Uncommon Schools Lottery Night
Rahsaan, a giggly four-year-old, comes bounding down the stairs of the auditorium of Excellence Charter School on the evening of the school’s annual lottery. Clutching an open bag of Mini Oreos in one hand and a Mini Oreo in the other, he chomps noisily on the cookie, the only audible noise in the auditorium save for Principal Jabali Sawicki’s reading of students’ names and the occasional murmur of a baby. He finds his mother in the third to last row and makes his way past stone-faced adults, one muttering quietly to herself “praise be to Jesus, praise be to Jesus,” to plop himself down in his mother’s lap. Just as he does so, he sputters up chocolate cookie crumbles and erupts with “Mama! They just said my first name!” She lets out a sigh, and, clutching him to her, she rocks her son back and forth, pausing before whispering to him, “Yes, sweetie, I know. I heard it too, baby.”
The annual lottery day for New York City charter schools fell on April 3 this year, meaning that five schools in the Uncommon Schools network held lotteries on a single night: Excellence Charter School, Kings Collegiate Charter School, Leadership Preparatory Charter School, Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, and Bedford Stuyvesant Collegiate Charter School, which will open to 81 students in August of this year. For the 405 spots available from these five schools, 814 students applied, leaving 409 of timely applicants on the waitlist for this year. (Those who submit their applications after April 1st automatically get put on the waiting list.) This year’s additional 409 waitlist spots pushed the total number of students waiting for spots at Uncommon’s Brooklyn schools to over 1,200. Originally, any eligible NYC public school student could apply to a NYC charter school lottery. Parents who attended information sessions for each of the Uncommon schools (in order to assure that each family knew the expectations and rigor of each school) could enter their child’s name into the lottery which, come lottery day, would be put on a card, the card tossed into a large tumbler and chosen, at random, during lottery night. Younger siblings of students currently enrolled in a school took preference, but otherwise, the lottery was random.
As of the 2008-2009 school year, due to legislation passed in 2007, all New York City charter schools must give preference to students residing in the Community School District (CSD) in which the charter school is located. In the case of Excellence, for the 75 spots available for the Kindergarten lottery, 69 applicants were given CSD 16 preference, and 3 were given sibling preference. This left three open spots for the general New York City public, for which there were 63 applicants.
This new amendment to the New York Charter Schools Act of 1998 escalated the anxiety on what has always been an already emotionally-charged evening. June Rogers, mother of Drew, lives twenty minutes away from Excellence by car – but those twenty minutes put her solidly outside of the CSD 16 boundary. As a former adult education specialist, a current director of a pre-school program, and the wife of a physics teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School, her day-to-day life revolves firmly around public education. After attending an Excellence open house, she brought her son, then barely three, for a visit. “He wanted to stay because he loved it so much, and he cried when we had to go,” she remembered, allowing herself a small smile minutes before the lottery began. Then her face changed. “I didn’t bring him tonight. I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
Drew currently attends a pre-school that Rogers describes as having “a terrible learning environment.” Having spoken with Sawicki and spent time at Excellence, the differences between Excellence and the boy’s other options for kindergarten became as clear as night and day: “You want to make sure your kid is in a place where there is a sense of partnership in the education process, between the parents, the teachers, and the administration,” she said. “This environment is an environment that lays a foundation for our boys. If he doesn’t get in here, I just don’t know what I’m going to do.”
If Drew had been of age last year, assuming the same number of sibling preference spots, he would have had a 40% chance of getting picked. This year, he had less than a 5% chance.
When Principal Sawicki read out the 40th name on the waitlist and Drew’s name still had not been called, Rogers got up and walked, slowly, shaking her head, to the door. But she still, somehow, couldn’t bring herself to leave. She stood at the back of the auditorium, Dean of Students Elizabeth Bliss’ arm around her shoulder. They waited together, and when Sawicki called Drew’s name as the 50th on the waiting list, Rogers smiled, took the pink slip for parents of waitlisted children, and made her way, resigned, up the stairs and out onto the street.
