I read with interest the encouraging news in The Current about the successes of students in various Northwest schools on this year’s DC Comprehensive Assessment System tests [“Local schools enjoy boost on spring DC-CAS scores,” Aug. 19]. I want to remind readers that a number of the District’s public charter schools’ students also performed well last spring. My faculty and I are particularly proud of our Washington Latin Public Charter School students, 82 percent of whom were profi- cient in both reading and math.
Your article quoted one edu- cator as having said that there is no magic bullet. Indeed, there is not, but we are all working hard to improve the quality of a Washington, D.C., education.

Martha C. Cutts
Head of School, Washington Latin Public Charter School

NPR

The Birth of a Charter School [TRANSCRIPT]

Host: Michel Martin

June 16, 2009

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.

We're continuing our special look at charter schools. In a few minutes we'll tackle the separation of church and charter school. Around the country and here in the D.C. area, a number of religiously-based schools that were faced with deteriorating finances have made the decision to convert to charter schools. And we'll talk about what that process is like for the people who have gone through it. For some it's surprisingly emotional experience. We'll find out more in a few minutes.

But we first we continue our conversation about charter schools with a close look at D.C.'s charter schools. More than a third of the District of Columbia's public schools students are currently enrolled in charter schools, the largest percentage in the country, but getting one up and running is not an easy task. Kavitha Cardoza covers education at NPR member station WAMU and she is following the founders of something called the National Collegiate Preparatory public charter school as they take their mission public. Kavitha welcome, thank you for joining us.

KAVITHA CARDOZA: Lovely to be here.

MARTIN: Tell us about Regina Rodrigues and Jennifer Ross, founders of the school. What kind of person wakes up one day and says I'm going to start a charter school?

(Soundbite of laughter)

CARDOZA: Someone who is very, very brave. They are a really interesting a pair. They actually called themselves the power couple with the perfect marriage, because they think they're so different that their strengths really compliment each other. So Regina has her degrees from Harvard and Jennifer from Howard. One is from New York, the other one is from California. One is really laid back and Regina says she's, you know, much more uptight and worried about things. So they really sort of compliment each other and one is taking on a lot of the academic portion and the other one is doing a lot of the student development.

And they are very fond of saying that between the two of them they have over 30 years of experience, so they're new to starting a public school but they're not new to education.

MARTIN: What is the mission or philosophy of a school they're trying to start?

CARDOZA: They wanted a high school because in Southeast D.C. there are very few high schools with strong emphasis on academics. So, for example, they want to start an international baccalaureate program which a lot of parents are very excited about. They want every junior to be able to go on study abroad programs. Their materials about the school were in high glossy, you know, really good - they want to set a very high standard. So their uniform, too, are blazers, they're going to have business days, because they said what they found was southeast D.C. encompasses some of the poorest neighborhoods. And they said that what they found was not just a socio-economic poverty but a poverty of thought where educators felt all the students, that's all they can achieve. And they wanted to show these kids an alternative.

MARTIN: You were reporting on the whole process of getting the school up and running. And despite the fact that the district already has a number of charter schools, the approval process is quite nerve-racking. I just want to play a short clip from your report describing some of what Rodrigues and Ross went through, here it is.

Ms. JENNIFER ROSS: We sat there kind of holding hands and every school they were denied and they come to us - she couldn't hear it

Ms. REGINA RODRIGUES: Just it looked that Jennifer because I figured well. She is pretty demonstrative, she will either cry or she will…

Ms. ROSS: And I did, but I (unintelligible).

Ms. RODRIGUES: (unintelligible) because we made it

MARTIN: And you report that the charter school board has only approved, 35 percent of the applications that they received in the past five years. How should we interpret that figure? Sort a sign that they're doing their due diligence or how - what does that figure mean in your view?

CARDOZA: I think what it means is that it's a very grueling process, as they said, because they said they worked for six months for six hours everyday just on the application process, because, for example, you can't say course work will be academically rigorous, you have to say how, what are the strategies, and the charter school board holds you accountable.

