Truman Scholars Charting a New Course in Education

Part I: The Founders: Building Schools with No Excuses

This piece is the first in a series. See also "Part 2: The Transition: John King’s Journey from Charter to Public Schools"

By Christopher Sopher (VA '10)

Featuring:
Dacia Toll (MD ’93), Co-CEO and President, Achievement First
Seth Andrew (RI ’99), Founder and Superintendent, Democracy Prep Schools
Ravi Gupta (NY, ’04), Fellow, Building Excellent Schools

Over the last few years, charter schools have generated an exceptional amount of interest and activity across the country, spurred by the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative and by encouraging results from the most successful charters. Nationwide there are some 1.5 million students attending more than 4,000 charter schools. It is a moment of great potential for leading education reformers who have spent years and sometimes decades developing, opening and running charter schools in some of the country’s lowest-income, lowest-performing districts.

A remarkable number of these leaders are Truman Scholars. I interviewed three Truman Scholars (among many, many more) who are involved in founding and running charter schools. This is their surprisingly connected story.

“A heck of an opportunity”

Dacia Toll had just returned from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and was starting law school at Yale, when the state of Connecticut passed its first charter school legislation in 1996. “It basically says to community leaders and entrepreneurs and others who are concerned about kids, ‘If you think there's a better way to do it and put together a robust plan and team, we'll actually let you run a public school,’” says Toll (MD ’93). “And that's a heck of an opportunity.”

Toll and a group of her fellow Yale Law School students took the offer, and over the intervening 13 years she and her colleagues have transformed that opportunity—first into a charter middle school in New Haven, and then into one of the most respected charter school networks in America.

Toll had not planned a career in education. In college she was involved in journalism and poverty issues, and later spent several summers working for former President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta Project, an antipoverty program.

“We worked with 18- to 30-year-olds, and we were preparing them for jobs that we would not want for our own kids. Without adequate educational background, it was not possible to access economic opportunity beyond a certain level. I had that experience over and over again ... It seemed like all the issues we were focused on in terms of job opportunities and issues of social equality and civil rights were really just downstream of unequal investments we were making in kids.”

That inequality found names and faces when Toll started a teacher prep program in New Haven Public Schools, while still in law school. “Something that was theoretical, something that I understood on a policy level became very real in my classroom of eight graders at Fair Haven Middle School.”

These experiences led Toll and her peers to found Amistad Academy, a charter middle school that opened in 1999 in one of New Haven’s toughest neighborhoods.

“There were officially I think 32 founders of Amistad. It ranged from the CEO of the local bank to a juvenile court judge to a child psychologist to a teacher, a parent. It was a wonderful mix. In New Haven there's always sensitivity to Yale projects. As a result we worked especially hard to broaden the founding team,” says Toll. “And it worked out really well.”

The founding team visited high-performing schools around the country, including some of the very first charter schools. They designed a “no-excuses” model, relentlessly focused on student achievement and quality teaching. Toll quickly found herself running Amistad.

“To make a long story short, the principal didn't work out, and by November of the first year, I was already starting to function as a principal, and I officially became the principal in the second year of the school. The story is, I loved the job. So I ended up doing that for six years.”

After only a few years in operation, Amistad began showing impressive results: performance gains with some of the most difficult students in the city, higher state test scores, high teacher satisfaction. The school was profiled in a PBS documentary and won a state award in 2006 for having the best middle school performance gains in Connecticut.

In Amistad’s fifth year, Toll’s partner and co-director (and fellow UNC alumnus) Doug McCurry left to found a second school in New Haven and start Achievement First, a charter network that now operates 17 schools serving predominantly low-income students in Connecticut and New York. Toll is co-CEO and president. Amistad’s early success has continued for Achievement First’s other schools.

“When Connecticut went to evaluate the performance gains [for schools across the state] without us in there, they said, we need to include the Achievement First schools. They needed to change the scales on the graph because the scores we so different between our kids and the rest.”

Success follows success...

In 2004, the same year Amistad was featured in a PBS documentary, Seth Andrew (RI ’99) arrived there for a one-year residency as a fellow with Building Excellent Schools, an organization that trains charter school founders and leaders.

After graduating from Brown University in 2000, Andrew followed his future wife to Korea, where he taught in a public school, an experience he says still informs his charter schools’ approach. Upon his return he taught and became an administrator in traditional public schools.

“I got very excited about teaching and about my practice, but really did not like the environment of the traditional school, which seemed stifling and bureaucratic, and my colleagues didn't have the same mission as I did,” says Andrew.

He left and became a fellow at Building Excellent Schools, which in 2005 helped him launch Democracy Prep charter school in central Harlem, one of New York City’s most historically troubled neighborhoods.

