Teach for America: Growing up, having impact

Posted on February 4, 2012 by admin

Since its launch in May 2009, Charter School Partners has been a strong partner with Teach for America-Twin Cities. CSP has encouraged  many of its Partner Schools to hire TFA Corps Members and we continue to maintain a strong, committed relationship with the ongoing development of the organization.

Today, CSP Executive Director Al Fan responded to an editorial in the Star Tribune by Jack Schneider, no doubt a very smart Carlton College professor (because he’s from Carlton), who, while not completely dissing TFA, did roll out a number of the somewhat tired, recycled straw-man arguments against TFA such as “the organization promotes itself as a panacea for the nation’s schooling woes. And, more important, reformers believe it”, a statement Al addresses  in his response.

Daniel Sellers, Executive Director of Teach for America-Twin Cities, regularly provided background information on the success of Teach for America nationally, which was key in passing alternative teacher licensing in 2011.

MinnPost recently outlined the growing trend of TFA alum to increasingly take on pivotal educational leadership roles in states and large urban districts.  The article includes the following quote:

He (John White, Louisiana’s new state Superintendent of Education) joins a growing number of TFA alums who have made their way from the classroom to positions of influence. Last March, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam appointed TFA Executive Vice President for Public Affairs Kevin Huffman, who started with the organization as a bilingual elementary-grades teacher, that state’s commissioner of education.

TFA alum Kaya Henderson is chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools, alum Kira Orange Jones was just elected to the board that appointed White and ex-TFAers have assumed superintendencies in New York City, Massachusetts, Arizona and elsewhere. Still others, like Chris Barbic, superintendent of Tennessee’s statewide Achievement School District, are heading ambitious school turnaround efforts. Some 600 are principals.

Charter School Partners looks forward to our continued partnership with Teach for America for many years to come and do ‘whatever it takes’ to deliver quality education to all Minnesotan children no matter their race or zip code.

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Harvest Prep: Beating the Odds

Posted on January 19, 2012 by admin
Great story on KARE 11 this morning on the success of CSP’s Partner School, Minneapolis’ Harvest Preparatory Academy, the state’s leading public school serving 95% low-income students. Here it is in its entirety.

Harvest Preparatory beats the odds on achievement gap

9:33 AM, Jan 19, 2012   |   0  comments

Best Academy students close the achievement gap

MINNEAPOLIS — “We are the best!” shout dozens of 5th through 8th grade boys at Harvest Preparatory School, a public charter school in Minneapolis.

This is part of a creed students recite daily at the school, which houses several programs, including Best Academy, a boy-focused program serving students through 8th grade.

“Our boys… have closed the achievement gap,” declared Harvest Prep founder and CEO Eric Mahmoud.  Because Minnesota carries one of the largest achievement gaps of any state in the country, Mahmoud makes quite a statement.

“Nationally, only 12 percent of African American boys are proficient in math and reading,” said Mahmoud, quoting a study by the National Assessment for Educational Progress.

Mahmoud and his staff weren’t satisfied by the scores of their own students. That’s why staff changed their approach in recent years.

“We changed the level of rigor, we changed the level of focus, we began to sweat the small stuff,” said Mahmoud.  The results have become more apparent in testing the past two years.  African American boys at the school now boast 85-percent proficiency in reading, and 80-percent in math, which Mahmoud says beats the state average for white students.

Part of that success also stems from something central to every student’s day at Harvest Prep.  Their school day is about 35-percent longer than the average school day in Minnesota.  That allows teachers more time to work with students.

It also takes some getting used to.  Shawn Williams moved her son, Dontae, to Best Academy when he was in the 6th grade.

“He was like, ‘Mom, I hate it there,’” Williams recalled.

But after transferring to another school in the 7th grade, it took Dontae just a matter of weeks to change his mind and return to Best.

“He was making straight A’s because he said ‘I did that already.  We did that last year,’”  said Williams.

Mahmoud sees the success of his students as critical to their own advancement, and also for the good of the country.  If the nation doesn’t find a way to close the gap “Then I think that we’re going to lose our competitiveness as a state and as a country,” said Mahmoud.

He’s already working with Minneapolis Public Schools and a school in Saint Paul to find a way to replicate Harvest Prep’s success in other programs.

