Hard Lessons: The Promise of an Inner-City Charter School - Hardcover

Jonathan Schorr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345447026 ISBN 13: 9780345447029

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2002

Synopsis

A decade ago there were only two charter schools in the United States. Today there are more than 2,400, serving more than half a million students. Charter schools are public schools that are free from many of the regulations that have long governed public education. Supporters include many of the country’s most prominent educators and politicians, among them President George W. Bush, who hope charter schools will reshape education, especially where it proves most challenging—in the inner city. The fact that most charter schools promise smaller classes and more parental involvement makes them immensely appealing to the nation’s most disadvantaged families. Charter school detractors, on the other hand, fear that these alternative schools will irredeemably ruin public education, drawing away the talented students and the most involved parents.

Clearly the stakes are high. But few Americans understand what a charter school really is—or what is involved in trying to create, attend, and teach in one. Written by a renowned journalist and education writer, and a former inner-city school teacher himself, Hard Lessons is the first book to capture the human drama of the entire experience. For three years, Jonathan Schorr was allowed complete access to the students, teachers, and parents of the E.C. Reems Academy in Oakland, California, making him uniquely qualified to tell their fascinating story. But would the new school succeed in effectively teaching children from urban neighborhoods where success is rare? Would it become a whole new bureaucracy or sabotage itself from within? The answers are found in the moving stories of some deeply involved yet very different individuals.

Among them, there is Nazim Casey, Jr.—rescued from his crack-addicted parents, he’s the last-chance child who will put inner-city charters to their ultimate test; William Stewart—a father whose fury at his daughter’s failed public school propels him into activism; Eugene Ruffin—the entrepreneur who helped introduce the personal computer to America, then collaborated with Wal-Mart heir John Walton to “invest” in education; and Valentin Del Rio—a young teacher whose idealism turns to exhaustion and the search for a punctual paycheck.

Through successes and setbacks, Hard Lessons reveals just how difficult it is, even with the best of intentions, to offer a quality education to every child in America. The story of E.C. Reems Academy offers invaluable lessons for anyone interested in America’s most pressing domestic concern. At once harrowing and hopeful, and in the finest tradition of modern nonfiction, Hard Lessons is one of the most important books to come along in decades.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Schorr is a native of Washington, D.C. He graduated from Yale University and earned a California teaching credential at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. He is a former urban public school teacher and a former reporter for the Oakland Tribune. His writing on education has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Education Week, The Nation, and Salon. He lives in Oakland, California.

From the Back Cover

“A very thoughtful and and intimate examination of the competing dreams and challenges faced by one community seeking a better way to educate its children. It will illuminate the current national debate about how to create schools where every child is expected and enabled to achieve and succeed.”
—MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
Children’s Defense Fund

“I started listing the people to whom I wanted to give this book, then stopped when I realized I wanted to give it to everyone. Schorr’s unsentimental but deeply humane account of the promise and problems of charter schools is not only a shrewd analysis of what makes them work, what makes them fail, and what they need to succeed, but a hold-your-breath drama populated with unforgettable characters who will linger in your mind and break your heart. With the eye and reporting skills of a first-class journalist and story-telling worthy of a novelist, Schorr has produced one knock-out of a book.”
—JUDITH VIORST
Author of Necessary Losses

