step back and study education policy, which landed him at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. That put him in Boston just as the state legislature passed an expansion of the original charter school law, during the same time that Evan Rudall and John King launched Roxbury Prep and Doug Lemov started Academy of the Pacific Rim.

Convinced that New York would never pass its own charter school law (it did, later), Peiser began circulating within the tiny circle of Boston charter entrepreneurs, looking for opportunity there. One day while participating in a group effort to write standards for the about-to-open Academy of the Pacific Rim, he ended up sitting next to Lemov.

“He was writing the English standards; I was writing the history standards.” It was the first time they met, and Lemov talked to Peiser about helping to start a new school. At that moment, it all jelled for Peiser. He would definitely start his own charter, which he did, with a Kennedy School colleague: South Boston Harbor Academy.

Launching that first charter came partly from a stiff nudge from Linda Brown (the leader of Building Excellent Schools, about whom I’ll be writing more later), who encouraged Peiser to choose South Boston, which had just endured a rash of teen suicides. Brown always seemed to live up to her nickname as a charter Svengali: the godmother. At the time, she ran a Boston-based organization that acted as a charter resource center. Attending meetings there were Peiser, King and Rudall. “You had these people coming to meetings and talking about best practices, then going to visit each other’s schools,” said Peiser. “I remember going to visit Roxbury Prep early on, looking at the way John was overseeing teachers and the way Evan was monitoring student information systems.” In return, Peiser gave them his student handbook that contained all the discipline systems.

The final piece of the puzzle came together when Peiser was speaking at Columbia University on a panel about curriculum standards. After the panel, he was approached by someone he had never met: Norman Atkins. “He told me he liked what I said and told me about running a charter school called North Star in Newark,” said Peiser. Soon, Peiser visited North Star. “I was blown away by the stu- dent culture and obvious pride. All these kids came up to me and told me their names and said, ‘Welcome to North Star.’ ”

As the relationship grew, Atkins was soon whispering in Peiser’s ear, “We should do something together.” Peiser and Atkins agreed on the bottom line: “How do we impact more students?” That was the beginning of Uncommon Schools.

Getting kicked out of one of Chicago’s most elite schools, the University of Chicago Laboratory School, may seem like an odd launching pad for a charter school founder, but that was Rudall’s spark. Rudall, who describes himself as a “fairly challenged” middle school student, got himself expelled in eighth grade for a long list of rebellious behaviors.

That expulsion triggered a radical change in Rudall’s life. Moving from the Lab School to a Chicago public high school meant moving from a school where most students were headed to selective colleges to a high school that was 90 percent African-American and Latino and mostly poor and where “half my ninth-grade classmates did not graduate with me four years later.”

Rudall was shocked by the educational inequity he witnessed. “The school was periodically violent, and there were lots of teachers who were indifferent, who wore headphones during their office hours and put do-not-disturb signs on their doors. I had a 10th-grade teacher who fell asleep in class. Those disparities struck me as incredibly unjust. At the age of 15, the seed was planted in me that I wanted to address that disparity.”

Rudall graduated from high school in 1988, and he then graduated from Wesleyan University. After college, he took a job at a private school in Louisville and ran a Summer Bridge program there for poor kids. “I fell in love with working with students who were challenged in one way or another, who were rebellious or resistant, because I could relate to that so easily.”

Determined to create a full-time school that would provide what Summer Bridge offered, Rudall enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “I spent the year there focused on charter schools, which at the time was a very small movement. I was hoping to open a small school in Chicago.”

But when an alumnus from his high school started a Boston charter school, City on a Hill, Rudall changed his plans and focused on Boston, selecting the high-poverty Roxbury neighborhood, where he did his principal internship, as the neighborhood most in need of a charter.

“The night before I submitted the charter application, I went out to dinner with John King. It was the first time I had met John. My wife and her sister went to Harvard with John, so my wife introduced me to John, who was a teacher at City on a Hill. We spent the entire dinner, three or four hours, talking about education.”

After the dinner, Rudall went home and rewrote much of his charter application to incorporate King’s ideas. “He was so insightful, as he always is. I ended up pulling an all-nighter to restructure the application and submitted it the next day.”

That first dinner at an Indian restaurant in Somerville set the stage. Several dinners later, King agreed to join Rudall as co-director: King would handle curriculum and instruction, Rudall would take care of operations and finance, and both would work closely with students and families.