Mahmoud says it comes down to the will of the adults in the room to do whatever is necessary for the good of the students.  Harvest Prep’s creed makes it clear, the school expects just as much from the students.

“We are the best not because we say it.  Because the best is what we do.  We are the best.”

(Copyright 2012 by KARE. All rights reserved.)

Posted in Beating the Odds!, CSP Partner School Profile, CSP's Closing the Gap" Schools, Culture of Reform and Achievement | Comments Off

Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) secures $28 million Promise Neighborhood grant!

Posted on December 19, 2011 by admin
A remarkable announcement from North Minneapolis today. The $28 million Promise Neighborhood grant is on top of last week’s announcement that Minnesota has secured a $45 million Race to the Top grant to support Minnesota’s Pre-K reform efforts, dollars that would be focused on four geographic areas including the Northside Achievement Zone.   These initiatives, along with several other efforts focused on improving district and charter school student achievement, show a new and genuine commitment to close the achievement gap in the Twin Cities. (Star Tribune article, MPR News, MinnPost).

Here is NAZ’ newsletter from today that includes a video of the very emotional event. Congrats to our friend and partner Sondra Samuels and the entire NAZ Team for their great effort in making this a reality. Now the work begins! (U.S. Dept. of Ed’s news release).

Dear Partners,

Today is a historic day for North Minneapolis. The U.S. Department of Education awarded NAZ with a $28 million Promise Neighborhood grant. Please read our release below, view the video of the announcement and celebrate with us!
North Minneapolis Tapped for $28M Promise Neighborhood Investment

Hopes Rise as NAZ’s Work to End Poverty Gains Steam

MINNEAPOLIS, Monday, December 19, 2011—North Minneapolis’ Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) is a winner of the Department of Education’s prestigious Promise Neighborhood Implementation grant. The U.S. Department of Education announced five national winners at 11 a.m. today from Elizabeth Hall International Elementary School in North Minneapolis. The school is one of several partners who make up NAZ, a collaborative organization that works to prepare North Minneapolis children to graduate from high school ready for college.

“North Minneapolis is a renewed community today,” said NAZ CEO, Sondra Samuels.  “The Promise Neighborhood program and NAZ share the same vision—that all children and youth deserve access to great schools and strong systems of family and community support that will prepare them for college and a career starting at birth.”

NAZ is dedicated to the success of children and families in North Minneapolis. It supports families, promotes academic achievement and creates a culture of success.

NAZ is positioned to coordinate the North Minneapolis service-delivery system and is refocusing the mission of every partner organization to drive toward a single, shared goal. The NAZ mission is based on the expectation that successful families will support successful children.  The NAZ collaborative includes schools and service providers, who have worked together to create a “cradle to career” pathway for children, while supporting their families with wrap-around services.  NAZ began in 2010 as a pilot.

The Promise Neighborhood Implementation funding for NAZ is $28 million over 5 years. NAZ currently operates with an annual budget of just over $1 million, provided through the support of individual donors, foundations and corporations.

The grant will be used to build NAZ infrastructure. For example, NAZ will increase the number of engagement team “family coaches” from six to 40.  Family coaches are from the North Minneapolis community and are trained neighbor-leaders who work one on one with families to build a culture of achievement within their homes.

“The Promise Neighborhood funding will allow us to immediately scale up our services to reach many more families,” Samuels said. “It sets in motion our ability to grow from our current 150 pilot families to our five-year goal of reaching 1,200 families with 3,000 children – all successfully on a path to college. We hold the belief that all of our families are going to succeed. This isn’t the end of our journey, but just the beginning,” she said.