MARTIN: And once a charter school is actually approved, you actually have to work hard to keep it going. You spoke with Tamara Lumpkin of the D.C. charter school board. Let's just hear a little bit more of your report.

CARDOZA: They've come to realize that very soon after that that's easier than actually opening the school, and then when they actually get it up and running - even after the first year - I've spoken with school leaders who've said, in the second year, they thought it would be easier and it wasn't.

MARTIN: Where are Ross and Rodrigues now? How close are they to bringing their charter school dream to reality?

CARDOZA: They just found a new building a few weeks ago. So they're absolutely ecstatic, because everyone says that that's the hardest part of starting up a charter school. They have to renovate, because it's in a former elementary school building. They have to raise the height of the water fountains, retrofit bathrooms, you know things like that. At the moment they're really strongly focused on recruiting faculty and students.

MARTIN: Well, tell me what are the other things you're looking at over the course of following this interesting movement.

CARDOZA: I think the next part is going to be how they go about recruiting students because you get funded based on the number of students you can enroll. So if they don't make the number, which is about 125 students entering the ninth grade, they're going to have a problem with everything else. Sort of paying for their building, and staff and things like that.

MARTIN: So there are certain benchmarks that have to be met.

CARDOZA: Absolutely. And there are only a certain number of students in D.C. So it's not just competition between public schools and public charter schools, now, there's a competition between public charter schools and public charter schools.

MARTIN: Well, we can't wait to see what you come up with next.

CARDOZA: Thank you so much.

MARTIN: Kavitha Cardoza is a reporter at member station WAMU in Washington D.C. She joined at our studios in Washington. Kavitha, thank you so much for joining us.

CARDOZA: Thank you so much for having me.

MARTIN: You can go to the TELL ME MORE page at npr.org to hear Kavitha Cardoza's latest reports on education including her interview with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin a Democrat, who's opposing a voucher program that allowed low income D.C. families to send their children to private and parochial schools.

Newsday

DC school enrollment continues to decline

August 24, 2009

by The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Enrollment in D.C. schools is expected to drop again as classes begin Monday, but educators are optimistic the student population could soon begin to rise again.

D.C. Public Schools are expecting about 45,000 students this academic year, which is 2,000 fewer than in the spring. Meanwhile, the city's charter schools project at least 28,000 students, or about 2,400 more than last year.

D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee said she expects the declining numbers in traditional public schools to level off by next year and enrollment to slowly rise soon after.

"We knew last year there was going to be a big drop-off because of school closings and consolidations," Rhee said.

The city closed 23 schools last summer because of under-enrollment; only three schools have been closed ahead of this school year.

In the last three decades, nearly 30,000 students have left the city's public school system for other options. Enrollment has winnowed from more than 100,000 students to less than 73,000 in public and charter schools. At the same time, suburban school districts have increased by up to 40 percent.

Some parents have opted for private schools or publicly funded charter schools, which first opened in Washington in 1996. Charter school enrollment jumped to about 25,600 students last spring. Tom Nida, chairman of the city's Public Charter School Board, said if charter and regular public schools implement changes, he would expect "a total turnaround in the next two to three years."

"The charters' challenge will be more competitive options from DCPS," Nida said. "We'll be pressed to stay on our game."

But experts point to several factors such as school choice and the city's high dropout rate that they say make it difficult to predict enrollment.

"There isn't another system in the country, except maybe New Orleans, where the dynamics are so complicated," said Margery Turner, vice president for research at the Urban Institute.

Still, Rhee said D.C. schools are "absolutely ready" for the new year. Her office has even run bus advertisements and radio spots about the schools — though officials didn't think students would flood in just because of the public relations campaign, Rhee said.

"But it's a signal to residents that a lot of things are happening in the schools," she said.

___

Information from: The Washington Examiner, http://www.dcexaminer.com/

The Washington Post

D.C.'s Other School Reformers
Charter schools continue to bloom as an alternative.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

WITH D.C. schools reopening, attention is focused on the reform efforts of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, and rightly so. But with growing numbers of students enrolled in charter schools, hers is just part of the story of educational change in the District. Not only are a record number of charter students expected this year but an initiative is also being launched to hold the public charters more accountable and improve their performance.

