Letter to Evan Rudall, New CEO, from Uncommon Founder Norman Atkins

DEAR EVAN—

LAST WEEK, as you know, I changed jobs.  As of July 1, I began work at UKA – Uncommon Knowledge and Achievement – representing an extraordinary collaboration between three revolutionary nonprofit charter organizations, our Uncommon Schools along with KIPP and Achievement First.  As you know, UKA is launching a new teacher training initiative called Teacher U, in partnership with Hunter College.  It is so important to help figure out how to train the next generation of teachers to supply the next generation of schools, but it’s also going to be incredibly challenging work.  You also know I like to start new things, and so this should be fun for me.  I am sorry it has taken me so long to put these thoughts down in an e-mail to you, but I’ve struggled about how to best to share my love, pride, and tentative reflections with someone who has taught me more than I can possibly express about how to improve myself every day. 

HELP US GO FROM GREAT TO GREATER.

Evan Rudall! You are a legendary force inside the charter school movement, a founder and co-leader of the world-famous Roxbury Prep, the COO of Uncommon Schools over the past three years and the primary architect of our organization’s success.  You have been my friend and partner in this work all the way through, and I am so gratified that you are taking over as the Chief Executive Officer.  Thank you for stepping up and pledging to take a great organization and make it far greater. 

You will lead the organization going into this fall with 10 schools serving 2,000 students.  In five years time, we’ll be three times as many schools and four times as many students.   A few years beyond that, Uncommon Schools will encompass 30-plus schools in Newark, Brooklyn, and Upstate New York serving more than 10,000 low-income children. And by serving, we mean preparing all of them academically to go to and succeed in four-year colleges and to generate in them the character strengths to pursue happiness throughout their lives. 

This growth is based on a plan that you developed in connection with a Bain consulting team this spring.  Nobody I know is better positioned than you to lead us toward those ambitious goals while ensuring excellence in everything we do.  Happy to continue to be a part of Uncommon Schools and to help you and our spectacular team moving forward, I become the Chair of the Board of our organization.  As I myself make this exciting transition, please permit me to share a few reflections about how far we’ve come as an organization in the past year and the past few years.  If you are dying to cut to the charts and bullet points to showcase our most recent results, please click here.  Otherwise, permit me an extra moment of corniness in beginning with a historical digression in the spirit of our national holiday today.  My theme is:

UNCOMMON SCHOOLS, FREEDOM’S WORK.

THE ORIGINS OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP AND THE FIRST CHARTER SCHOOL.

AS THE FIREWORKS BURST IN THE SKY TONIGHT, we have so many American symbolic words to draw upon.  There’s Jefferson at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia 232 years back, issuing forth not just a bill of particulars against George III, but a vaulting declaration that we are all “equal, endowed…with inalienable rights….life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  There’s  Lincoln, four score and seven years later at Gettysburg, lifting our nation onto the shoulders of its war dead, committed to the “unfinished work….a new birth of freedom…a government of the people, by the people, for the people.”  And then a century later, there’s King behind bars in Birmingham, shaking the patience out of his fellow clergymen, calling us to urgency because “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

For those of us gathered around the cause of education reform, for those of us dedicated to the urgent mission of creating “uncommon schools,” for those of us committed to the unfinished work of closing the achievement gap, we should find special resonance not in words, but in the very letters of freedom.  That is to say, we – more than others – know that learning the alphabet, breaking the code, and acquiring reading mastery hold the keys to the kingdom of liberty.  We are taught this most powerfully, most famously, by our nation’s great abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  Douglass knew first-hand that the achievement gap is neither a genetic condition nor a certainty of fate.  Rather, he saw that it emanated from bad faith on the part of his countrymen in failing to fulfill the Jeffersonian promise and, worse, a willful and systematic oppression predicated upon the realization that knowledge is power, and power is freedom.   In other words, the owners of human chattel -- and the silent majority who supported or tolerated them, and later the architects of Jim Crow and another century of do-nothing bystanders -- perpetrated and perpetuated the achievement gap precisely to maintain slavery and unequal society. 