“I first tried to start Democracy Prep in Rhode Island almost ten years ago. The educational and political environments weren't supportive of bold reforms at that time,” says Andrew. “When we couldn't do it in Rhode Island we moved to New York, and had a very supportive chancellor and mayor and political environment, which meant that we were able to get Democracy Prep off the ground and open in 2006 in public school space.”

By 2009, Democracy Prep was the top performing school in Harlem. In September of 2010, New York City named it both the top middle school and top charter school in the entire city.

“I ran the school day-to-day as head of school for the first two years, and now we're running five schools in New York and Rhode Island, and that half of it is exciting, hard, challenging, brutal work,” says Andrew. “But it is incredibly rewarding because you get to see your results with kids every single day.”

Democracy Prep schools, like Dacia Toll’s Achievement First schools, follow a “no excuses” model. Andrew says the model has five elements: 1) more school time; 2) the use of data to measure outcomes and needs; 3) rigorous curriculum and high expectations; 4) a culture of respect and enthusiasm (what Andrew calls “the joy factor”); and 5) high-performing teachers. “The single most important thing of successful schools is really great teachers in every classroom,” he says.

Andrew’s experiences and early success have given him confidence in the model and the best practices it suggests for public education. “It's 100 percent clear. It's not something magic. It's a lot of work, but if you look at the highest performing schools around the country ... they all do exactly the same core principles.”

Despite opposition in some circles to these principles and to the charter school movement, Andrew says parents and students in New York have responded positively—so positively that student demand currently far exceeds the supply of charter school spots.

“We had 1,500 families apply last year for about 100 spots. Literally almost every kid who is eligible in District 5 for our program is putting in an application to our school. For New York, there are 40,000 families on the waiting list trying to get into charter schools.”

“I want to do what he’s doing”

In the summer of 2009, while Democracy Prep was busy becoming central Harlem’s best public school, Ravi Gupta (NY ’04) wandered into a panel session at the Truman Scholars Association’s first National Conference in Washington, DC.

“In the meeting there were Trumans who had started charter schools and were involved in education. I saw an incredible guy named Seth Andrew ... and I was blown away by his presentation. I was so floored by his take on charter schools, and by his passion for the cause ... that I said to myself, I want to do what he's doing. I slipped him a note and told him I would be e-mailing him. I sent him an e-mail the next day telling him I wanted to do what he was doing, and he told me to apply for Building Excellent Schools.”

Gupta had just graduated from Yale Law School and was working as an assistant to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice (DC ‘84), a job he had maintained while in law school, after taking a year off to work for the Obama for America presidential campaign.

“I almost immediately applied and was accepted, but had to defer for a year because I had an obligation to work for Susan Rice. But I knew what I wanted to do. Seth is a warrior. There are few people I've met in life who are as passionate and dedicated and effective as he is. He was a big part of it.”

Gupta is now a fellow with Building Excellent Schools, where he is studying school leadership and preparing to launch a charter school in Nashville, Tennessee.

“My dream in life is to start a school where I grew up in Staten Island, but an opportunity presented itself to build a school in Tennessee because they won Race to the Top ... and I jumped at the chance. I love the people in Tennessee, and I'm loving Nashville.

“We're getting used to the grind of running a school. But for me, that's not too much of an adjustment. I went from campaign world, working seven days a week until 1 a.m., to the UN, where every day there's another crisis to respond to.”

“I hear a lot of people tell me that it's not possible in medium-sized cities, or not possible in that region. But if you look around this country, there are a handful of schools out there defying the odds, and they're doing it all over the place,” says Gupta.

What’s next

Toll, Andrew and Gupta all say they expect the movement to grow in the years ahead.

“There really is a quiet revolution taking place,” says Toll. “Through Race to the Top and other things, we have seen more progress in the last 18 months than we've seen in the previous decade.”

Andrew, for his part, is ready to open more schools.

“We need more high-performing charter schools ... I told the chancellor [of New York City schools Joel Klein] in no uncertain terms, that we will build as many Democracy Pep schools in Harlem as they will provide us buildings,” he said. “We want to serve our community so that there is no lottery and no waiting list. We want to get to the point where supply meets demand, and we have enough spots for everybody who wants one.”

All three founders credit the Truman community with support, ideas and inspiration, and say they hope the connections continue to the next generation of school founders and leaders.

“The Truman community is like wind in your sails, having a whole group who shares your values and commitment,” says Toll.

“There is no better advice than from those who have done it; to sit down individually and talk with the great resources the Truman community has,” says Gupta. “Seth helped me, and I'm ready to [help other] folks who want to get involved.”

Chris Sopher (VA ’10) is a senior in his last semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies public policy.