Enrollment of 28,000 to 30,000 students is projected for the charters, a remarkable number considering that the first charter school opened its doors just 13 years ago. (Meanwhile, traditional public schools, which opened Monday with an encouraging 37,000 students already enrolled, are projecting an eventual roster of some 44,000 students, based on budget assumptions.) There are 56 charters, making the District a national leader in its embrace of these publicly funded but independent and often innovative schools. Recent test scores show overall success by the charters, though with big variations among them. So it's good that the Public Charter School Board will measure the schools' success more vigorously.

In what is being described as a national first, the city's charters will be subjected to a uniform evaluation process. Developed with grants from national foundations, the "performance management framework" will include academic measures, such as student test scores and readiness for graduation, and nonacademic indicators, such as governance and fiscal management. Because much of the success of charters flows from their ability to provide unique educational settings, the review respects the individual missions of each school. The evaluations will help parents figure out the best place for their children, reward quality in schools and make it easier to close schools that don't perform. Moreover, with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan making the replication of successful charter schools a key component of his school-reform plan, the District's efforts could well serve as a model for the nation.

Charters are not the enemy of the city's traditional public schools. If anything, the District's flourishing charter movement will help Ms. Rhee by offering choice and competition while refuting some of the excuses used to justify the poor performance of urban schools.

Washington Business Journal

Unfit him to be a slave

Friday, August 28, 2009

By Norman N. Johnson

The Washington Times

Monday, September 21, 2009

'Builder' forges schools

By Deborah Simmons

Donald L. Hense, chairman of Friendship Public Charter Schools, has been many things to many people, and many of the recipients don't know his name. To Mr. Hense, who calls himself a "serial entrepreneur" and a "builder," that's OK because he has dedicated his life to helping others help themselves.

Reared to serve God, community and humanity, Mr. Hense has been establishing charter schools that give youths a fighting chance at productive and successful lives. This year, he opened a school that steers youth toward the high-tech industry and began working with one of the nation's most recognized reformers, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, to begin transforming Anacostia High School, which has been plagued with violence and low academic achievement. Both Anacostia and the new charter school are in Southeast, the city's poorest quadrant.

A pioneering educator, Mr. Hense says a Baptist convention and the words of three influential Americans changed the course of what he thought was a life bound to Missouri.

The middle child of five, he was born in St. Louis, whose gateway led him to the South before answering the call to come eastward and work at Howard University.

Mr. Hense says that his mission remains absolute and that he is resolute, whether shaking hands with presidents, praising children or standing shoulder-to-shoulder with philanthropists as the head of Friendship Public Charter Schools, the largest community of charters in the Washington-Baltimore region.

"I believe this is what will save black people," Mr. Hense said.

Life imitates life

Mr. Hense says faith lights the way and perseverance keeps him going. Every step of the way, he draws from his stable childhood, historical turn of events and profound relationships.

He grew up in St. Louis as it relished World War II manufacturing industries, including McDonnell Aircraft Corp. Young Donald attended his neighborhood school, across the street from his home, where students, teachers and staff were close-knit. His mother, Lillie, was a homemaker, his father, Fred, worked at an engineering firm, and the Hense children knew what their father did on Mondays, his day off.

"Back in those days, everybody was working-class," he said. "We were just coming out of World War II. Schools were segregated, but I don't remember any problems.

"My father had four double-breasted blue suits, one with pinstripes, another solid and so on. He always wore one of those blue suits to school. My mother was a housewife. There wasn't a lot we could get away with. I had good, caring teachers, fantastic teachers."

In school and church, Donald relished the opportunity to express himself in recitals and to value partnerships by joining a speaking and performance group in first grade. "I stayed until I was 16 or 17 years old," he said. "Relationships and partnerships are keys to what I do and who I am."

Becoming a Morehouse man

"There were three constants in my life," said Mr. Hense. "Baseball, church and school." And there were three religious and education leaders who inspired him to leave St. Louis - Benjamin E. Mays, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson and Martin Luther King.

