It is the
beginning of spring and the end of long and brutal winter. The mind of everyone
in a high school, teacher's and student's alike, drifts toward pleasanter
times, and, inevitably, toward graduation. City on a Hill's graduation is held
in the majestic Faneuil Hall, but despite the nice weather and the suitable pageantry,
most look toward to Graduation for representing the too often unattained culmination of American achievement and democratic ideals.
There is little controversy in the goal of a high school graduation.
Similarly,
my high school graduation speech was not very controversial. It told that clichéd
story of the old man, walking at dawn along an expansive section of low-tide
shoreline, tossing doomed and desiccated starfish into the surf. An observer
calls out that the man’s work is futile; he cannot possibly save all the
starfish.
“You’re wasting
your time,” he says. “There’s miles of shore, and the tide will roll in before
lunch time. Why are you doing this if it won’t make a difference for all of
them?”
“Well,”
the old man said, hucking another starfish into the sea. “I made a difference for
that one.”
My job as
a tutor, when I explain it to friends, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors,
fellow-travelers of the MBTA, and anyone else foolish enough to ask me “...and
what do you do?” is also not controversial: I teach minority, low-income inner-city
students skills in math and English in order to get them ready for college.
There are very few people on any point of the political spectrum opposed to
this description of my day-to-day work. Yet charter schools remain a flashpoint
of debate for various reasons. In the complex political world of urban
education and education reform, I am transformed from an educator into an
activist by the very nature of my employment.
In my
desire to teach math and English skills to low-income minority students, I did
not court controversy. I simply felt it my duty to help those most excluded
from the so-called American meritocracy achieve the skills they need in order
to join the ranks of decision-makers. My day-to-day work is apolitical – few
ideologies are opposed to Shakespeare and fewer still to the quadratic
equation. Yet our school’s overall mission is based on premises both appealing
and appalling to various political orientations. At City on a Hill, we
emphasize the importance of hard work and we stress decorum and civility.
However, we also acknowledge structural biases and vestigial racism. Most
importantly, we maintain high standards: our students dress conservatively,
interject appropriately, question probingly, debate academically, compete
ferociously and achieve competitively.
Anyone
reading this blog
is likely familiar with the myriad of arguments against charter schools and the
controversy they can create. The most persuasive argument against charter
schools I have yet found is the fear that we are neither replicable nor sustainable.
City on a Hill boasts an impressive 4:1 student to faculty ratio and
consistently manages to recruit an all-star roster of absurdly dedicated young educators.
It does not seem imminently likely that America’s education system can be
reformed in such a way that every low-income urban high school student can have
access to a system like ours. To me, this is not an argument against charter
schools. This is an argument against the status quo, and what it means that our
most talented young educators are not welcome in our traditional public school
system. If more schools were like City on a Hill, I have no doubt that more and
more graduates from our most prestigious universities would invest time in
closing the achievement gap.
The tide is rolling in. For
years, we were forced to deny more and more middle-schoolers a spot at City on
a Hill. The number of potential students who wanted what we offer increased,
but the number of seats we could legally offer remained constant. For years, our
lotteries were painful ceremonies where families had a roughly 1 in 10 chance
of receiving our unique education. In February, helped by the recommendation of
Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts has tripled the amount
of students City on a Hill might access, by accepting our application to
replicate our charter once in New Bedford and once again in Boston.
According to the
internationally recognized magazine The Economist, Massachusetts “has
had excellent results [because] it is strict about the schools it allows to
operate.” The only problem they find with our Commonwealth’s system is that the
mandated “caps on the number of charters in a state drag down performance...and
discourage investment.” Our potential donors, on whom we depend due to state
funding policies, are hesitant to invest heavily in an organization that has
legally constricted barriers to growth. Now that the Commonwealth has
recognized the stifling nature of the limit on charter school seats, I hope
sincerely that more interested parties will support the efforts of
non-traditional educational organizations with demonstrated success.
As a tutor, I only work with
12 students. My fellow tutors only teach 12 students each, and my colleagues
who teach full classrooms reach no more than twice that many per class. Yet
there are enough of us that we can work with 280 students. 280 students is less
than .05% of the humans in Boston, less than .5% of the students in Boston
Public Schools, and yet 100% of our graduates get accepted to a college that is
right for them. When I look at these numbers, the only outrage I feel, and the
only controversy I see, is that the number of young adults we help get to
college is so small. We know what we’re doing and we know how to help our
population, yet the Commonwealth, which used to only let us help 280 students,
now will let us help merely 840. The facts are clear and I wish the desire to
help ever more students – even minority students from historically low-performing
school districts – was not controversial. Even with the generous recognition of
the DESE, the problem is real and the effects are enormous, but the rising tide
is reversible.
Matthew Lawrence is a CoaHCORPS Lead Tutor, currently in his 2nd year at City on a Hill. He attended Brandeis University and graduated in 2010 with a degree in History. While he loves exploring his new home in Boston, he is originally from Vermont and visits as often as possible.