Reviews

For three years, Schorr trailed parents, teachers and students as they struggled to establish the E.C. Reems Academy in one of Oakland, Calif.'s poorest neighborhoods. Beginning with community outrage over graffiti-decorated, rat-infested trailers masquerading as classrooms, Schorr (formerly an urban public school teacher) chronicles their bureaucratic wrangling, search for a principal, building renovation and discipline problems in exhaustive detail. The scope of this investigation is admirable, particularly its even-handed treatment of School Futures, an idealistic and highly political organization that helps set up charter schools. However, Schorr's attention to detail gets tiresome. Why, for instance, is it relevant that teacher Valentin Del Rio arose at 5:27 a.m. "an odd number he arrived at by pressing the `fast' button on his digital clock" on the first day of school? Despite such fastidious reporting, Schorr never manages to breathe life into his one-dimensional subjects. The result is a useful handbook for parents and educators undertaking the Herculean task of building a viable charter school. But given Schorr's distant and somewhat preachy tone, it seems unlikely that this account will appeal to readers outside the academic world.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Starting with the critical experiences of public schooling 40 years ago, every generation has needed its own storytellers to record America's chronic inability to create just schools for deserving communities. Following the model of such empathic and articulate eyewitnesses as George Dennison and Jonathan Kozol, Schorr provides highly detailed observations of an Oakland charter school, the E. C. Reems Academy. Like all educational stories, this one has the essential mix of ingredients. The human players compose an unstable cast of invested folks: diverse kids, inexperienced teachers, anxious parents, tense administrators, and politicized community observers. Surrounding factors make up an entire record of the social issues and aspirations that affect such ventures: low school achievement, recent immigrant populations, homeless families, poor materials, and the cultural marginality of education as a priority. The result is a story that measures out hope in teaspoons, and frustration by the cup. Schorr is a warm and graceful writer with all of the right sensitivities for perceiving this mix and understanding its ambiguities. David Carr
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Reality

The rage in Lillian Lopez had been burning for some time.

Her anger began with her neighborhood, the Fruitvale district of East Oakland, the city’s greatest Latino stronghold. She didn’t want to live there anymore. For nearly a quarter century, she had worked at one good position after another in the corporate offices of Wells Fargo Bank; certainly, between her income and her husband’s, they could afford to move to a safer, quieter area. She endured the blast of the boom boxes, the screeching cars that made the front bedroom no good for sleeping, the unswept streets. But the hardest part was being scared. Her two younger boys, with their typical walk, their typical clothes, their typical haircuts, looked so much like every other boy in the neighborhood—even she, driving down the street, would mistake other people’s children for her own. One day, she feared, gangbangers with guns would make the same mistake. She couldn’t even let her children ride bicycles on the sidewalk, for fear of the speeding cars turning “donuts� in front of the house. But her husband, Jose, refused to abandon the neighborhood. “This is Mexican town,� he declared, and he wasn’t about to call a moving van to take him away from his roots.

The deepest daily wellspring of anger for Lopez came from her search for a decent school for her boys. In those days, she had no notions about creating a new school, nor even that it was possible—she just wanted to find a place where her two younger children could get an education. Her oldest son, Mart�n, now twenty-seven and born long before her marriage, had enjoyed a relatively easy journey through private elementary and then public middle and high school. But by the time she married Jose and had her next son, Chipito, times—and schools—had changed. Lopez enrolled Chipito at Jefferson Year-Round Elementary, the neighborhood public school. It was a decision she would come to regret.

For starters, Jefferson had run out of places to put children. Designed to house some 700 children, Jefferson had burgeoned to more than 1,100—and in bad years, that number might jump by another 600 or so. California’s grim recession had left it with the most crowded classrooms in America, and struggling Oakland had not built a new school in thirty years. Yet in the Jefferson neighborhood—a mostly poor area dominated by Latino, Southeast Asian, and African-American families—the population had swelled during that time. Bereft of new building funds, the district had responded to the rising tide by hauling one portable classroom after another onto Jefferson’s weathered, cracking blacktop playground. The more the numbers of children grew, the more playground disappeared, until the campus—which sprawled across two unbroken city blocks—resembled an odd little city, with narrow, isolated alleys between the yellowish-tan trailers. The gaps between adjoining portables were covered by plywood, which eventually decayed, opening holes big enough to admit rats, or in some cases, children. The innumerable hidden spaces let graffiti artists work with little fear of interruption.

Yet even with the extra classrooms, Jefferson was still overcrowded, and sought to accommodate the high numbers of students by running year-round. This solution depended on a complicated system of four staggered calendars, so that one “track� of kids would attend during another group’s vacation. The plan had succeeded in thoroughly annoying parents, some of whom had children on various tracks, but had failed to solve the crowding problem. There were still too many kids, and select unfortunate “rover� teachers were forced to move their entire classrooms every month—bulletin displays, phonics charts, art supplies, and all—to classrooms vacated by other teachers. Jefferson, with thirteen rover teachers among a staff of fifty-one, had it worse than any other school in Oakland. And somehow, there didn’t seem to be many alternatives. In 1992, a handful of parents from that crowded part of town had created an independent public middle school called a charter school. But for most teachers in the district, that felt like heresy—like an abandonment of public education as they knew it. Anyway, things hadn’t worked out well in that school, and few wanted to try the experiment again.