It was the summer of 1965 and Mr. Hense thought he was destined for the University of Missouri before he heard the three men speak at a Baptist confab in St. Louis. One by one, the three alumni of Morehouse College in Atlanta opened his mind, his eyes and his ears. The first night he heard Mr. Johnson, a minister and the first black president of Howard University, and on the second night, he was enraptured by Mr. Mays, president of Morehouse. Before Mr. Mays' protege, Mr. King, had closed his speech, "every fiber of my whole being" had said to become a Morehouse man.

"I sent my transcripts by airmail to Morehouse College. I called late afternoon the next day. The registrar answered, and I said, 'I want to come to Morehouse. I just saw Martin Luther King.' "

Mr. Hense smiles as he recalls how "ridiculously naive" that might sound today, but he says there were no coincidences.

Morehouse reinforced Mr. Hense's faith, the importance of brotherhood and the value of civil rights and community involvement. The brotherhood included Morehouse Trustee Charles E. Merrill Jr., son of the Merrill Lynch founder, and schoolmate Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of New York's influential Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Mr. Hense, who served as an usher at Mr. King's funeral in 1968, paid homage on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. At the ceremony held at Friendship Southeast Academy, Mr. Butts said Mr. Hense is carrying out remarkable work. He also said that at Morehouse, they learned to appreciate, not fear, thresholds of opportunity.

Community service

If the heady 1960s racked America's conscience, the 1970s rocked black America, says Mr. Hense, who was lured to Washington with a job offer at Howard University, where President James E. Cheek wanted someone to start a government-relations department to bolster the school as a research institution. Mr. Hense says he "couldn't resist the opportunity" to come to the capital, where the best of black America showcased itself and the Nixon administration had embraced affirmative action.

Mr. Hense, who had worked at Boston College and Dartmouth, answered the community-service call by working for the National Urban League, the liberal lioness Marian Wright Edelman's Children Defense Fund, and Friendship House, the social service organization that, like Mr. Hense, was many things to many people.

By the time the Reagan administration had left Washington and the Clinton administration was in its second term, the city had lost its glamour and was on the verge of losing a generation of young people to follow in the footsteps of the Kings, Mayses and Johnsons, Mr. Hense says.

"In 1973, Washington was a hopeful place, a city full of upwardly mobile people," he said. "But it became ravaged by drugs, a declining education system [and] a vast underculture."

In the late 1980s, school reform became a mantra for change. A decade later, new and evolving partnerships would begin changing the course of public schooling with charter schools.

Chartering a new course

Mr. Hense stands among those at the forefront of the new course. Guided by the values, hard work and faithfulness of his parents' generation, he and other forward-thinkers became charter-school pioneers. Friendship schools - the namesake of Friendship House - were born in 1997, the year after Congress passed legislation establishing charter schools. The schools are in Washington and Baltimore.

Friendship parents, Mr. Hense says, are as much a part of the students' schooling as the teachers. They make policy decisions regarding discipline, curriculum, fundraising and other issues. They are fixtures in Friendship schools, just as Mr. Hense's father was when he was a youngster.

Policymakers and decision-makers often forget that children need help every step of the way, he says. "You can't just point the way," Mr. Hense said. "You have to lead, and if you see barriers, you don't retreat. You find different avenues."

Friendship schools partner with successful organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to open various avenues for teachers, administrators and students. And sometimes, Mr. Hense says, you have to pave a new path.

He tells the story of a visit to the Virginia suburbs, where the idea for a new tech-centered school presented itself. Mr. Hense was in Reston to attend a meeting and drove around parking lots in the technology area looking for D.C. license plates, searching for evidence that D.C. men and women were employed. To his disappointment, D.C. tags were few and far between.

Mr. Hense says Friendship Tech Prep Academy, which opened its doors this school year, is another opportunity to help blacks help themselves.

There are various types of taskmasters, he says, explaining that some merely tear down and some tear down and rebuild.

"I'm a builder," said Mr. Hense. "That's what I do. That's what I know."