About NAZ
NAZ is a collaboration of service providers and schools who work with children and families in a geographic area, or “Zone” of North Minneapolis to build a culture of achievement so that all youth graduate college-ready. NAZ focuses on a geographic target area that is an 18 by 13 block square that is most impacted by crime, violence and poverty on Minneapolis’ Northside. The Zone is estimated to be home to more than 5,500 children. A variety of challenging family factors are experienced by these children—including physical and behavioral health, stability and safety of housing, and economic and financial well-being.The purpose of NAZ is to end multigenerational poverty by significantly improving achievement outcomes for all children and youth in the Zone. To achieve this bold goal, NAZ has developed a comprehensive, multi-level change strategy that uses a “high-touch” approach to engage families and children, coordinate services and supports, and build the culture of achievement one family at a time.
NAZ FLASH / News from the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ)
1200 W. Broadway #250 | Minneapolis, MN 55411 | 612-521-4405 | the-naz.org
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Partner Tuesday, TFA Event highlight CSP’s busy week

Posted on December 15, 2011 by admin

House Ed-Reform Chair Sondra Erickson at CSP's Quality-Charter/Ed-Reform Partner Tuesday event this week

Two events highlighted a very busy week at Charter School Partners. The first was a Partner Tuesday Quality-Charter/Ed-Reform Legislative Luncheon in which House Ed-Reform Committee Chair, Rep. Sondra Erickson, joined CSP Partner Schools and a number of CSP ed-reform partners for lunch at Concordia Creative Learning Academy (CCLA), St. Paul.

In addition to hearing about the upcoming legislative session from  Rep. Erickson, presentations included the rolling out of CSP’s legislative/policy agenda as well as comments from several representatives of a nascent and growing ed-reform coalition here in Minnesota including the African American Leadership Forum (AALF), the Minnesota Business Partnership, and Leadership for Education Equity (LEE), the advocacy arm of Teach for America. MinnCAN’s advocacy team were all out of town, otherwise they would have joined us.

CSP’s Partner Tuesday Quality-Charter/Ed-Reform Legislative Luncheon at a very holiday festive  Concordia Creative Learning Academy, St. Paul. CCLA students charmed the guests by escorting them from their cars, greeting and making name tags, serving lunch and giving tours of the school. The CCLA choir performed three spirited songs as well.

TFA-Twin Cities/Charter School Partners host
BUILDING THE MOVEMENT: TOWARD A NEW DEFINITION OF SCHOOL LEADERSHIP

Later that evening at Minneapolis’ Open Book, TFA-Twin Cities and Charter School Partners hosted an event for TFA corps members and alum on school leadership and ed-reform.  Speakers included CSP Executive Director Al Fan and Katie Piehl, who is with the National Alliance for Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), both of whom outlined developments in the national ed-reform movement. In addition, two panel discussions were held on school leadership.

CSP's Director of Academic Excellence and Leadership Development Katie Barrett Kramer leads a panel of current and aspiring school leaders who discussed their careers as teachers to becoming transformational school leaders. From left to right: Katie Barrett Kramer, Hiawatha Academies' Shannon Blankenship, KIPP's Ben Tierney, Hiawatha Academies' Robin Fisher , CSP Fellow Angela Mansfield, Carl Phillips of Achieve Language Academy, and CSP Fellow Matthew Bannon.


Posted in 2012 Legislative Session, Partner Tuesday Events, Teach for America | Comments Off

Better Choices: Charter incubation as a strategy for improving the charter school sector

Posted on December 7, 2011 by admin

Al Fan

CSP’s Al Fan was part of a panel of national experts for today’s CEE-Trust and Fordham Institute forum from Washington, DC on Driving Quality: Can charter incubators solve the problem of too many mediocre charter schools? Al discussed CSP’s incubator efforts to launch new high performing charter schools via our Fellowship and other start-up and replication efforts. (Here’s a MinnPost article on the event).

The group also released a policy brief entitled Better Choices: Charter Incubation as a Strategy for Improving the Charter School Sector, in which CSP’s efforts are discussed.  Public Impact’s researchers Joe Ableidinger and Julie Kowal explain in their new policy brief that incubators are an important tool to help meet the demands of parents and students for more quality schools of choice.

The report outlined how incubators are organizations that intentionally build the supply of high-quality schools and charter-management organizations (CMOs) in cities or regions by recruiting, selecting, and training promising leaders, and supporting those leaders as they launch new schools. Groups leading this innovative effort include New Schools for New Orleans, the Tennessee Charter School Incubator, Get Smart Schools in Colorado, Charter School Partners in Minnesota, The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator in Indianapolis, and 4.0 Schools in several southeastern states.

Charter School Partners has worked closely with these other organizations and are united in our belief that the development of great charter schools can be accelerated through these initiatives to bring in and support great leaders to open and operate charter schools. Incubators provide an up-front quality screen for new leaders, and with intensive support on the ground, boosting the odds that new schools will succeed.