Recruiting families proved to be relatively easy. “We had 80 families sign up for the school based only on information sessions that I gave by myself — despite the fact we had no building, no teachers hired, no curriculum in place, and the school was obviously unproven. It just shows how eager families were for another option. They were attracted to the promise of rigorous instruction, deep caring for students and a safe, structured environment. That’s what we promised.”

Rudall tells the same story many charter entrepreneurs tell: Linda Brown from Building Excellent Schools was a key player, especially with fundraising and ensuring the application process went smoothly. “I’m not sure Roxbury Prep would have opened without Linda.”

At the last minute, Rudall found unused space in a nursing home, space that the school continues to use. Roxbury Prep opened in the fall of 1999 and within a few years led the state in scoring on the eighth-grade MCAS, a state test that at the time was considered the nation’s most rigorous.

During Roxbury’s Prep first year, Rudall got to know the other players in the Northeast charter world, including Brett Peiser and Norman Atkins. “I relied heavily on Brett to work through our first-year challenges,” said Rudall. Atkins was part of a group that visited Roxbury Prep to evaluate it for a possible grant. “My introduction to Norman was five hours of cross-examination… We fell in love with each other that day and stayed in touch.”

Rudall left Roxbury Prep for law school but never lost his desire to be involved in education. While still in law school, Rudall accepted Atkins’s offer to become Uncommon’s chief operating officer. “So I spent my third year of law school as the COO of Uncommon, which meant I never went to class.”

King, who left Roxbury Prep for law school at Yale, also agreed to join Uncommon, and Roxbury Prep was folded into the Uncommon network. “Norman had this brilliant vision to bring together several people who had run high-performing charters, and it paid huge dividends.”

In 2012, Rudall left Uncommon to start the nonprofit Zearn, a digital math program, which to him was a way of reaching far more impoverished kids than Uncommon and other top charters could possibly reach. Today, Rudall works as a consultant to district leaders and charter management organizations.

Lemov was on his way to earning a Ph.D. in English at Indiana University when he got an unusual request: Would you be willing to coach some football players who are struggling in their English classes? Because Lemov had been a serious soccer player as an undergraduate student, and also because he had taught at a private school, it was assumed he could relate to the athletes as they came to special study tables.

One of the football players he tutored was a redshirt freshman who had gone to a high school in the Bronx. “He was a real gentleman, a decent guy in every way, but he was struggling academically. So I said, ‘Why don’t you write a paragraph about yourself,’ which he did. I took one look at it and thought, ‘Holy shit, he can’t write a complete sentence.’ I can still see it in my mind’s eye, on a yellow piece of paper written in black ink. There wasn’t a complete sentence in it. It was just unbelievable.”

Curious as to how the football player had been admitted, Lemov visited the athletic office, where he learned, much to his surprise, that the player was there on his own merits: He had good grades and good recommendations. So they admitted him.

“All of a sudden it hit me, that here was this decent kid who wanted to do the right thing, gentlemanly, never a troublemaker in class, and his high school teachers all wanted to do right by him because he was so talented, and nobody wanted to be the one to crap on his dreams by saying, ‘Actually you can’t write, so I can’t pass you.’ ” The sad result, of course, is that the player stood no chance to make it academically at Indiana University and eventually dropped out and returned to the Bronx.

“It was an epiphany to me about social promotion. Those teachers thought they were helping someone, but what they were really doing was making themselves feel better. In the end, they hurt this guy badly.”

That epiphany, which translated into a desire to build better schools for urban kids, prompted Lemov to accept an offer from a college friend from Hamilton College, Stacey Boyd, who wanted to start a charter school in Boston (Academy of the Pacific Rim, which launched in 1997). After one year serving as dean of students, Lemov took over as head of the school.

In those days, the charter school movement in Boston was tiny, so it was only a matter of time before he met Brett Peiser, Norman Atkins and Linda Brown, all part of Boston’s inner circle of charter entrepreneurs. “Linda was like everyone’s fairy godmother,” said Lemov. “Every time you’d come across a problem that seemed to have no solution, she’d say, ‘OK, come on in and we’ll figure it out.’ ” Both Brown and Atkins served as master connectors. “From the outset it seemed like everyone knew Norman and he knew everyone.”