The Washington Post

Charter Success
Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

OPPONENTS OF charter schools are going to have to come up with a new excuse: They can't claim any longer that these non-traditional public schools don't succeed. A rigorous new study of charter schools in New York City demolishes the argument that charter schools outperform traditional public schools only because they get the "best students." This evidence should spur states to change policies that inhibit charter-school growth. It also should cause traditional schools to emulate practices that produce these remarkable results.

The study, led by Stanford University economics professor Caroline M. Hoxby, compared the progress of students who won a lottery to enroll in a charter school against those who lost and ended up in traditional schools. The study found that charter school students scored higher on state math and reading tests. The longer they stayed in charters, the likelier they were to earn New York state's Regents diploma for high-achieving students.

Most stunning was the impact that the charters had on shrinking the achievement gap between minority and white students. "On average," the study found, "a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English." Researchers were careful not to draw conclusions, but they highlighted a correlation to practices such as a longer school day, performance pay for teachers, more time spent on English and effective discipline policies.

Nearly all of the city's 78 charters participated (although the elementary school operated by the United Federation of Teachers opted out), so no one can argue that the results are an anomaly of a few, select schools. Indeed, the results show the possibilities for success in urban education when leaders welcome change and innovation. Chancellor Joel Klein encouraged charters to flourish, providing start-up assistance and offering space in public buildings, even as the teachers unions did their best to put up roadblocks, lobbying the state legislature to limit the number and funding of charter schools.

Now the facts are in. The desperation of poor parents whose children are stuck on waiting lists for charter schools is well-founded. And every time the union scores another lobbying success in Albany -- or Annapolis, Richmond or Washington, D.C. -- to hold charters back, more poor children will pay a price.

The Inner-City Prep School Experience

In the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence. Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT — “daedal,” “holus-bolus,” “calamari” — are taped to bathroom and dorm walls. And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.

Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast’s Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny’s.

Every Sunday night, 325 students in grades 6 through 12, most of them African-American, most from single-parent, lower-income families in Southeast and Northeast, pass through the gates of SEED — the first inner-city public boarding school in the country, with admission by lottery. And for the next five days they do what other prep-school kids do: in uniforms of pressed khaki pants and polo shirts, they take classes in Spanish, precalculus, U.S. history and other subjects. They meet with staff members at the school’s College Café to talk about college applications. They spend their afternoons in chess clubs, on the basketball court or in poetry workshops.

Then, after school on Friday, they head back home, lugging duffel bags, suitcases and garbage bags serving as suitcases. For 48 hours, they leave SEED’s protected, grassy campus to return to their neighborhoods — the ones that created the need for charter schools like SEED in the first place. That ongoing transition, from school to home and back again, symbolizes the school’s unwritten requirement of its students: to juggle and to navigate two different and often conflicting worlds.

At 7:20 on a Friday morning in a bathroom in the girls’ dorm at SEED, Reneka Blackmone, who is 17, was standing in front of a mirror, surrounded by posters of Queen Latifah, Beyoncé and Naomi Campbell, brushing her teeth. Witty and self-deprecating, Reneka often performs her way through her day, dabbing beauty marks on her soft, dimpled cheeks with a mascara wand, imitating models on catwalks and freestyle rapping. But this morning she was preoccupied with the busy day ahead: Spanish class, an oral presentation on Charles Darwin for world history, classes in business management and music. Then there was the weekend to think about. At 3:30, the last bell of the week would ring and Reneka would be freed from the beige brick dorms, the study halls, the uniforms, the dining-hall food, the no-MySpace, no-Facebook, no-TV rules. She would also be freed from the reminders that teachers, administrators, counselors and resident assistants rain on her and other students 15-plus hours a day: tuck in your shirt, raise your hand, talk with respect, get to class on time, be nice to your classmates, study for your test, turn the lights out, get some sleep.

“Come on, baby, it’s late,” said a resident assistant, hands on her hips and old enough to be Reneka’s mother, as she stood in the doorway. Like all SEED students, Reneka belongs to a cluster of 12 to 15 students that is named after a college or university. The Howard House room Reneka and Quadidra Taylor shared was small and spare, with a desk, dresser and bed for each girl and a shared computer.