How to grow better schools faster? The authors distill five main characteristics of successful charter incubators:

  1. Selective screening for high-potential school leaders. Incubators focus on the recruitment and selection of top talent, restricting their services to a small group vetted for its leadership promise.
  2. Strategic focus on leadership development. Incubators develop promising leaders or leadership teams through months-long rigorous fellowships and training that help them open and operate successful schools.
  3. Expertise in new starts. While some charter-support organizations provide ongoing services to charter schools, incubators’ primary focus is on recruiting and supporting new charter start-ups or new school leaders, including the provision of financial resources to talented leaders to develop and build new schools.
  4. Public accountability. As a result of their intense, direct relationships with school leaders, incubators, their funders, and the public tend to judge their success by the performance of the schools they incubated.
  5. Regional focus. Local ties help incubators provide powerful support to school leaders as they open and operate new schools. Such targeted assistance can include access to funding, introductions to other local leaders, technical expertise (e.g. financial, academic, or organizational), or direct support to encourage things like a planning year, intensive fellowship programs, and training activities.

Ableidinger and Kowal also highlight strategies that federal, state, and local policymakers can implement to launch, strengthen, and expand the work of charter incubators. The authors note, “Targeted funding and changes to key policies can help incubators thrive in their target cities or regions, boosting the supply of promising leaders who start high-performing charter schools and ensuring that these leaders are adequately supported as they open and operate their schools.”

The emerging work of charter incubators across the country is an important reform strategy that states and communities should learn more about. As Better Choices points out, the cost of incubation is far lower than the costs of other reform options and slighter still compared to the social and economic costs of continued school failure.

Here are a few choice tweets from the event — several of them mentioning Al’s comments.

Results for #drivingquality

@OhioGadflyOhio Gadfly

Al Fan: Need to transform a system of choice into a system of good choices for parents #drivingquality

Retweeted by allie_kimmel and others

Fordham Institute

educationgadfly Fordham Institute

Tweeting live from #drivingquality! stream live : bit.ly/sexD8L
Ohio Gadfly

OhioGadfly Ohio Gadfly

Patrick Herrel: biggest challenge is finding people who can run a network of schools with experience in people management#drivingquality
Ohio Gadfly

OhioGadfly Ohio Gadfly

Al Fan: biggest challenges to incubation= high quality talent and funding #drivingquality #drivingquality
Fordham Institute

educationgadfly Fordham Institute

Al Fan: Charter schools aren’t the solution for public ed, but they can be catalysts or examples #drivingquality
Ohio Gadfly

OhioGadfly Ohio Gadfly

Al Fan: Need to transform a system of choice into a system of good choices for parents #drivingquality
Allie Kimmel

allie_kimmel Allie Kimmel

Watching a very interesting conversation about #charter incubators via @educationgadfly – Check it out! bit.ly/tz4Yf1 #drivingquality
Ohio Gadfly

OhioGadfly Ohio Gadfly

Neerav Kingsland: biggest bailout going on right now is the amount of $ going into failing schools #drivingquality
Posted in CEE-Trust, Charter School Incubator | Comments Off

What are the secret ingredients for schools closing the achievement gap?

Posted on November 17, 2011 by admin
Taken from Lease Aide Newsletter, Market News and Real Estate Strategies for Charter Schools. November 2011, published by Cushman&Wakefield/NorthMarq

Al Fan, Executive Director, Charter School Partners comments on the success of several Minnesota schools who are closing one of the nation's largest achievement gaps.

Each year when the Minnesota state MCA tests are announced, the Minneapolis Star Tribune publishes a Beating the Odds chart. For the past several years, including this year, 8 out of the top 10 public schools in the state that are making the most progress in closing the achievement gap are charter schools. Many of the schools named this year were on previous year’s Star Tribune lists.

This mirrors national data as well. In New Orleans,  13 of the top 15 public schools are charters; in Denver,  7 of the top 10 public schools are charters; Houston, New York and Chicago all have similar statistics. Why are some schools, which happen to be charters succeeding in closing the achievement gap and others schools — both district and charters — not succeeding?