The next steps for Lemov were working for the state charter authorizer and then attending business school, where he formulated a plan to launch a group of charter schools in upstate New York, an area he had gotten to know while at Hamilton College. “I wrote a business plan and showed it to a bunch of people, including Norman, who said it looked good but suggested I join with him to pursue a similar plan.” That plan was Uncommon Schools, designed as essentially a federation of charters with separate, semi-independent regions, including True North, a cluster run by Lemov in upstate New York with schools in Rochester and Troy.

Like other top charter operators, Lemov borrowed heavily from other charters, especially Roxbury Prep and Aspire. It’s the little “borrowings” that Lemov enjoys citing. From a KIPP school in Albany, he learned how to re-do school bathrooms, which for most schools are the source of many discipline problems — from graffiti to the sparks that lead to later-in-the-day scuffles.

“It’s hard to manage that space, so at this school they flipped the bathrooms on their head. They put posters on the walls in the boys’ restroom. There were carpets in front of the sinks, ferns like what you might see in a law office bathroom, liquid soap dispensers. They made it an attractive, civilized place.”

The unspoken message: Respect this place or it will get replaced with the traditional disgusting bathrooms. “Basically, they took a problem area and made it super positive,” said Lemov. So the True North schools did the same.

Another borrowing from the KIPP school in Albany: A “millionaires” club that rewards the kids whose good behavior usually gets ignored. Those chosen for the club get their own “millionaires” tables at lunch. “There are board games you can play during lunch, a tablecloth, salt and pepper shakers. All of a sudden, it was like a restaurant, and it conferred status and privilege on the kids who were doing the right thing.” So True North did the same.

Today, Lemov remains part of Uncommon, but he has shifted to full-time teacher-training work that was launched by his best-selling book Teach Like a Champion, which lays out the successful teaching methods pioneered by top charter teachers. More than a million copies of his teaching books have been bought by teachers, many of them in traditional schools, thus making Lemov perhaps the most powerful example of charter/district crossover influence.

Interestingly, all the Uncommon leaders have branched out into crossover work, with Atkins co-founding Relay Graduate School of Education (discussed in a later chapter), Rudall starting up Zearn, and Peiser becoming Uncommon’s CEO overseeing charter/district collaborations in Brooklyn’s high-poverty Brownsville neighborhood.

That’s no coincidence, says Lemov. “I think it comes directly from our federalist structure, where educators from each leg of the federation enjoy independence but also reach out to others for resources and advice. It’s an organization that’s built to learn. It starts with the humility of admitting we don’t have all the answers and we probably never will, so let’s design ourselves, learn as much as we can as fast as we can, and then share. It’s embedded in our culture.”

That fast, independent, Uncommon-style learning spun off best-selling books, a successful graduate school of education that breaks all the rules, and a successful online learning company. And from Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, who later joined North Star and now serves as one of Uncommon’s two chief schools officers along with fellow North Star alum Julie Jackson, came the influential book Driven by Data, which has become the go-to source for both charter and traditional teachers for designing instruction around data.

All of this stems from one charter group, Uncommon Schools, which today has 44 schools in three states serving 14,000 students, with Peiser the chief executive officer.

Uncommon graduates earn bachelor’s degrees at five times the national rate for graduates from low-income schools. In 2013, Uncommon won the Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. Later, I will offer close-ups of Uncommon schools in both Newark and New York City.

Download the book, read more about Joel Klein . Below, a video interview with author Richard Whitmire, on what he learned while writing the book:

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 .

Klein took over the New York system in August 2002, and for the first year he remained silent on charters while he carried out big organizational changes. But in his second year, all that changed as he arranged meetings with the heads of top charter management organizations: Dave Levin from KIPP, Norman Atkins from Uncommon, Dacia Toll from Achievement First and Geoffrey Canada from the Harlem Children’s Zone. Klein set out to do something any other schools chief would consider insane: disrupt his own schools with built-in competitors. And Klein didn’t want mere tinkering; he wanted big change, so at first he focused only on the major operators who could open multiple schools that would be high performers from the first day. What about the mom-and-pops, the one-off charter startups that might grow into KIPPs and Uncommons? Didn’t they deserve support? Fuhgeddaboutit. This was New York; only the biggest and the best. And right away!

“I know with Dacia, she was skeptical at first,” said Klein. “People didn’t know how aggressive the city would be. But I pushed hard on this notion that I didn’t want this to be a boutique business, that they would be in this for the long haul with multiple growth opportunities … I wanted to make New York the Silicon Valley for charter schools.”