At 7:35, five minutes past the deadline to go to the dining hall for French toast, orange juice, apples and boxes of Golden Grahams, Reneka pulled on her uniform of khaki pants and a pale blue polo shirt. No plunging neckline, no huge hoop earrings, which are violations of the dress code. SEED’s 116-page Student-Parent Handbook, however, did say it “is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” So Reneka put on her faux Chanel rhinestone earrings, slipped on a chunky chain bracelet and spritzed her body with perfume, from her neck to her ankles. She was ready for the school day.

The night before, I asked the girls about their weekend plans. “Chillin’, talkin’, walkin’,” Quadidra said. For Reneka, Friday nights were often catch-up time on all she missed during the school week: four- to five-hour stretches of MTV, VH1 and cable-TV karaoke, her favorite steak-and-cheese sandwich and 11 or 12 hours of sleep a night. By Saturday morning, she would be at her aunt’s apartment in Northeast, in jeans, strappy sandals and tidy cornrows, before heading out again, past the drug dealer in the stairwell on his cellphone, down the street lined with two- and three-story brick apartment complexes, including the one where a man killed his girlfriend and her children, until she landed at her friend’s house. There, she would sit on the front porch as her friend, who graduated from high school last year, braided her 1-year-old son’s hair. Reneka and her friend would talk about, among other things, the kinds of girls they were not: “rollers — skates with no brakes,” hopping from one boy’s bed to another.

Other SEED students stuck closer to home on weekends. They drifted away from the old friends who didn’t want to hear about their SAT scores or the eight college campuses they visited with SEED staff members. Those friends probably faced a different future: Maybe they would graduate from high school or get a G.E.D. They might land a cashier job at CVS or Safeway or find something more lucrative in the drug business.

Reneka’s boyfriend last year was that kind of neighborhood boy — a low-life, in Reneka’s estimation, who skipped school too much, smoked too much weed and would never amount to anything. I asked if he had ever visited her at SEED. Never, she said. SEED was her refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. “I know what I gotta do when I’m at SEED,” she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, “I don’t mix my worlds.”

By the time she was 12 and her number was picked from the annual SEED admissions lottery, Reneka had moved several times, including into foster care for a year, while her mother struggled with a drug addiction. Once, she was playing double Dutch when a guy began shooting up the street. Another time, she was washing her mother’s hair when they heard the pop-pop of gunfire and dropped to the floor. Three of her half-brothers have been killed in gun violence.

When Eric Adler and Rajiv Vinnakota, both former management consultants, opened the SEED School of Washington, D.C., in 1998, they had students like Reneka in mind: students who contended not only with failing schools but also with the risks of their neighborhood during the nonschool hours. Last year, the SEED School’s foundation opened a Baltimore school, and plans to expand into other cities. Some critics, though, have balked at the expenditure — $35,000 per student, most from the city’s public funds — which, in theory, could be used to help more public schools and serve a greater number of students in nonboarding settings. And, of course, the ultimate goal should be to improve homes and neighborhoods enough so kids don’t need to leave.

While SEED enrolls plenty of at-risk students, critics argue that SEED and other charter schools skim the cream of inner-city youth, attracting the families who are motivated to fill out the paperwork to apply to the school. Meanwhile, some of the most high-risk kids, whose parents are barely functional and place more value on their child’s being home every day to baby-sit or do housework than they do on education, are left behind.

But SEED’s statistics have impressed fans of the school, including President Barack Obama, who called the school “a true success story”: at least 97 percent of SEED graduates are accepted to colleges, including Princeton, Alabama A&M and Connecticut College. And 90 percent of SEED graduates immediately enroll in college, compared with 56 percent of African-American high-school graduates nationally. (About 70 percent of SEED graduates are currently in or graduated from college, although the program is new enough that the sample size is small.) Though SEED also outpaces D.C. public schools in reading and math, reading is still a weakness for many SEED students and, not coincidentally, the school’s SAT scores have been unimpressive. Part of the blame, according to Charles Barrett Adams, the head of the school, lies with the public elementary schools: students arrive at SEED typically two to three grade levels behind and spend much of the next years playing catch-up.