At the risk of being too simplistic, let me simply state that the not so secret answer to that question is that the charter model offers greater autonomy and flexibility than the more traditional school models to implement a more tailored program to serve all students, no matter what their race, income or zip code. Yet not every charter school serving low-income children are succeeding in this mission, which is unfortunate. The charter model only works if the school takes advantage of the ‘privilege’ to utilize the flexibility and autonomy given to it by the charter law.

Five of the highest performing Beating the Odds schools include three Minneapolis schools’ — Harvest Prep, Best Academy, and Hiawatha Leadership Academy as well as St. Paul’s Concordia Creative Learning Academy (CCLA) and Global Academy in Columbia Heights. These five schools are ‘poster schools’ that embody all the necessary ingredients that make up the close-the- gap success. And what are those ingredients?

Ingredient #1: they all have incredible strong leadership: To a person, Harvest Prep’s/Best Academy’s Eric Mahmoud, Hiawatha’s Shannon Blankenship, Mary Donaldson from CCLA and Global Academy’s Helen Fisk are by any measure, exemplar, best-in-class school leaders.

These strong leaders have created school environments with high-expectations, no-excuse, whatever-it-takes cultures for both teachers and students (Ingredient #2); they have a laser focus on data-driven results (Ingredient #3), which includes rigorous and ongoing formative (interim) assessments as well as summative assessments; they all have longer school days and longer school years (Ingredient #4). And finally, (Ingredient #5) these school leaders have the ‘flexibility’ to hire and, I’ll say it, fire teachers, who do not have the skills or are not the right fit for a school doing the really tough work of closing the achievement gap for our most at-risk students.

Charter School Partners is a charter support group, so it is not surprising that we use charter examples as models of success. Yet we believe all public schools can incorporate the lessons of the Beating the Odds schools and fulfill the promise of public education to provide every student with the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to be successful and fully engaged in our vibrant and dynamic democratic society.

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Global Academy receives Minnesota Biz Partnership award for achievement gap success

Posted on October 26, 2011 by admin
Below are excerpts from an article from today’s Pioneer Press.  CSP wishes to congratulate Global Academy’s Director Helen Fisk, Assistant Director Melissa Storebakken and the remarkable staff for their exemplary effort in helping close the achievement gap for Minnesota’s children. Here is the Minnesota Business Partnership’s announcement of the award.

Recognizing Achievement in Columbia Heights

The Minnesota Business Partnership last week presented a Minnesota’s Future Award to Global Academy, a charter school in Columbia Heights, to honor its success in improving overall student performance and bridging the achievement gap between white students and students of color. (Note: Global Academy is featured at 1:57 into the video).
Each year since 2006, the organization has honored one Twin Cities school and one in greater Minnesota (this year, Longfellow 45/15 Choice Elementary School in Rochester) that serve a high percentage of low-income and/or minority students.

“A quality education is critical to every child’s future and the future of our state,” says a statement from Charlie Weaver, the Minnesota Business Partnership’s executive director. “We need to recognize, encourage and learn from schools like Global Academy, which teach us that ‘poverty’ and ‘race’ don’t have to be synonymous with ‘low achievement’ and ‘high failure.’ “

“The school culture focuses on high academics,” she says. “It is a no-nonsense place.”"The school culture focuses on high academics,” she says. “It is a no-nonsense place.”

“The basic belief is that all children can learn. We need schools where people believe that. Kids will do what we expect them to do, and they can do amazing things if they are asked.”

“Word has gotten out,” Fisk says. The school has a current enrollment of 415 students and a waiting list of more than 500.

Global Academy’s student body, with many students from Minnesota’s growing Somali community, includes 92 percent who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and 70 percent who speak English as a second language.

The students participated in decision-making about how to spend the $10,000 check the school received with its award: more books for classroom libraries, as well as additional iPads for student use. The school also will receive computer early-learning equipment to be used by kindergarten students.

Fisk also cites the quality of her teaching staff. In a video showcasing the two honored schools, she explains that Global Academy’s teachers have “at-will” contracts. “We don’t have performance pay because you don’t work at this school unless you’re an outstanding teacher. You can do that at a charter school.”