Douglass learned his letters and came to reading at the age of 12, six grade levels behind, but learned quickly -- as children will when given the opportunity.   By the time he was the age of today’s high school juniors or seniors, recognizing the shackles of illiteracy holding back those around him and the failure of the public sector to provide equitable resources to remediate this injustice, he created one of our nation’s very first charter schools.  He called it the Sabbath School because classes took place when slaves came out of the fields on Sunday, although sometimes he taught by candlelight at night.  He began with the A-B-Cs, and then had his students charge through passages from the Bible, even while privately questioning how a rights-endowing Creator could permit the institution of slavery.   In reading and education, Douglass first frees his mind to engage the philosophical questions, then frees his will to become the master of his own destiny, and then literally frees his body, following the North Star to freedom.  He reports that at least another one of his students graduated by such means as well.

The schools where our Newark students learn to read and lead – North Star Academy – are named after Douglass’s abolitionist monthly, The North Star.  Our Rochester Prep students are closing the achievement gap on hallowed ground, the very place where Douglass brought others to freedom a century and a half ago on the Underground Railroad.  In 11 years since the opening of North Star, and in the past five years of the development of our organization, Uncommon Schools has become a beautiful community of like-minded and ferociously dedicated souls, a group working ceaselessly to help our country, our cities, and our children make good on the promise of Jefferson, Lincoln, King, and Douglass. 

A GAP-CLOSING YEAR.

I AM SO PROUD OF WHAT WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED together with the most impressive and inspiring group of individuals.  We are organizationally in debt, and I am personally grateful, to all of the teachers, leaders, deans, home office teammates, school staff members, and school and Uncommon trustees who have shaped the early history of our organization.  When we’re done, when you’ve led us through the next decade, may Horace Mann’s common school be a footnote to history about the meaning of uncommon schools! 

Evan, in 2007-08, we’ve had an uncommonly good year.  You can read about the results from our New York schools by clicking here. By the numbers, our schools are among the very best in the districts in which they operate and among the very best value-added schools in the state.  More importantly, based on early work by those in the know, Uncommon Schools is showing itself to be one of the very highest performing networks of schools in the country.   The New Jersey results should be coming in the fall, as will norm-referenced test results for Leadership Prep.  I am confident that we’re making progress across the board.

I know it’s early.  I know we’re small.  I worry that the bar is too low, and that it may be even lower than in years past.  But still:  the numbers raise the curtain on a basic truth that you see with your plain eyes and feel with your heart when you visit Williamsburg Collegiate, Excellence Charter School, Rochester Prep, Kings Collegiate, Leadership Prep and all of the North Star Academy campuses. Our students are learning, growing, closing the gap, reaching for greatness, experiencing joy.  For all of this, everyone on our team should feel justifiably proud.  At the same time, let’s admit that the results are necessary, but ultimately insufficient to propel our beautiful students through to college.  Please keep raising expectations.  Make sure more of our students move, over time, from proficient to advanced, from college matriculants to college graduates, from those who skate by to those who persevere against inevitable challenges.   Embrace the accountability and welcome annual assessments in all subjects, but beware of those in the bureaucracy who may want to lower standards for children in order to make the adults look good.

Here are some additional highlights:

BROOKLYN:  Thanks largely to your leadership, SUNY recently approved four Uncommon charters to open what will amount to four additional K-8 schools – three more “Leadership Prep” schools in Brooklyn and an Excellence Girls School in Brooklyn, too.  And we now have additional applications in front of SUNY for what will be three more Collegiate schools.  If we grow the number of schools permitted under all of these charters, we will have 20 schools in Central Brooklyn. 

NEWARK:  As you well know, North Star Academy will have four campuses – two middle schools, a high school, and an elementary school serving about 700 students this fall.  These schools will be joined in time by three other campuses leading to seven schools serving as many as 2,500 students. 

TRUE NORTH:  The True North network will expand with the opening of True North Troy Prep in the fall of 2009, and with it will spread the training developed partly at the True North schools in the form of the Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices.