Toll recalls her first meeting with Klein, who asked that she expand her Connecticut operations to the city. The discussion seemed to go well, so she asked Klein: “OK, who [in the department] do I start the conversation with about Achievement First coming to the city?” Klein answered immediately: We just had the conversation, and you just agreed to open three schools. “It was like, boom!”

Toll checked quickly with Dave Levin and Norman Atkins, the KIPP and Uncommon leaders in New York, to see if they would object to the added competition. “They said they were more than OK. Their attitude was, ‘This is going to be fun. Come to New York!’ ”

On July 14, 2003, the first day of school for KIPP S.T.A.R. in Harlem, the new strategy kicked off as Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg held a at the school, which was housed in a former district office building. It was a clear shot across the bow: We will find space for top charters.

Said Bloomberg: “We said we would put children first when it comes to education — and by creating a new school where offices once stood, we are doing just that. We applaud KIPP for their academic achievements and for their continuing commitment to New York City’s schoolchildren.” Added Klein: “In just two weeks we have taken district office space that used to house bureaucracy and transformed it into a charter school in a community that needs innovative and excellent new schools … We continue to work with charter schools throughout the city to share best practices for teaching and learning across all types of schools.”

Most charter operators gravitate to cities where there’s little hostility from unions and charter critics, meaning anywhere but New York. But Klein had a very large carrot to bend that maxim: $1-per-year rental fees inside existing school buildings. “We took the view, and it was controversial, that the schools belonged to the children,” said Klein.

Uncommon’s Brett Peiser, who would return to New York City to lead Uncommon’s expansion there, was stunned by the freedom offered by Klein. The all-consuming need to find buildings in the most expensive city in the country suddenly ended. “It was a huge part of our growth,” said Peiser. “I had just spent three years where all I did was work on the building [availability] issue.” The idea that buildings were going to be taken care of meant Peiser and others could focus just on instruction. That was huge. “That’s what moves people’s hearts and is why people are excited about this work — not school construction bonds.”

To support rapid charter growth (which would soon grow to about 20 school openings a year), Klein pulled together a collaboration of philanthropists who formed the NYC Center for Charter School Excellence, now called the NYC Charter Center. All this was to create schools to compete against his own traditional schools — unthinkable in any other city. “Most people running a school system are not eager to give up market share to the charter sector,” said Klein. “But our overall view was that serving lives, particularly in high-poverty neighborhoods, you want to create as many options for good schools as you can.” But creating more good schools was only part of the plan. To be fundamentally disruptive, those schools had to become permanent, not something future union-friendlier mayors could dismantle. The theory: “If you change the status quo for families, the schools become bulletproof,” said Klein. That’s why he ushered in only the top charters; they had to be good from opening day.

One crucial development during the Klein years was granting in-school space to Success Academies, a charter group that has grown faster than the others, attracted more philanthropy than most, registered higher test scores — and drawn exponentially more criticism. All that arises from the unique personality of its founder, Eva Moskowitz, possibly the most polarizing, successful and controversial charter leader in the country.

“She had a rapid growth plan, and one that we were happy to support,” said Klein. “Her whole modus operandi depended on us giving her space. It’s hard to grow at the level she wanted to unless she had co-located space.”

Everything about Moskowitz is different, including her launch. As a former City Council member and head of the council’s education committee, she held a now-legendary series of investigative hearings that skewered union work rules, leaving the unions furious and vowing revenge — a revenge they extracted in 2005 when Moskowitz launched an unsuccessful bid to be the Democratic nominee for Manhattan borough president.

It was during those hearings that Moskowitz began forming ideas for launching her own schools. “At the hearings, I was asking teachers and principals and coaches and custodians about every part of schooling, about what excellence looks like, about what needs to happen,” she said. “Once I decided to open Success Academy, I crisscrossed the country finding every great example I could.”

In addition to the New York City–area schools she visited — Uncommon, KIPP and Achievement First — she went west as well. From California’s High Tech High, she came away impressed by the focus on rigor. From a Colorado charter school, she borrowed lessons learned on running project-based learning. The visits were not limited to charter schools. Parochial, private and traditional district schools were on her must-visit list as well.

In Queens, at Ozone Park’s P.S. 65, she came across Paul Fucaloro, who was overseeing the lunchroom while peppering the students with math facts. She hired him to work at Success, where he ended up as director of pedagogy before he retired in 2014. At the prestigious Nightingale-Bamford private school in New York, she found a social studies program she admired. From the private, all-girls Brearley School in New York she found a science focus that helped shape the intense concentration on science.