Chipito struggled at Jefferson. Like his father, he spoke little English. By the end of his kindergarten year, the school notified Lopez that he would be held back. Dissatisfied, and with few friends at the big public school to help with child care, Lopez enrolled him at a private school attached to a small local college. She was happy, briefly, but then Jose lost his job at a local bakery, and they no longer could afford the school. She moved Chipito again, to a Catholic school with lower tuition costs. There, she knew he was not being challenged, and she confronted his teacher. Her protests served only to make her a hated figure at the school, and the administration warned her that if she didn’t like their methods, she could take her money and leave. At the end of the year, the nun in charge told her, “I think that you and Jose would be happier elsewhere.�

With Chipito entering fourth grade, Lopez returned to a Jefferson in chaos. A cadre of parents was demanding the ouster of the principal and was holding the school’s budget hostage. When she joined the parents committee, Lopez was told that as an outsider she was not welcome in the discussion. The dispute devolved, as Lopez watched, into a fistfight between a parent and a teacher. Things got even worse when it came time for the Lopezes to enroll their youngest son, Alex, at Jefferson. The kindergarten teacher did not show up on time for class most days. The first-grade teacher was a “rover.� The second-grade teacher’s mere presence sent Alex—who usually liked school—into tears. Shortly into the school year, the teacher was fired amid allegations that he had, without permission, been taking students home with him.

While the fruitless search for a decent education stoked Lopez’s fury, other events left her shaken and desperate. Chipito, entering sixth grade, wanted to attend the public middle school, Calvin Simmons, with his friends. He had the support of his father, who did not want to spend money on a private school. Lopez didn’t like the size and impersonality of the middle school, but gave in to the wishes of her husband and son. A month into the school year, following an argument over a girl, a gang of young toughs attacked Chipito in front of the school. They knocked the boy to the ground and began kicking him. Chipito escaped and pounded at the school doors, seeking sanctuary, but no one answered. He was not seriously injured, but for Lopez, the locked doors were even more galling than the beating itself—evidence, to her, that the school did not care about her child. Later, she learned that the boy who led the beating on her son had been jailed at juvenile hall, now implicated in a shooting. Lillian Lopez’s most frightening fantasy had just come home.

In a wrenching decision, Lopez uprooted her children and moved to a small town called Delhi (pronounced DEL-high) in California’s rural Central Valley, transferring to work at the local Wells Fargo office. There was talk that Jose might follow, but he never did. It was not a classic separation; she remained committed to her marriage, though she was angry Jose didn’t move with them. And the safe, placid new community seemed, to her eyes, perfect. But the rural idyll crashed on the first day of school, when Chipito came home and addressed his grandmother, who had come from New Mexico to help with the move. “Grandma,� Chipito asked, “what’s a wetback?� As Lopez’s hopes of small-town peace evaporated like a mirage, Chipito added, “They’ve been calling me a beaner, too.�

It didn’t end there. At the polls on election day, a man in line in front of Lopez pointed her out to his wife and murmured, “Now they’re letting them vote!� Chipito, then ten, suffered from chronic stomachaches all year, which Lillian chalked up to the separation from his father. Finally, she faced the undeniable: the move, her last resort, had failed. At the end of the school year, she and her boys returned to the dirt and the noise of the Fruitvale, and the chaos of Jefferson. It was the single worst moment of her life.

•    •    •

Hope dawned for Lillian Lopez on Saturday, September 27, 1997, at St. Elizabeth’s Church. A week earlier, when she was registering Alex for catechism class, a friend and fellow Jefferson mother had mentioned there would be a meeting about improving the school. Lopez had agreed to attend, but she had been to many meetings about Jefferson, and she went to this one reluctantly, expecting to hear nothing new. An intense, plainspoken woman with a reddish tinge to her dark hair, Lopez wore her moods like a banner. And just now, her mood was...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345447026
• ISBN 13: 9780345447029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352