Posted in Beating the Odds!, CSP's Closing the Gap" Schools | Comments Off

2011-2012 Partner Tuesday kick-off: A conversation on charter school quality/Charter 2.0

Posted on October 20, 2011 by admin

This week, CSP Partner Schools came together at the Boca Chica Restaurante in the heart of the city's West Side hispanic community, for the start of the new school year's Partner Tuesday events. The intimate setting (with delicious food!) was a great forum for a new Community of Charter School Excellence to dialogue about Charter School 2.0.

At this week’s Partner Tuesday event, CSP’s Leadership Team led a series of discussions and conversations around strategies to improve the charter school sector and impact all public education in the state. The broad and engaging conversation touched on CSP’s Strategic Framework, which includes the somewhat controversial suggestion of closing low performing charter and district schools (CHURN), the CSP Fellowship, CSP’s programs to Partner Schools, and  a ‘quality’ charter school advocacy agenda.

Most importantly, it was a time for charter school leaders committed to a quality charter school movement to come together, get to know each other better and continue to build community around a shared vision of charter school quality and achievement.


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Charter schools continue to be state’s leading ‘Beating the Odds’ schools

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

For the second year in a row, the Star Tribune’s ‘Beating the Odds’ chart showed that eight out of the ten schools with the highest number of students scoring at grade level or better serving the neediest children in poverty are charter schools.

The four schools with the highest aggregate scores for reading and math in the 2011 state MCA tests were all Charter School Partners’ schools — Harvest Prep, Concordia Creative Learning Academy, Hiawatha Leadership Academy and Best Academy (Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy, TiZA, was also listed in the rankings but has sinced closed).

Charter School Partners has worked closely with these four schools over the past several years and can attest to the incredibly strong leadership, the high-expectations, the whatever-it-takes culture for both teachers and students, and the one-pointed focus on data-driven results, which includes rigorous and ongoing formative (interim) assessments.  (See 9.21.11 MinnPost article on ‘What are successful ‘outlier’ schools doing to close achievement gap?’).

Al Fan, in a recent letter to the charter community, stated:

“In city after city, the charter school model has proven to be successful and effective in increasing academic performance and closing the achievement gap. In the Twin Cities 8 of the top 10 Beating the Odds public schools are charters; in New Orleans 13 of the top 15 public schools are charters; in Denver, 7 of the top 10 public schools are charters. The charter model offers greater autonomy and flexibility than traditional school models to close the gap. But the charter model only works if there is also high accountability. Charters must be accountable for high student outcomes and sound fiscal management or we will lose not only the public’s trust, but also our students’ trust.”


Particularly stunning was the improvement of Eric Mahmoud’s Harvest Prep, which despite the nine point drop in statewide math scores, apparently due to the new more rigorous math test, increased its math scores 20 points and reading scores 14 points over the 2010 state tests.  (Eric Mahmoud also founded and has led Best Academy).
In fact,

  • Harvest outperformed every metro school district in the state in math including the high performing suburban school districts.
  • Harvest outperformed every Minneapolis Public School (MPS)  in math in the district, including the city’s more affluent schools.
  • Harvest outperformed the state average in reading 77% vs 75%
  • Harvest outperformed the state average in math 82% vs 57%
  • Harvest outperformed the state white average in math 82% vs 65%
  • Best Academy outperformed the state average in math 61% vs 57%
  • 100% of Best Academy 3rd grade boys were proficient in math
  • 100% of Best Academy 8th grade boys were proficient in reading
So while we celebrate a new cadre of high-performing charter schools that are closing the achievement gap in Minnesota, we are also sobered by the fact that this work is only beginning and both the charter and district sectors need to rethink the  incrementalist approach to reform that have kept generations of poor Minnesota children from achieving their full potential.
Posted in Beating the Odds! | Comments Off

Harvest Prep: The student population is black and poor — and highly proficient

Posted on October 3, 2011 by admin

Fourth-graders wait in line at Harvest Preparatory School in Minneapolis. Photo: Jeffrey Thompson, Star Tribune

UPDATE.  10.6.11. Twin Cities Daily Planet:  Harvest Prep: ‘The prisons are not getting any of our boys.’

(Given the accurate portrayal of CSP Partner Schools Harvest Preparatory School and Best Academy described in this article by Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten, we simply reprint the article in its entirety, without additional comment). See two additional links below for articles on Eric Mahmoud, Harvest Prep and Best Academy.