Reneka was 12 the first night she stayed in SEED’s four-story, 77-bedroom girls’ dorm. She kept her door wide open and barely slept. She wasn’t worried about the neighborhood. She had lived in worse. She didn’t even miss home much — as the oldest child of a single working mother, she was relieved not to be caring for her four siblings. Instead, she feared being behind the gates with kids who were bigger than those at her elementary school, where she held her own in fights. In neighborhoods like hers, being sent away was for delinquents, not kids with college ambitions.

It wasn’t so different across the campus in the boys’ dorm. During his first months, Triston Elliott, now a senior, wondered who would take care of him if he got hurt; he also longed to get bags of chips from his mother’s kitchen. The boys’ dorm was unadorned and felt forlorn, like an airport terminal: “It’s like you’re supposed to sit and wait for something to happen,” he said. His brother Parry, older by 16 months and handsome, with angular features and an intense approach to everything from his basketball game to his A.P. classes, struggled to find his place at SEED, too. Older kids bullied him, and Parry pushed back. Both boys phoned their mother regularly those first months, often asking to come home.

“So you’re giving up?” their mother asked them. Tolya Elliott-Chandler was in the minority of SEED parents who had graduated from college, and she pushed her sons academically, but she was not convinced that she could outweigh the forces at a traditional public high school and the neighborhood. She knew there were worse fates for her sons than feeling homesick.

Some kids don’t last beyond the first year or two at SEED. Until recently, the school lost about 20 percent of the student body each year — mostly in middle school and mostly boys. The incoming class of 70 students slowly dissipated each year so that by senior year, the remaining students barely filled a gym bleacher. The high attrition made the school’s much-lauded college acceptance rate less impressive: If a class of 70 seventh graders fell to 20 students by the time of graduation, those remaining 20 students were arguably among the best — at least in terms of self-discipline and a willingness to stick it out — of the original class. Adams, who became the head of SEED two years ago, has been improving the attrition rate by reducing the number of staff members with authority to dismiss students and taking a more nuanced view of dismissal-worthy offenses. During this past school year, the attrition rate dropped by more than 50 percent.

Though SEED students get in trouble for the usual teenage reasons, in some cases breaking rules reflects their ambivalence about prep-school culture. Black inner-city boys particularly have to wrestle with the question of whether it is O.K. to be smart. And if it is, then they have to figure out how to wear that — or not wear it — when they return to their neighborhoods each weekend.

To survive that back and forth, many SEED students learn to code switch. A SEED student knows he can’t swagger through the hallways in baggy jeans, the rapper Ludacris blaring out of his iPod, while he avoids eye contact and a handshake with Mr. Adams. But if he takes too much of SEED back to the neighborhood basketball court — the big words and pressed shirts — he could have troubles of a different sort. Rather than try to erase students’ street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack,” he told me. “Why would I want to rid him of that?”

Some parents argued that students’ lives would be easier if they were at SEED seven days a week. The five-day plan was primarily a financial decision — it was too expensive to staff the program on weekends. But Elliott-Chandler was one mother who chose SEED, in part, because she could still see her boys regularly. As it is, weekends fly by with family visits, errands, church and pilgrimages to Sam’s Club, where Triston and Parry stock up for the school week — bags of chips, SunnyD drinks, packs of Winterfresh gum and Gatorade.

And on Sunday, when other families have the entire evening in front of them, Parry and Triston are finishing laundry at home and packing their uniforms. Around 8 p.m., they and their mother pile in her car and soon they are driving through the SEED gates for another school week.

Last year, when Reneka was considering having sex with her boyfriend, she confided in Carmen Brown, her life-skills counselor. Like many of the counselors, who are on duty from 3 p.m. to midnight, Brown is African-American, in her 20s and a college graduate. She is also the adult on campus to whom Reneka feels the closest.

