Teach Your Children
Alumni create new models for urban education
Princeton Alumni Weekly
March 24, 2004
By Kathryn Federici Greenwood
For years Terry Eakin '66, whose company builds upscale town-houses around Washington, D.C., served on a committee to improve his local public schools. As a member of D.C. COPE - the Committee on Public Education - he recommended reforms and tried to work with administrators and the unions to make them happen. But Eakin found the bureaucracy was interested in preserving the status quo, while test scores kept dropping, buildings kept deteriorating, and schools remained short on books, despite injections of money into the school system. So he redirected his energies to coming up with an alternative. "Our country desperately needs to try new ways to improve," he says.
In 1998, Eakin became chairman of the board of the District of Columbia Public Charter School Resource Center, and for five years he helped charter schools get started. Last September he helped found a new charter school himself: D.C. Prep, for fourth- through eighth-graders, next to a subsidized housing development in Northeast Washington. Now he hopes to open five to 10 more charter schools in Washington. "Educational results are enhanced by school autonomy," he says, "as opposed to having policies and other matters dictated from above."
Eakin is far from the only Princeton alum convinced that traditional models of public education are failing America's most at-risk students, and working to create models - both public and private - to replace them. Rajiv Vinnakota '93, a Princeton trustee, started the nation's first public charter boarding school, the SEED Public Charter School, which now serves 305 seventh- through 12th-graders in a formerly burned-out public school in Southeast Washington. Carmelita Reyes '98 is a founding teacher of Oakland, California's Life Academy High School of Health and Bio-Science, a public school of 250 kids that split off from Fremont High School, which had about 2,000 students and a dropout rate of about 50 percent. Hans Hageman '80 in 1993 founded the private East Harlem School at Exodus House for disadvantaged fifth- through eighth-graders and has since become executive director of Boys and Girls Harbor, founded by Anthony D. Duke '41, which runs a charter school in East Harlem. "There's a tremendous hunger and thirst in the East Harlem and Harlem communities for alternatives of all sorts," says Hageman.
Many of the alumni work in charter schools - independently operated, publicly funded schools that generally have great flexibility in hiring, curriculum, and budgeting. Though charters serve students of all socioeconomic groups, many were created specifically to provide alternatives for children in poor, low-achieving public schools. The differences among these schools are enormous, says Theodore G. Kolderie '54, who helped get the nation's first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1991 and is considered the godfather of the charter-school movement. While some have the most advanced technology, others are decidedly low-tech. They differ in curriculum, in dress and behavior codes, and in management and organization, he notes.
It's still unclear how the new schools are faring. Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse, who specializes in education research, notes that there has not been a conclusive study of charter schools. Some research suggests that reducing school size can increase student participation, reduce dropout rates and school violence, and enhance academic achievement and teacher efficiency. But it also shows that small size alone does not necessarily lead to higher achievement. Many new, smaller schools find they are not immune to the challenges of poverty facing urban education, and some have been forced to close because of management or financial problems, low test scores, or high teacher turnover.
It's hard to predict how "alternative" schools will change American education - charter schools, for instance, enroll only 1 percent of the nation's student population - but many of these schools offer low-income kids what suburban families expect: a nurturing environment filled with expectations and hope for the future.
Profiled here are three schools in which Princeton alumni are playing key roles:
Tough Love
Kids from Boston's toughest neighborhoods start lining up outside Media and Technology Charter High School Ð MATCH Ð an hour before class begins on a mid-September morning. Many of these high school students have traveled more than an hour on public transportation to get to the school, on the edge of Boston University's campus. At 7:45 MATCH's morning ritual begins: The principal, Charlie Sposato, a fiftyish man with glasses, opens the door and greets each student by name, with a firm handshake. Sposato asks each student the same three questions; each responds with standard answers:
Kids from Boston's toughest neighborhoods start lining up outside Media and Technology Charter High School - MATCH - an hour before class begins on a mid-September morning. Many of these high school students have traveled more than an hour on public transportation to get to the school, on the edge of Boston University's campus. At 7:45 MATCH's morning ritual begins: The principal, Charlie Sposato, a fiftyish man with glasses, opens the door and greets each student by name, with a firm handshake. Sposato asks each student the same three questions; each responds with standard answers:
Sposato: "Why are you here?"