In spring 2016, as Success Academy was celebrating its 10th anniversary, Moskowitz ran 34 schools that enrolled 11,000 students, nearly all of whom register striking academic gains. (It was hardly a surprise when the network was named one of three finalists for the 2016 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools.) In 2015, her minority-dominated schools, which operate in some of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, scored among the best in New York state: Five of the top 10 schools in New York in math were Success Academy schools.

For the next school year, 20,000 students applied for 3,228 spots. Moskowitz’s long-term goal: 100 Success Academy locations. Some of the controversy surrounding Moskowitz is of her own making; she’s still bashing the unions, essentially fighting the same fight from her City Council days. And comparing academic results from her schools with those from neighborhood schools, when her schools enjoy important differences such as not “backfilling” classes after fourth grade, is unfair.

But there’s no question that she has pioneered success at unprecedented scale by doing one thing different: offering incredibly rich academics to students who live in neighborhoods where that just doesn’t happen. Klein, who had his own clashes with Moskowitz, said the success at scale is the source of most of the attacks. “That’s threatening to a lot of people.”

Did Klein’s master plan work out? According to independent researchers, New York charters come close to being the best in the nation. But did they change the status quo for city families? That question got an early test when union-friendlier Bill de Blasio was elected mayor and immediately went after the co-located charters despised by the unions. The result: Thousands of minority parents and their children turned out for massive demonstrations in both New York and Albany. These were parents for whom the status quo had definitely changed. De Blasio famously backed down. Bulletproof.

The Bloomberg/Klein period of school reform in New York involved scores of initiatives, most of them highly controversial and all drawing fire from the teachers unions. Only with hindsight is it possible to see that the most radical change Klein pushed, and certainly the most successful, was persuading the nation’s top charter operators to make New York City a priority. He challenged them to disrupt his schools.

Klein’s revolutionary charter-building initiative in New York points to a second phenomenon: These charter pioneers, the designers of charter groups such as KIPP, Achievement First and Aspire, didn’t do this on their own. That success happened because a separate group of education entrepreneurs, district leaders such as Klein, philanthropy innovators such as Kim Smith of NewSchools and creative funders such as Reed Hastings all joined forces to make it possible.

Download the book, read more about Joel Klein . Below, a video interview with author Richard Whitmire, on what he learned while writing the book:

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��, and explore the Founders Oral History at .

IDEA Public Schools is to promote high-quality charter schools.

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One of those was Tom Torkelson, who signed on with Teach For America while he was a senior at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His assignment: the Rio Grande Valley. “I got out a map and couldn’t find a place called the Rio Grande Valley.” But he went, taking a job teaching fourth- and fifth-graders in the Donna Independent School District. “I was teaching kids [who were] three or four grades behind [grade level] and thinking this was impossible. They’ve only been in school five years. How could they already be that far behind? I was shocked that schools could be that bad.”

Once a month, all the TFAers in the region met in McAllen for a “corps development” night. One night the invited guest was KIPP’s Mike Feinberg, there to talk about his new KIPP charter. It made an impression, both on Torkelson and on his colleague JoAnn Gama, who taught in Donna just down the hall from Torkelson. Gama grew up in modest circumstances in Houston in the very neighborhood where the new KIPP was succeeding. She knew what it took to succeed there.

(More: A ‘Founders’ Excerpt: The Noble Network of Schools Thrives in Chicago — Against All Odds)

Soon after, Gama and Torkelson drove to see Feinberg’s school. “Our big takeaway,” said Gama, “was wow, this is not rocket science. There are just a lot of teachers who are actually teaching and kids learning. I think we were expecting a lot of fireworks and unbelievable teachers.” In short, what they saw in Houston looked like something they could do in the Rio Grande Valley. Which they did, as co-founders.

When Torkelson drove to Austin to argue for his charter application, he was expecting a tough inquisition. But by chance Barbic, who was beloved by the approving board, had just spoken to the board and put in a good word about Torkelson. “He told them, ‘Hey, you’re going to hear from a guy named Tom Torkelson a little later, and the best decision you guys can make today is to give this guy a charter, because his school is awesome and it’s going to make you guys proud to support charter schools.” After that warm-up, the inquisition turned into a coronation.