Brown suggested that Reneka slow things down. Then, she brought her Howard House girls together to talk about relationships and sex. Later, she created a panel of men, including a student-life coordinator, Matthew Carothers, who lives in the boys’ dorm, as well as a senior male student, and asked them to answer questions the girls submitted in advance: “What’s on the mind of the 16- to 18-year-old boy?” “Why is it hard for boys to be faithful?” It was a key part of SEED’s after-school curriculum called Halls, Habits for Achieving Life Long Success, with more than 200 lesson plans run by life-skills counselors, including “What Do Those Food Labels Mean?”; “Hip Hop: Is It Bad?”; “Dining Etiquette”; and “Mean Girls.”

In the boys’ dorm, the teenagers were just as much in need of life skills and relationship advice. A few years ago, Triston liked a girl but wasn’t sure how to get her attention. He wasn’t going to ask his friends, and he doesn’t know his father. So he talked to his life-skills counselor, Nathaniel Goodwin, who had worked with Parry and Triston since they started at SEED five years ago. Triston told Goodwin that many of his ideas about romantic relationships came from the 1997 film “Def Jam’s How to Be a Player,” about a playboy. “Mr. Goodwin was like: ‘No, no, no. That’s not it,’ ” Triston told me, as we sat on a bench outside the girls’ dorm one afternoon. Goodwin told Triston to be himself. “And he told me,” Triston said with a small smile, “to shower more than twice a week.”

Like the Halls lessons, other efforts at SEED are intended not only to broaden students’ experiences but also to ease the transition to colleges, where there would be plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class students who had summered in Paris and interned at law firms. To that end, SEED, with the aid of scholarships, sends students off in the summer to study creative writing at the Putney School in Vermont, to wilderness trips in Wyoming and to other programs in places like Zambia, Guatemala and Scotland. For Parry, the school’s annual two-week trip to Greece for a select group of upper-schoolers was a turning point. Imagining a broader world outside Washington was one thing. Being abroad, with food, music, history and a language far different from his own, made him hungry to see and to learn more.

Around 11:30 on a Saturday morning, during their 48-hour break from SEED, I met Parry and Triston at their family’s tidy two-story row house in Northeast before we headed out into the neighborhood. A couple of blocks away was the basketball court where Parry has clocked countless hours. He still plays there most weekends, though he has grown weary of the neighborhood boys’ talk about SEED as “D Block.” He no longer tries to set them straight and avoids telling them about his plans for college. Instead, at the end of each game, Parry heads in one direction, the boys in another. “You feel bad when you are different from people in your own neighborhood,” Triston said.

Those neighborhood streets may become more alienating when Parry and Triston leave for college next year. Parry hopes to go to Morehouse for business law. Triston wants to study film at Oberlin. In both cases, they will be hundreds of miles from home. But among the lessons SEED instilled in Triston and Parry was that to move ahead, they had to keep moving beyond home.

City Offers Up Franklin School for Development

Washington City Paper

By: Ruth Samuelson

The Franklin School seems destined to become a boutique hotel. It’s gorgeous. It’s right downtown, almost equi-distance from the convention center and the White House. It looks out across a leafy park.

You can already envision the lobbyists strolling out the front door after dining at whatever celebrity chef-driven bistro ends up there.

Who knows? But it almost happened once. And, it’s a real possibility again: the city has issued a request for proposals to redevelop the Franklin School, after making the building available only to charter schools last Spring.

The Franklin School RFP states: “Highly-qualified development teams with experience in planning, financing, building, and operating small to medium scale mixed-use, commercial, hotel, residential, or retail use development projects and experience in working with community stakeholders are strongly encouraged to respond to this RFP.”

Homeless advocates have long pushed back against plans to convert the building, which was used as a shelter until last September.

A few months ago, two charter schools applied to move into the Franklin School building, but “we vetted those proposals. We didn’t find any of them to be viable,” says Sean Madigan, spokesperson for the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

Just yesterday, I wrote about the homeless advocates still pushing to re-open the Franklin School as a shelter. Since the remaining homeless residents were booted out of the building, the Committee to Save Franklin Shelter and former residents filed two lawsuits against the city:  One in D.C. Superior Court, and the  other in federal court. The later suit alleges that the closure of the shelter is part of a larger trend of forcing the city’s homeless to the outer, poorest edges of Washington D.C.