A north Minneapolis school at Olson Memorial Hwy. and Humboldt Avenue has demographics that seem a sure predictor of our state’s most intractable education problem. The student population there is 99 percent black and 91 percent poor, and about 70 percent of the children come from single-parent families.

Such “racial isolation” is widely considered a formula for defeat — a hallmark of the cavernous “achievement gap” that separates poor, minority students from their more affluent white peers. In recent decades, Minnesota has spent billions of dollars attempting to narrow the gap but has little to show for it.

That’s why the achievements of the school I just described should be shouted from the rooftops. In this year’s state math tests in grades three through eight, this school outperformed every metro-area school district, including Edina and Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

This extraordinary school is Harvest Preparatory School, a K-6 charter with five programs, including Best Academy, a K-8 boys program.

Eric Mahmoud at a CSP sponsored rally for Minnesota charter schools at the state Capitol in July 2011.

Black males are among our state’s lowest-performing groups of students, but at Best Academy, 100 percent of eighth-grade boys scored proficient in reading. “Best Academy has the highest proportion of African-American boys of any institution in Minnesota,” says founder and director Eric Mahmoud. “The only institution that competes with us is the prison system.”

How have Mahmoud and his team worked this magic? Mahmoud is an electrical engineer by training. “At the factory I used to run, if we had a failure rate of 0.5 percent, we’d shut down the line until we figured out the problem,” he says. “In our education system, we’re failing with 40, 50, 60 percent of our African-American children, but we keep the system that turns out the same product, year after year.”

Mahmoud’s new educational system includes the following components:

•Top-notch instruction: Every day, Harvest devotes 100-minute time blocks to reading and math. In early grades, the school teaches phonics and math facts using “drill and kill” methods that would drive most education professors shrieking from the room. But the “automaticity” that results liberates students for the challenges that await them — from deciphering Emily Dickinson poems in fifth grade to mastering algebra in eighth grade.

• A laser-like focus on data: Harvest continually assesses students on a host of measures so it can implement targeted interventions before kids fail. Teachers are evaluated based on their students’ learning gains.

• A calendar that gives students the time they need to master what they need to know: Harvest is in session 200 days a year, from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The key to academic success, says Mahmoud, is “great teaching, and more of it.”
But Harvest Prep doesn’t stop with academic excellence. At its heart is a school culture that instills moral character.

The process begins with what Mahmoud calls “the power of the uniform” — no saggy pants or short skirts here. Middle-school boys, for example, wear red ties, khaki slacks and blazers. A culture of manners and civility permeates the building. Students are addressed as “scholars,” say “please” and “thank you,” and greet visitors politely. Weekly ceremonies recognize children who achieve academic success through hard work, who sacrifice to help struggling classmates, or who demonstrate moral courage and truthfulness.

The obligation to “give back” is constantly discussed. “We don’t just want great test-takers and smart children — we want children who do good things,” says Mahmoud. He cites Mary McLeod Bethune, a 19th-century black education reformer. A sign above the door of a school she founded read, “Enter to learn; go forth to serve.”

Today, lots of folks — including school board members, superintendents and state officials — insist we can’t narrow the achievement gap without boatloads of new money. Some say that if poor, minority children are to learn, they must be bused far from home to sit next to kids whose skin color or income bracket is different. Few talk much about teaching kids the vital importance of hard work, self-discipline, rejecting victimhood and taking responsibility for their own success.

At Harvest Prep, students know better. Every morning, as the Best Academy boys shout their creed together, they say these words:

“We are boys striving to become great men. We are the best, because we work hard at it; we make no excuses; we ensure that we are always prepared; we will uplift each other; we are our brother’s keeper. …
“We will be honest in our words and honorable in our actions. … We will respect our parents and honor our elders. …
We are the best, not because we say it — because the best is what we do!”

Here’s the link to the article:  Katherin Kersten, Star Tribune:  At this school, usual excuses don’t apply.  9.24.11.
Additional recent articles on Eric Mahmoud, Harvest Prep and Best Academy
Dane Smith, Shawn Lewis, Growth and Justice: African American Boys: Too important to fail. 9.23.11
MPR News:  How do we close the achievement gap. 9.1.11

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