Though the new legislation did not affect all of Uncommon’s schools to such a dramatic degree, all entering classes will be comprised more fully of individuals living in their respective CSDs. For Leadership Preparatory Charter School, that means 72% of next year’s entering class, assuming that all those selected enroll in the next few weeks.
During the Q&A segment of one of the school’s information session in March, Principal Max Koltuv fielded questions from irate parents. “What if my child doesn’t live in the district and gets put on the waitlist?” asked one mother, the pitch in her voice escalating. “What am I supposed to do then?” Koltuv began calmly. “This is something beyond our control.” Then, as he continued, the pitch in his voice began escalating as well, rising to match hers: “Write to your congressmen! Get involved! We want to serve as many children as we can, we want to give every child the opportunity to get this type of education!”
The principals of the North Star Academy schools in Newark, New Jersey, don’t have to factor CSD preference into their lotteries, but they echo Koltuv’s concern. At the North Star lottery, held on April 2nd, parents clapped as, in his introduction, Managing Director Paul Bambrick-Santoyo said that more spots than ever were available for this year’s lottery. Yet, for fifth grade, only approximately 50% of applicants received spots. While there were 172 available seats for North Star this year, combining the lotteries for the two middle school campuses and the kindergarten, there are currently 1,124 students on the waiting list for all campuses, factoring in all those students from previous lotteries who have not yet received a spot in their appropriate grade.
“I hate the lottery,” muttered James Verrilli, North Star co-founder and current principal of the Downtown Middle School. As he stood in the back of the cafeteria and watched parents’ faces of anxiety turn to elation or dejection, he said, “For everyone who gets in, there are one or two who don’t. We need more schools.”
While Kindergarten applicants have only a vague idea what the lottery means, most applicants for the fifth grade classes are visibly in tune with their parents’ emotions come lottery night. In the brightly-lit cafeteria at North Star, with the school’s chant printed in a banner that wraps around the walls (“Where are you headed? To college! And will you succeed? Yes! And when you succeed, what will you do? Give back to others!”), a mother and daughter walked in and sat down at a table. The girl clutched her mother’s hand and rested her forehead on the cold table beneath. “Don’t get too excited!” warned the mother, though her own hand was clenched tightly.
Prior to the lottery, Margarita Price, mother of fourth-grader Cassie, marveled at the students’ work on the walls of the cafeteria. “I love it that they care here,” she gushed, referring to her visits to the school and her talks with Principal Verrilli. “There’s simply a different sense of college prep, a higher set of expectations.” She pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose and called over Cassie, who, wearing all pink and sporting a toothy smile, reeled off her favorite subjects without a breath (“Math, Reading, Art, Science, and Social Studies!”). As the girl left to help her little brother settle down, her mother revealed that Cassie is an epileptic. “In the regular public school, she’s Special Ed, but they don’t give her much attention,” she said, cracking her knuckles nervously. “At North Star, they’ll pay attention.”
Halfway through Bambrick-Santoyo calling out the names, as North Star’s Certified Public Accountant picked the cards out of the large bingo wheel, Margarita, front-row, pulled Cassie onto her lap and started to play with her daughter’s hair. As Bambrick-Santoyo’s names inched into the thirties, Cassie started fidgeting, but seemed to understand that she had to sit on her mother’s lap despite her discomfort. By the forties, Margarita started muttering “oh my God, oh my God” under her breath and clutched her daughter tightly, and when Bambrick-Santoyo boomed “Cassandra” as number fifty-five for Principal Michael Mann’s middle school, Margarita shrieked, squeezed her daughter, and burst into tears. When she finally let Cassie go, wiping away tears from under her glasses, the little girl shook out her body and skipped over to her friend, who was sitting next to her mother. Both mother and daughter were biting their nails. “I was so scared too!” said Cassie with a smile.
Encouragingly, she added, “I really hope they pick you out of the, the turn-y thing up there.”
Her friend nodded quickly and looked down at the linoleum floor, eyes closed, waiting.
 — By Sophie Brickman
Wordplay: Principal Max Koltuv closes the 30 million word gap
On a day in early March, a harbinger of spring in the city, Cartier Rodriguez, a second-grader at Leadership Preparatory Charter School, walks up the alleyway to his school’s entrance and sticks out a hand to greet his principal, Max Koltuv.