BOSTON:  We gained two associate members this past year – Boston Collegiate, the school founded by Brett Peiser, and Roxbury Prep, the school founded by you and John King.  These schools are a part of our community, participate in our professional development activities and inform our work.  They both had great years. 

HOME TEAM:  You know this already because you largely assembled, and have been managing them, but you really are the captain of the Dream Team of the charter school movement.  Your leadership has been critically important in bringing and keeping these leaders together, and in causing them to be maximally effective at designing, building, and supporting A+ schools. 

WE BELIEVE, WE ACT.  WE CHANGE OURSELVES, EACH OTHER, AND HISTORY.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, the quintessentially American philosopher who had faith in learning because he believed that we are always full of potential change, would have liked Uncommon Schools, would have liked our teammates and our students, who are always in a state of continuous improvement.  Emerson also described our country’s early attempts at quasi-universal education in a way that anticipates the importance of public investment, the mission of equal educational opportunity, and the autonomy and choice at the core of the charter school movement.  He described educating poor children on the public dime as “the most radical of revolutions.”  Emerson is amazed:

                            that the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn

                            when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put 

                            his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not

                            as you will, but as I will: not alone in the elements, but, by further provision,

                            in the languages, in sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The child

                            shall be taken up by the State, and taught, at the public cost, the rudiments

                            of knowledge, and, at last, the ripest results of art and science.

I have been amazed, too, over the past decade that “the State” has finally, a century and a half after Emerson, shared public dollars with its citizens to come together to create new schools on behalf of low-income boys and girls alike, and to say – in essence – “You shall educate us, not as you [the State] will, but as I [the citizens] will.“  This is an awesome responsibility and opportunity that should not be under-estimated.  We are guided by our beliefs. 

We believe that education has the power to be the great equalizer.  We believe in the responsibility of the public to provide the equal educational opportunity too often denied our forebears.  We believe we are the public who bears that responsibility.  We believe that we exercise this responsibility not by building schools that are marginally better than the State schools, but by being attentive to excellence in every detail.  We believe these schools must be small enough so that they are truly communal enterprises bathed in a culture of joy and high expectations.  But we also believe we need to grow these schools fast enough so that we can help serve the many thousands of students who urgently need the educational justice that has been denied them too long. 

We believe we must knit these schools together in an “uncommon” network in order that they will be maximally effective, learn from each other, and help lead the way toward even broader public reform.  We believe such reform begins when adults organize a better and more efficient world where all children can learn and achieve.  We know we are a part of something way bigger than our classrooms, our schools, our organization.  And while we take immense pride in taking part in the civil rights movement of our time, we believe that great and effective work means we have to bear down on the specifics of the 100 one-percent solutions right in front of us.   So, at the end of the day, we convert all of these beliefs into concrete daily actions that help individual children achieve at the highest level and grow into the great and good people they are meant to be.  In acting, we believe we are involved in the work of freedom.   And make no mistake, freedom is work.  In Langston Hughes’ fierce metaphor, we put our shoulders into “freedom’s plow.” 

Of course our students act on this every day.  They go to school for longer hours, do more homework, and have more expected of them than their peers everywhere else.  We urge them on in this, love them with all our hearts so that they will want to work incredibly hard to close an achievement gap not of their making, not of their families’ making.  They are strong, and growing stronger.  Our theory of change is that if we do right by the children who have been entrusted to our care and guidance, then when they grow up, they will – in the best tradition of Frederick Douglass – teach others, build more schools, remake the world, and change history. 

Cheers! 

Uncommon New York Schools Close Achievement Gap in 2008

On the 2008 New York Math and English/Language Arts exams, Uncommon Schools’ 480 students, grades three through seven – 99% of whom are Black and Latino – collectively closed the “achievement gap,” out-performing the state’s White students.Click here to see our results.

Across four schools, 96% of Uncommon’s Black and Latino students, grades 3-8, scored advanced or proficient on the Math exam, besting the overall state average by 15 percentage points and the white student average by 8 percentage points. On the ELA exam, 80% of Uncommon’s Black and Latino students scored advanced or proficient on the ELA exam, topping the state average by 11 points and the New York State White students by one percentage point.The release of the 2008 New York State Math and English Language Arts exam results highlights the exceptional performance of Uncommon's four campuses, three in Brooklyn and one in Rochester.

• Excellence Charter School in Brooklyn, an all‐boys school where 98% of the student body is African‐American, was one of the state’s highest performers. 100% of the 3rd and 4th grade students scored advanced or proficient on the 2008 New York State Math exam, with 2/3 of its 4th graders scoring “advanced.” Meanwhile, 97% of the 4th graders and 90% of the 3rd graders scored proficient or advanced proficient on the ELA test. Whereas girls across New York State outscored boys by 6‐7% on the 3rd and 4th grade ELA tests last year, Excellence’s all‐male scholars are closing the gender gap, too.

• Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, where 81% of the student body is low income, rated the number one public school in New York City according to this year’s NYC Department of Education progress reports. 100% of its 7th graders scored advanced or proficient on the 2008 New York State Math exam, compared to 79% statewide and 69% across New York City. This same cohort posted a 92% rate of advanced or proficient performance on the 2008 New York State 7th grade ELA exam.

• At True North Rochester Preparatory Charter School in Rochester, where 79% of the student body is low‐income, 98% of 6th graders scored advanced or proficient on the 2008 New York State Math exam, compared to 79% statewide and 56% across Rochester district schools. These results mark Rochester Prep as the top performing public school in Monroe County (which includes Rochester and surrounding suburbs) on that exam, even while its students are eight to ten times more likely to live in poverty than students in top performing suburban schools.

• At Kings Collegiate Charter School in Brownsville/East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, in its very first year of operation, 91% of 5th graders scored advanced or proficient on the 2008 New York State Math exam, compared to 83% statewide and 79% across New York City.

Uncommon’s other New York City charter school, Leadership Prep, which has students in grades K‐2, will be tested for the first time in 2009. The school’s initial reading assessments and national tests show very strong student achievement gains. In August 2008, Bedford Stuyvesant Collegiate, the newest member of the Collegiate network, will open its doors to 81 fifth graders.

“At a time when we are preparing to open and grow more schools in New York City and upstate New York, these results demonstrate that our students can achieve at the same level as their more affluent peers,” said Norman Atkins, CEO of Uncommon Schools. “By closing the achievement gap between black and white, rich and poor, our students are changing our cities and fulfilling the promise of our nation."

Mr. V's North Star: Navigating Scholars Straight to College

“When our predecessors were sitting at lunch counters and going to jail, they couldn’t say ‘Excuse me, it’s five o’clock, I have to get home.’”

North Star Middle School Principal Jamey Verrilli, known as “Mr. V” to his students and colleagues, pauses for a moment before continuing his impromptu speech for one of the many groups of visitors to come through North Star Academy each week.

“We’re fighting a modern civil rights crusade. So our staff and teachers, they commit.”

They commit, yes – Verrilli certainly has longer than any other, having been the principal for 11 years and a teacher for two decades. But unlike the tumultuous Civil Rights movement of the Sixties, Verrilli, his team of crusaders, and their bright, young students comprise a movement, on a day-to-day basis, of learning and laughter.

One day this spring, Verrilli’s part in the cause begins when he leaves his glass-walled office which looks out onto the cafeteria (“I live in a fishbowl”) and strides upstairs, clinking and jangling each step thanks to his mass of keys hooked onto a carabineer on his belt loop.

He reaches the classroom he’s covering for an absent science teacher and, after a look around the room, begins. He regularly teaches History and is winging this class, but watching him ask his students rapid-fire questions, you’d hardly notice. (Perhaps it goes back to his college days at Colby College, where he did a lot of acting – though he humbly admits that in Shakespeare plays, he was “always one of the lords or somebody, never anyone big.”) It seems second nature for him to make classes interdisciplinary and interactive. It’s not just about Science.

As his students complete a worksheet on the platypus, he asks them, “Does anyone know what they found out about the platypus recently? It was just in the news.” After a few guesses, including one suggestion that “they found the trait of cuteness in its DNA” – which elicits a smile from Verrilli – he guides them towards the correct answer: the platypus has the DNA of a bird and of a mammal.  

He shoots out another question: “What is the word that describes an animal that comes out twice a day, like the platypus?”

“Octurnal?” one student suggests.

“No, that would mean it only came out at eight,” Verrilli replies quickly, and the student giggles at his own mistake before landing on the correct answer, diurnal.

Verrilli wraps up that class and, after a quick meeting with a parent about a student’s discipline issue, he notices that he has a free six minutes before he’s scheduled to give a tour. Off he goes to observe science teacher Clarence McNeil (who affectionately deems Verrilli and his energy “inhuman”) for five minutes (it takes him approximately thirty seconds to walk up the stairs to McNeil’s classroom and back again) before returning to greet his guests. He lives and breathes the Uncommon mantra that “every minute counts.”

Watching Verrilli now, it would appear that he wanted to be an educator from birth. Instead, he readily admits that “until sophomore year of college, I never did anything to make the world a better place.” That changed after he joined “Big Brothers Big Sisters” and became a mentor to a boy who lived in Waterville, Maine. Enticed by the slogan of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, “ruined for life,” he continued to contemplate his next move as he and his friends rode their bicycles to California after graduation.  He considered himself “a religious radical,” which made him hesitant to join the Jesuits, but one night while on an Indian reservation, he met a lady who was working for AmeriCorps. After talking to him, she told him, candidly, “Honey, you want to do this kind of work, you’re gonna need religion.”

With that, he applied to the Jesuit Volunteers and worked in the Bronx as a “community organizer,” subsisting on less than $150 a month as he set up recreational programs for children, organized community work, and immersed himself in inner-city life. After he completed his term, he moved to Newark and taught for the Project Link Educational Center, an alternative school with $800 per year tuition. After four years, he moved to Rhode Island to receive his Masters in teaching from Brown University.

In 1996, then Governor Christine Whitman signed the twentieth charter law in America, the Charter School Program Act, which allowed 135 charter schools in the state of New Jersey. When Verrilli returned to Newark, he knew this was his opportunity to start a school like Link, but without even the nominal fee. He called Joe Walsh, a board member at Link, who suggested Verrilli contact a man named Norman Atkins. The moment he hung up the phone, it rang again. Atkins was on the other line. Kismet!

The two went out for a four-hour lunch to discuss their ideas about education, and that meal marked the birth of a new charter school, which they decided to call “North Star.” The school has since gone on to become one of the most successful schools in New Jersey, sending 100% of its graduates to college every year and posting exceptional results on state exams at both the middle school and high school levels. It’s no surprise that more than two thousand students fill the waiting list for the North Star Network, which now encompasses four schools (one elementary, two middle, and a high school).

North Star high school is the only high school in the Uncommon network, and thus the only school by which Uncommon’s mission – to prepare every student to enter, succeed in, and graduate from college – can be vetted. Adam Kendis, the school’s College Alumni Coordinator, is confident that 90% of North Star’s inaugural class will graduate from college, an immense accomplishment. 

One of these graduates, Edaine Murray, graduated from Mt. Holyoke last month. (Verrilli saw her graduate not only from high school, where he spoke, but also traveled to South Hadley, Massachusetts, to see her graduate from college.) She’s starting LSAT classes this summer, has four job offers on the table, and is planning to matriculate at law school in 2009. When asked what made North Star so exciting, she refers, without a beat, to her teachers, and references Verrilli, who taught her almost ten years earlier. “If we were studying Napoleon, he’d dress up as Napoleon, and we wouldn’t be allowed to call him Mr. V. He’d say, ‘Who’s that?’ ”

As his classes graduate and go off to college, year after year, Verrilli stays in his fishbowl office at his high-performing school, and continues to help his students get on the path to college. Though he has thoughts of devoting more time to teacher training projects, he happily continues to dress up as the explorers of America during his middle school History class, as he has for every one of his previous ten years in the school.

In his civil rights movement, he knows that this is just the kind of small gesture that makes or breaks his students’ futures.

 
— By Sophie Brickman