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A School Founder’s History: JoAnn Gama, IDEA Public Schools

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That was only the beginning of the sharing process. Looking at the quick expansions by KIPP, YES Prep and others, Torkelson concluded that IDEA also had to grow quickly. For road maps, he obtained multiple charter business plans, including those from KIPP, YES Prep, Aspire and Uncommon. After he visited Aspire and met with Don Shalvey, IDEA launched what became a rapid expansion: By 2015, IDEA served 24,000 students in 44 schools in the Rio Grande Valley, Austin and San Antonio. That same year, KIPP served 70,000 students in 183 schools around the country. YES Prep that year served 10,000 students in 15 schools.

That’s how the best multiply: They all know one another, and they all borrow from and swap with one another.

About a year ago, I visited IDEA during college signing day, a cross between graduation and pep rally. On this ear-splitting afternoon held in a minor league basketball arena, graduates walk to a center stage microphone to announce where they will attend college.

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IDEA Public Schools Celebrates Its Students on College Signing Day

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A mini-Jumbotron flashes the student’s name and the college, plus an asterisk if that student is a first-generation college-goer. I never saw the asterisks disappear. The announcement is witnessed by friends and family — but most important, younger students get the unmistakable message: One day, this will be you.

On this day, there were 554 graduates. Of those, 19 were headed to the Ivy League. The three graduates going to Harvard included a “Dreamer” born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. She was one of 41 Dreamers who crossed the stage during signing ceremonies. The mother of graduate Gilberto Gutierrez, who was headed to MIT, worked in an IDEA school cafeteria.

(More: Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan on what’s impressed him most from 25 years of charter schools)

A reasonable question: Is this an example of sending hundreds of ill-prepared graduates to college, where they have no hope of graduating? At IDEA, 62 percent of those entering college will graduate in six years. IDEA is now consciously working to boost that rate to 85 percent.

In May 2016, IDEA announced a $16 million foundation gift that should create 20 new schools in Austin. Also in May, IDEA was named among the three finalists for the Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. The network’s long-term goal: to serve 100,000 students by 2022.

Download the book, read more about Uncommon Schools and USC Hybrid High . Author Richard Whitmire, on what he learned while writing the book:

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Depending on the flow of politics and the day of the week in Chicago, at times it appears that Karen Lewis, the fiery president of the Chicago Teachers Union, commands more clout than Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Had she not fallen ill and called off her likely mayoral campaign, she might be sitting in Rahm’s seat today.

So how to explain that in 1996 the Illinois legislature passed a reasonably liberal charter law, allowing 45 charter schools: 15 in Chicago, 15 in the suburbs and 15 in downstate communities? (In later years, those caps would get expanded.)

The answer begins with a political quirk: The charter law passed during a two-year period when Illinois Republicans, thanks to Newt Gingrich’s political success at the time, held sway in both the state House and Senate.

(More: Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan on what’s impressed him most from 25 years of charter schools)

But if that were the only reason, the law would have been repealed by now. What actually happened during that two-year window was that Republicans were moderately interested in passing a charter law, but angry traditional Democrats (the rise of the “progressive” Democrats who dislike charters was years into the future) were intensely interested. They demanded better, less corrupt schools for their neighborhoods.

“There were a bunch of urban Democrats in Chicago upset at 15 years of Chicago schools being patronage shops,” said Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. “The schools were a total mess — nepotism, cronyism.” There’s a reason former Education Secretary William Bennett once pronounced Chicago schools to be the “worst in the nation.”

It’s remarkable to hear a Secretary of Education get that up close and insulting. But in fact, Bennett didn’t stop with the worst-in-the-nation comment. It would take a “man or woman of steel” to clean up Chicago’s school system, he helpfully elaborated.

“I’m not sure there’s a system as bad as the Chicago system.”

So that’s how the charter law got passed, a huge bipartisan event that was totally missed by Michael Milkie, who at the time was a high school math teacher at Chicago’s Wells Community Academy and soon to be married to Tonya Hernandez, a high school social studies teacher at Harper High School in West Englewood, one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods.

Two of Tonya’s teaching friends, Michelle Smith and Sarah Howard, however, were paying close attention to the new legislation and started one of the first charters in Chicago. That got Mike and Tonya’s attention. “They had to sit me down and explain it to me,” Milkie told me. “I actually spent many hours with them trying to learn what they were doing. They were instrumental in getting Tonya and me to apply for our charter.”

Milkie was looking for a change. He could see from his own teaching experience that new-generation schools were desperately needed in Chicago. “The appeal was to have charter freedoms such as control over budget, staffing and curriculum.”