“Cartier, do you think it will be warm for the next few days?” asks Koltuv. The three-and-a-half footer nods enthusiastically before walking through the school’s entrance.
Koltuv turns to a visitor and explains, sotto voce, “Cartier wants to be a meteorologist when he grows up. He is a devotee of The Weather Channel. He can always tell me if a front is coming in.”
Koltuv then continues to shake the hand of each elementary-schooler who attends his school, offering tidbits of information as they walk by. He greets the two sets of identical twins in his kindergarten class (Lashana and Lashandra, and David and Daniel) by name. When first grader Justin Smith approaches, gasping back sobs and offering a tear-smudged hand, Koltuv gives him a variation on a hug (Justin clinging to the principal’s pant leg). He explains over the boy’s head, quietly, “Justin cries every morning leaving his mother… and then cries every afternoon because he has to leave school. Wait until the end of the day.” Just a few of the many issues Koltuv handles as principal: indistinguishable youngsters with barely distinguishable names, and chronic and indiscriminate separation anxiety.
When he smiles down at his charges, many wearing Dora the Explorer or Spiderman backpacks, his dimples make this youthful school leader seem even younger. A small diamond stud in his left ear conjures up Koltuv the adolescent, standing outside 129 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn after classes have ended at his alma mater, Saint Ann’s, a New York City private school known for its strength in the arts and its absence of grades. Its students learn for the love of learning. His business casual outfit hints at Koltuv the businessman, who he could have been at this point in life had he decided to continue climbing the ladder at Monitor, a grade-A consulting firm, or attended business school – a period Koltuv refers to as his “prior life” – instead of turning to teaching and becoming a part of the Building Excellent Schools fellowship.
Yet Koltuv has succeeded in melding these three selves – the exuberant child, the innovative educator, and the critical management consultant – to create a loving and efficiently-run school where students sing, dance, and giggle, all the while progressing in leaps and bounds on their reading and math tests. The reactions of visitors speak directly to the joy in the school: oftentimes, they have a hard time suppressing their own giggles as teachers make their students laugh.
Koltuv and Leadership Prep Chief Operating Officer Tara Marlovits, under the overseeing eye of Managing Director John King, built this school, which opened in August 2006, upon the guiding tenet of the Uncommon network: to prepare every student to succeed, and graduate from, the college of his choice. This goal is realized at the most basic level in the interactions between teacher and student, which is why Koltuv spends hours preparing for professional development sessions he runs throughout the year, and why he’ll make time in his packed day to meet with prospective teachers and show them around the school. After one such tour one day, in his brightly colored office, he spells out the single criterion of his target teacher: “We are looking for the kind of person who strives for excellence in everything he does. If he weren’t doing this, he’d be doing something else that requires excellence. Look, it’s simple. People don’t get here because they get assigned or because of inertia.”
The daily schedule can clash with the philosophies of outside educators: nearly 200 minutes of literacy instruction in a day that begins at 7:30 a.m. and does not end until 4 p.m., or 5 p.m. if a student needs extra tutoring. Koltuv, educated at Yale and known to go into classrooms in the morning to lead his five-, six-, and seven-year-olds in an abbreviated version of the Yale Fight Song (“Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow! Eli Yale!”), cites one number that keeps him on the hunt for mission-aligned teachers: “When our students arrive here, they are 30 million words behind students from high income households. Sometimes people will say, ‘No nap time? The kids are five!’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes, but they have 30 million words to learn!’”
In an American Educator essay in spring 2003, entitled “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3,” researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley reported their findings after observing, recording, and analyzing the interactions of children from 42 families of varying socio-economic status, from the age of 7-9 months until the children turned three. They found that an extrapolation of their observations in a one-hundred hour work week showed “the average child in the professional families with 215,000 words of language experience, the average child in a working-class family… with 125,000 words, and the average child in a welfare family with 62,000 words of language experience.” Furthermore, they noted that by the age of four, “the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback… but an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated 125,000 more instances of prohibitions than encouragements.” Hart and Risley concluded their findings by stressing the national risk that “makes intervention more urgent than ever.”
While the number “30 million” has its fair share of skeptics, and while Hart and Risley’s methodology may leave room for holes in data, most educators agree that a child’s exposure to words is typically severely lower in low-income households than in high-income households. Koltuv and his team took this data as a clarion call, and in eleven months, between July ’06 and June ’07, more than doubled the percent of students reading at grade level, from 39% at the beginning of the year to 93% by the end of the year (as measured by the Terra Nova).
To get these phenomenal results, the days are long, but the students remain rapt in attention as their teachers teach them phonics, reading comprehension, math, and ethics – because the teaching is top-notch, and because the teachers break each lesson up with multiple, quick activities. Sultana Noormuhammad’s first-grade class takes five seconds to stand up and stretch as she bids them to “get your sillies out!” Down the hall, Portia Jones turns on a CD player and has her kindergartners do a freeze-dance. Jones dances along. The walls are plastered with the work of happy children: Jasien’s letter to a zoologist, suggesting ways to save a panda (“1. You can give them a mother panda and she can take care of it. 2. You can bring it to a zoo and give it to a panda”), and Xavier Richardson’s illustration of a fish, a sad boy, and an unknown object, coupled with a short, and needed, explanation (“I like fish but fish died and I had to flush it”).
Last year, 100% of Koltuv’s staff returned, due in no small part to Koltuv’s management style of visionary-leader-cum-friend. George Davis, now a second-year kindergarten teacher, says, “Max is the best principal I could have ever imagined. Besides the obvious incredible leadership qualities, he’s simultaneously thoughtful and strategic in everything he says and thinks. Even in difficult conversations where he has to call me out on something, he always does it in a constructive way. It’s more than obvious that he loves the school, the kids, and the parents. This place is really his baby.” Celestina De La Garza, Davis’ co-teacher, agrees, saying, “I feel like I can go find him in his office to talk about anything, professional or otherwise.”
Koltuv’s office, converted from a large classroom, is open to students, teachers, families, and administrators alike, and as it sits on the main hallway of the school, visitors breeze in and out throughout the day. Those over five-feet-tall can peer in the door’s window and catch Koltuv’s eye before coming in. A colorful rug depicting the world decorates the floor, and on a metal filing cabinet, someone has rearranged some of the magnetic poetry to read “We want some cheese cake.” (Perhaps written by Koltuv himself, wistfully. For lunch, he whips his tie around his neck and chows down on hummus, tabouli, and wheat crackers which mimic drywall in texture. Koltuv doesn’t just eat healthily. Despite growing up in Brooklyn, he also loves the outdoors, and led Outward Bound trips for three years. He can hike, canoe, and camp, and he and his wife, Eve, travel to Minnesota every Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to spend time dog-sledding. Not your average urban principal.)
After school, students whose parents are late to pick them up sit in the office reading their “Reading Mastery” books, or choose from the book shelf in front of their principal’s desk. John King stops by occasionally to work alongside Koltuv, and Marlovits will pop in with a quick organizational question before heading back to her own office, which overlooks the New York skyline, the Empire State Building commanding midtown Manhattan. The two of them discuss all issues, major and minor alike, down to whether or not Koltuv needs to wear a tie to an upcoming lottery info session. Marlovits says “Yes,” and Koltuv grudgingly agrees, a tinge of a whine in his voice. (Note: Koltuv arrives at the info session five days later sans tie.)
Brendalyn King (no relation to John), the school’s Office Manager, has whittled down the number of times she needs to bother Koltuv: “After three years of knowing Max, I know his moods, I know who he wants to talk to and doesn’t, I know which mail he wants to see and doesn’t, I even know the answer to my questions before I ask them.” Koltuv’s sense of urgency has rubbed off on King, who knows the name of every child in the school, can recognize parents over the phone, speaks with the voice of a seasoned educator, and hopes to start her own charter school in the upcoming years: “People say, ‘You’re only 23,’ and I say ‘We don’t have time to be sitting around and waiting!’”
Leadership Prep asks that its teachers, parents, and students sign an accountability contract before becoming involved with the school. This act cannot be enforced legally, yet 100% of all parties read the document and sign it. Each teacher agrees to various levels of professional and emotional commitment, and each parent agrees to provide a quiet space for her student to study, and to check the child’s homework each night. In turn, each student agrees to “complete all my homework in a top-quality manner.” Prospective parents are not given an application unless they attend a lottery information session, during which Koltuv and Marlovits walk attendees through a PowerPoint emphasizing the high expectations the school has for its families and students. Yet the joyful culture of the school makes the hard work of students, teachers, families, and administrators possible. Koltuv believes that, at least initially, culture trumps instruction: “Even if you have a ten out of ten in instruction, but a seven out of ten in culture, you’ll miss out.”
At a rare break during his day, Koltuv takes a few moments to muse about the future of his students, the oldest of whom won’t enter college until 2020. He touches upon the recent phenomenon of Ivy-League colleges doing away with high tuitions, partially or in their entirety. “We watch that really closely here,” says Koltuv, “because what it really says is that if we can create hundreds and hundreds of students across our networks fully prepared to do the work at those institutions, there will be nothing to prevent them from competing equally against any other candidate.”
When Koltuv’s students enroll in top universities, he’ll be able to write a letter, not to a zoologist, but to researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, to let them know that it’s time to collect new data.
— By Sophie Brickman
One Percent Solution: Homework
The school day for the four and-five-year-olds at North Star Elementary runs longer than the average American workday. The students arrive at school by 7:30 a.m., and the buses do not arrive to pick them up until 4 p.m. In addition, the kindergarteners take home an hour of homework each night.
For students who need, on average, ten hours of sleep, these youngsters get less than two hours of free time each night, factoring in time spent commuting and a half hour for dinner. But Principal Julie Jackson believes that engaging homework, properly assigned and graded, is one of the keys to long term academic success. She is joined by the other leaders at Uncommon Schools in her belief.
Last November, New York City Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr., upset that he could no longer spend time with his own daughters due to their homework burden, urged the city to adopt a “ten-minute rule” (ten minutes of homework per grade level). The chatter about homework built in op-eds and online education forums.
When asked about this, Principal Julie Trott of Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, which ranked number one out of the 1,200 public schools graded by the New York City Department of Education last year, echoed the sentiment of all Uncommon schools: “We’re trying to have students improve one-and-a-half or two grades per year. It’s impossible for this to happen in the school day.”
The homework completion rate for all Uncommon schools hovers around 95% every day, few parents complain, and the students consistently outperform their district counterparts – in many cases they outperform students from the more privileged districts that have made nightly homework anathema.
How do Uncommon Schools make homework effective?
“Does assigning fifty math problems accomplish any more than assigning five?” ask authors Sarah Bennet and Nancy Kalish rhetorically in their book, The Case Against Homework. All Uncommon principals answer, resoundingly, “No!”
Jabali Sawicki, Principal at Excellence Charter School (where homework is called “life’s work”) remembers his own days as a student: “Homework was traditionally drudgery – rote memorization, filling in the blanks. It was practice to some degree, but it was essentially mindless. We challenge our teachers to think about life’s work as being just as enriching as the lessons are during the day. And the result is that students like to learn, they like to read, they like to be engaging in content, they like to do things related to scholarship. Homework extends this learning beyond the classroom.”
While it may be hard to imagine a five-year-old returning home from a full day eager to do homework, the students are chipper and joyful in the morning (when they complete even more work during breakfast, called “bright work”). They appear neither exhausted nor bored, and eagerly walk up the stairs to start class.
- Reasonable, age-appropriate amounts
When structuring Kings Collegiate Charter School, Brett Peiser, Managing Director of the Collegiate Network, referred to Harris Cooper’s The Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents. Cooper notes that the effect of homework can be positive, especially on middle and high-schoolers. Teachers of upper elementary students can expect the average student completing homework to outscore approximately 52% of students not doing homework. This increases to 60% for junior high school students, and 69% for high school students.
Nonetheless, Cooper warns against misunderstanding these statistics. Not only are shorter, more frequent assignments more beneficial than longer, more sporadic ones, but also, at a certain point, assigning homework can have a negative effect on the student’s ability to learn and retain information. For example, for high school students, there is a positive correlation between homework time and achievement starting after the first hour of homework, but a negative correlation after two hours. Similarly for middle school students.
As a result, Peiser and Lauren Harris, the school’s co-director managing instruction, decided to target the one-and-a-half hour mark for their incoming fifth graders, assigning approximately 20 minutes of homework per class, every night (including over holidays). The homework completion rate is constantly over 90%, and Kings is slated to follow in the steps of its sister schools, whose students progress in leaps and bounds over the school year.
- Family supported elementary homework; Independent middle and high school homework
Especially in the younger grades, schools call upon parents to get on board the homework train. Jackson admits that one hour of homework can seem like a lot for kindergarteners, but notes that at least twenty minutes of that homework consists of a parent reading to her child, which doesn’t seem like “homework,” in the traditional sense at all. “It’s simply essential that you read to your child,” says Jackson.
Sawicki agrees: “In order for us to succeed in getting all of our scholars to college, parents need to participate in this process. This interaction allows parents to be more prepared for intervention at home, if it’s necessary, and it gives the students the support they need at this critical stage in learning.”
For the younger grades, schools send parents homework sheets for each child on Mondays, mapping out the assignments for the rest of the week. Parents must indicate that each night’s homework has been completed with a signature. If they do not, they’ll get a call, and if this happens repeatedly, they’ll be asked to come into school for a meeting. But this situation rarely occurs, as schools fully prep all parents at information sessions before application time about high homework expectations.
As students get older, school-required parent involvement decreases, as it becomes important for each student to gain autonomy. Nonetheless, encouraging the parents of young children to make their homes conducive to studying follows into the older grades, which is invaluable to a child’s ability to learn.
- Homework helps to reinforce the school culture and mission, and vice versa
The mission of the schools in the Uncommon network is to prepare each student to enroll and succeed in the college of his choice. From naming classrooms after colleges, to incorporating college cheers at community meetings, to visiting colleges, Uncommon students find themselves steeped in the language of college from the day that they enroll. As such, students know that homework not only prepares them for their future, but provides a preview of the work that lies ahead.
Harris says she outlines these expectations clearly to her students: “You’re going to have a ton of homework in college, I tell them. You’ll need to be able to prioritize at home both the work you need to complete for school, and the work you need to complete for life. Our homework will prepare you for this.”
- Teachers use homework as a diagnostic tool to determine each student’s individual needs
Teachers check homework for completion and accuracy. While the jury is still out as to whether the presence or absence of feedback influences the value of homework, certain studies, like those cited by the authors of Classroom Instruction that Works, find homework assigned but returned without comments to be far less effective than homework returned with written comments.
Regardless of the value of feedback in and of itself, researchers and educators agree that homework can, and should, serve as a diagnostic tool. After carefully grading assignments, if Uncommon teachers find that certain students needs extra help, they require that the students attend after school tutoring. Those students who do not complete their homework similarly attend “Homework Center.”
“Books, afterschool tutoring, and homework,” Peiser lists off. “Those are some of the biggest signals that families use to make sure that a school is doing its job.” Through an effective grading system that follows up on student progress, the school can assure parents that not only is it doing its job, but it’s doing its job well.
- Schools celebrate students’ homework achievement
At Leadership Prep, classes with consistently high homework completion rates receive pizza parties. At Excellence, a poster charting each class’ homework completion rate hangs outside of the cafeteria, a Candy Land-type board with spaces for prizes. These built-in homework incentives help to boost a student’s passion for outside learning.
But after all of these arguments – the fact that, if assigned and graded correctly, students will enjoy and benefit from doing their homework, it engages parents at a critical stage in students’ learning, it reinforces each school’s mission, and, at the end of the day, it is one element out of many that pushes Uncommon students over the top to consistently outperform their district counterparts – what about the argument that kids need free time to sit around, relax, play, and just be kids?
Sawicki has an answer: “Once upon a time, we were competing against things that were actually enriching. Now, between the hours of 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., we’re competing against TV and video games. It’s better that during those hours our scholars are reading, learning, and enriching themselves.”
— By Sophie Brickman
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