Student: "To learn."
Sposato: "What's it take?"
Student: "Courage, discipline, perseverance."
Sposato: "Key word?" (The word of the day is posted outside the door.)
Student: "Nefarious."
Sposato teases them and asks how they are doing. To one boy, he says, "So your dad's doing OK?" The boy nods, yes. "You get your homework in?" Another nod.
The ritual sets the tone for the day, says Alan Safran '80, the school's executive director. Before coming to MATCH in July 2002, Safran worked for the Massachusetts Department of Education, most recently as senior associate commissioner, in charge of making sure high schools helped students meet a new state testing standard, and before that as deputy commissioner, overseeing school funding, buildings, teacher certification, and technology. Safran left the Department of Education for MATCH, which was founded in September 2000, to "get down in the trenches," he says. "I had a craving to be in a school. I wanted to be close to individual kids and their lives. I felt a hunger to contribute something directly to kids as opposed to policy changes that the schools may or may not implement."
Safran and his MATCH colleagues live by the motto, "Kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." But teachers and administrators are also sticklers for discipline and rules, including a firmly enforced dress code. One student entered wearing a black skirt that was more than one inch above the knee; she never got past Sposato, who made her go home to change. MATCH's philosophy might be summed up as "tough love." Students have three hours of homework each night. To pass a course, they must earn a C or higher. And if students fail two courses or more, they must repeat that year. As a result, roughly 30 percent of students are held back each year, and the average student will spend five years earning a high school diploma, says Safran.
This year's senior class had 75 students in the fall of 2000; now it has 25. Eight students had to repeat a year, some students moved, one was expelled for bringing a weapon to school, some left because they didn't adhere to discipline standards, and others transferred after receiving two Ds. Safran says the attrition rate has been dropping for each subsequent class.
MATCH's high-tech name is a misnomer. The real focus is on the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics, and the school uses media and technology when appropriate, Sposato says. Safran developed a tutoring program to supplement what teachers do in class, and all ninth- and 10th-graders get eight hours a week of one-on-one tutoring by local college students. Any student who fails a course must attend tutoring sessions with M.I.T. students for five weeks in the summer. Safran also arranged for all seniors to audit one course at either Boston University or Boston College.
Safran first became involved with MATCH the year it opened, 2000-01, as a volunteer chess tutor on Friday mornings. The son of public school teachers, before going to the Massachusetts Department of Education, he had been executive director of the Republican party of Massachusetts, an assistant district attorney in New York City, and spokesman for the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee. Now Safran puts in 70 hours a week at MATCH, fundraising, supervising, keeping tabs on the kids, and calling parents.
Because MATCH is a charter school, it has great flexibility and control over hiring and budgeting. It hires nonunion teachers and staff, and pays teachers based on their relevant experience. For example, MATCH hired a lead math teacher who might have been passed over by traditional schools because she lacked state teaching certification and didn't follow a traditional route to the classroom. "We look very positively on teachers who have other life experiences that make them good role models for our kids," Safran says.
Unrestricted by labor contracts, MATCH has more freedom to have a longer school day and year. It also may spend its budget as it sees fit. Safran recently negotiated a contract for an S.A.T. preparation program; the better students do on the test, the more the company will be paid.
Most of the 180 students live in single-parent homes, and most are black or Hispanic. Seventy-three percent qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. Like the average Boston public-school student beginning ninth grade, the typical MATCH student enters with fifth-grade math skills and sixth-grade English skills. Since the school opened in September 2000, average reading achievement has increased by two grade levels each year. Last spring, 89 percent of the class of 2005 passed both the math and English sections on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System standardized test on the first try, compared to a 52 percent pass rate for the Boston school district.
It takes time for new students to buy into the school's culture. Most behavioral problems show up with the ninth-graders, says Safran, "because they're not used to a place that's holding them accountable for behavior." Junior Deverine James, who has been in and out of foster homes, acknowledges that she often was suspended in her first year, after taking out anger on students and teachers. At MATCH, she says, "if you have a problem there's always someone to talk to," including a full-time social worker. She doesn't like going home at night, so she stays at school until 7 or 8 p.m. Ñ with teachers and administrators who often stay late and tutors who work until 7:30. Says James, "It's a place you want to be."
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