Staffing was key. The “steps and lanes” personnel system settled upon by unions and superintendents made no sense to Milkie. There were many good teachers at his Chicago high school, but there were also many who were unprofessional: constantly calling in sick, exhibiting a poor work ethic, never assigning homework.

He wanted more freedom in choosing teachers and dismissing those who didn’t work out.

And then there was the discipline issue. “The students [at Wells] were allowed to be disruptive, and a lot of students felt unsafe. We wanted a school where students felt safe, supported and accountable for their behavior.”

For ideas on how to structure the first school, Milkie visited two Boston charters, Academy of the Pacific Rim (where Uncommon Schools’ Doug Lemov served as principal) and City on a Hill. Milkie admired the “orderly and positive” student culture at the Pacific Rim school, but it was an odd thing at City on a Hill that really caught his attention. “I remember they wouldn’t let the kids chew gum. And my reaction was: We can just tell them they can’t chew gum? Where I taught, gum was everywhere.”

Banning gum at the new charter would become part of a culture rooted in discipline and orderliness. “Not having gum stuck everywhere was a sign that the big things were being attended to as well.” Same with the school uniforms he saw — and adopted in the new school. “It sets the tone for discipline, to have people look professional. And it addresses gang issues.”

So the first charter opened in the fall of 1999, just a few months after he and Tonya married. That first school drew students from the mostly Latino West Town neighborhood and was named Noble Street, after its street address. From the first day, the school was oversubscribed, a pattern that would hold true during the following years of Noble’s expansion. “There were definitely many families who wanted other options.”

Today, despite the rapid expansion of Noble schools across Chicago (in 2016 Noble served 11,000 students on 17 campuses), Mike and Tonya maintain their original office at that first school, Room 207.

“We never changed offices because we didn’t want to lose touch with what we started our work for,” Milkie told one interviewer.

In the fall of 1999, Noble Street’s first year, Milkie taped a 60 Minutes segment on KIPP charters and played it back for his Noble students. “I wanted them to see that they weren’t the only kids in the country with strict dress codes, strict rules and high expectations. Up to that point, I think they believed they were.”

From the beginning, Noble became the Midwest touchstone in the developing web of high-performing charter networks located mostly on the East and West coasts. Milkie, for example, was invited to a Walton-sponsored Denver gathering in 2004 (profiled earlier) where he heard Aspire’s Don Shalvey advocate charter management organizations as the best vehicles for expanding.

“That was a watershed moment for a lot of us in terms of, yeah, we can have an organization that operates multiple schools.”

Noble used its $50,000 Walton grant to plan its expansion, a plan Milkie followed precisely: two new campuses per year for four years in a row.

Soon, Noble and KIPP became close allies, with KIPP placing one of its principal internship programs in a Noble school. Other close partners were Achievement First founders Dacia Toll and Doug McCurry and Norman Atkins from Uncommon Schools.

Some examples of those interweaving relationships: Two of Noble’s top administrators came from KIPP, and two former Noble school leaders now lead KIPP regions. Most interesting about Noble: One of Noble’s strongest principals ever, Oliver Sicat, left Noble to take over USC Hybrid High School in Los Angeles, which is now a CMO, Ednovate, overseeing three schools (profiled later). That’s how these high-performing networks spread.

Despite Chicago becoming, in Broy’s words, “an epicenter of charter opposition,” the city continues to grow high-performing charters, most of which, like Noble, are modest-size networks born in Chicago and operating only in Chicago. Others include LEARN charters and the Chicago International charter schools.

What makes Noble unique, both within Chicago and nationally, is its focus on high schools. Most of the national charter networks start with elementary school, adding one grade at a time, fearing that high school is too late to make up lost academic ground. “Noble,” said Broy, “demonstrates that you can take in kids well behind and in four structured years get students up to an ACT [score] that means they are prepared for college.”

In 2015, Noble won the $250,000 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. Noble’s schools — in which 95 percent of the students are African-American or Hispanic and 89 percent are low-income — ranked among the state’s top-performing school districts.

Said Paul Pastorek, a former Louisiana state superintendent of education and prize board member: “Noble is clearly onto something, because they’ve been able to scale and sustain their academic achievement.”

Download the book, read more about Uncommon Schools and USC Hybrid High . Author Richard Whitmire, on what he learned while writing the book: