Satellite image of True North Rochester Prep and the surrounding area

EXCELLENCE IN THE

NY TIMES MAGAZINE

The New York Times magazine cover story on March 2nd, "Teaching Boys and Girls Separately," featured Excellence Charter School Principal Jabali Sawicki and highlighted key elements of the school's approach to educating elementary school boys.

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Big Mann on North Campus: Principal Mike Mann and NSA Middle School

Lean, clean-shaven, his jet-black hair slightly damp, Michael Mann strides purposefully around the North Star North Campus cafeteria as his students eat breakfast and quietly complete their morning work. In his crisp white shirt, thin tie and gray slacks, he cuts a serious figure. Had he become the intelligence official that the State Department recruited him to be, he’d be the guy with the clipboard, commanding meetings at a linoleum-floored-and-fluorescent-lit building in Foggy Bottom.  Instead, he’s calling a couple of hundred middle schoolers together for a community circle.

Mann’s path to this moment has been a winding one, to say the least. After completing his undergraduate degree at Harvard College, he went to the State Department, which he instantly deemed “boring and very backwards.” Though offered a spot, he decided not to matriculate at Harvard Law School and, instead, traveled to Kunming, China, where he taught English. He joined Teach For America in 1993, teaching for three years in Washington in D.C., where he was routinely his school’s teacher of the year. Following that, he taught for two years at Ted Sizer’s charter school in Massachusetts and rode his motorcycle to classes back at Harvard for an M.Ed.  Upon earning his degree, he taught for seven years at North Star Downtown, where he became a legendary teacher and soccer coach. And finally, he ended up right where he should be: in an area which he describes matter-of-factly as “the Tony Soprano part of Newark until they built I-280,” where he runs a phenomenally high-performing middle school.

He leads his fifth, sixth, and seventh-graders into the large gym next to the cafeteria, in a building North Star shares with a parochial school (“the priests love our program and think this is what Catholic education used to be,” says Mann), and begins to read the school a story about Christina Amalita, a girl who used “strong words.” He loves being around children, and knows which little gestures will reach them. Somewhere amidst a day that starts before seven and does not end until after the sun has set, he has spent an hour writing the story...

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1% solution: Words of Inspiration

“C-O-double L-E-G-E!”

“College is no fantasy!”

“C-O-double L-E-G-E!”

“For me it will be a reality!”

Nelson Ferrer, Fitness instructor at Excellence Charter School, and an auditorium of elementary school boys collaborate to bring jumping and fist pumps to the age old choral practice of call-and-response at an all-school meeting in Bedford-Stuyvesant. On this particular Friday, Ferrer introduces a new chant to the community. Never certain which will stick with his charges, he tries out different rhyming messages throughout the year, gauging the boys’ response. His frenetic energy pops off the stage and into the green-sweater-and-tie-clad audience of the ten-and-under crowd, which rises and belts out its part in unison, following Ferrer’s cues to a T.

In the Uncommon Schools network, similar chants, phrases, and poems echo off, and are written on, the walls of the schools. In James Verrilli’s history class at North Star Academy, his eighth graders transition from a silent “Do Now” to Mr. V’s instruction by standing up and belting out, in perfect unison, a Frederick Douglass quote: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” At the start of Sultana Noormuhammad’s first grade class at Leadership Prep, students punctuate each phrase with a clap as they sing:

“This is the way (hey!),

We start our day (hey!),

We get the knowledge (hey!),

To go to college (hey!),

But don’t stop there (hey!),

Go anywhere (hey!),

This is the way (hey!),

We start our day (yeeee-ah!).”

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