NEW YORK Principal Gregory Hodge guards the entrance to Harlem’s Frederick Douglass Academy like a pit bull.
The object of this no-nonsense educator’s consternation: latecomers.
“Geez, nice for you to get out of bed,” Mr. Hodge growls, crossing his arms in mock disgust and tilting his head disapprovingly as a student slinks in a little before 9 on a bone-cold, windswept Friday morning.
School begins at 8.
“I woke up late because I was studying,” the student offers softly, knowing his excuse won’t cut it with Mr. Hodge, New York City’s own Andy Sipowicz of public education.
Like Detective Sipowicz, the curmudgeon cop of television’s popular “NYPD Blue,” Mr. Hodge, 46, is both gruff and deeply caring. He knows that if he doesn’t keep a dogged, law-and-order watch over his more than 1,000 students in grades seven through 12, they may succumb to the evils of the ‘hood that beckon a few steps outside the doors.
“The more you keep the street out of the school, the more you set the tone for instruction,” Mr. Hodge says.
The principal is known to spend the night on a couch in his office, where he usually gets about 4 and 1/2 hours of shut-eye before rising again to greet his young scholars.
Last year, U.S. News and World Report named Frederick Douglass Academy one of the nation’s 96 top public, private and parochial schools. Under its college-preparatory program, foreign language instruction is mandatory; many seventh-graders take classes in Japanese. Graduates were accepted by the likes of Cornell, Yale and the University of Chicago. Most received scholarships, the school’s ultimate goal.
“They are there because they are qualified, not because they are minority,” says Mr. Hodge, who grew up poor in Harlem and the South Bronx and was pushed to go to college by a high school counselor.
This series profiles Douglass Academy and two other public schools a charter school in tiny Durham, N.C., and a small Arkansas elementary in the heart of the Mississippi Delta where students excel even though they come from low-income families.
Each of the three uses a different method to get the best out of children. And each was identified by the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation as among the best in the country as part of the conservative think tank’s push for higher standards in public schools.
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