Model D.C. schooling

OPINION:

A young man approached me the other day and said, “hello, Mrs. Simmons, how’ve you been?” After telling him I still follow the Lord’s path (one day at a time), I turned the question on him. “How have you been doing?” Well, his response brought a natural smile to my face. “I’m running for D.C. Council,” he said. After telling him how proud I was, I walked to my car and quietly shed a few tears.

Understand, my eyes welled up because fate hadn’t dealt this young man, Darrell Gaston, the best of hands. Darrell’s formative years like those of far too many young people were spent in Washington’s underbelly, where survival of the fittest often means turning your back on the very people who — whether related by blood, geography or happenstance — are trying to pull you down. It’s the rough-and-tumble environment that you read about and talk about but don’t want you or your loved ones to be a part of. It’s the type of environment that visionary culture warriors are pushing hard toward the trash heap.

Darrell began making right turns while a student at the Friendship Collegiate Academy, where the school of hard knocks is turned on its head by formal education and where Darrell graduated in 2004 before earning scholarships to attend Coppin State. Now armed with a degree in political science, Darrell is on course to blaze the way for a new generation of political leaders.

Too often we forsake the Darrell Gastons, who often end up on the wrong side of the street through no fault of their own. We look the other way while young people began moving toward lifelong rap sheets instead of lifelong learning. The visionary warriors, however, recognize that trend and use education as the phalanx to reverse it. As Chairman Donald Hense of Friendship Public Charter School, which has five campuses and has begun planning a six, told me this week: “I wanted to try to stop the pattern of poor education leading to life long poverty and the inability of many black boys to lead productive lives because of the number entering the criminal justice system at early ages.”

Teaching and learning are like train tracks, my parents used to say, both must be perfectly aligned in order to avoid derailment. While D.C. Public Schools is still trying to upright the train and realign itself, charter schools have already shown teachers, parents and students the light at the end of the tunnel.

Friendship is a model example. Its five campuses grow minds from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, and its Collegiate Academy, from which Darrell graduated, not only offers AP courses, which many traditional public schools don’t, but the academy also helps students acquire college scholarships and partners with academic and philanthropic communities to give students a broad and deep understanding of what is expected of them after they leave the halls of high school. In other words, Friendship schools are building blocks.

D.C. schools used to operate similarly, but some 35 or so years ago “the system” became less interested in growing mayors (Adrian Fenty), members of Congress (Eleanor Holmes Norton) and sports figures (Wizards Coach Eddie Jordan) and more interested in growing itself.

There’s another important reason why charter schools are a model example: Charters generally ignore the bricks-and-mortar syndrome. The people who run them think outside the traditional schoolhouse model. For example, charter schools sometimes retrofit themselves to warehouse-like spaces, office buildings and other nontraditional environs to get the job done. Many cannot even afford athletic fields and the like — facilities that public school children take for granted. Also, building or modernizing a traditional schoolhouse can take “the system” three, four, even five years to complete. Successful charters don’t have such red tape.

Consider Friendship’s Collegiate Academy, which is called the Woodson campus, and the Southeast Campus. It didn’t take four or five years to build the schools or even three years. In fact, the Southeast campus opened within 60 days and underwent major renovations before its official ribbon-cutting on April 4, the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination (www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080405/METRO/138325068/1004). Woodson represents yet another clear picture. Friendship and its partners took a schoolhouse that long ago was abandoned (Carter G. Woodson Junior High) and in a year turned it into an educational facility that has a 90 percent graduation rate, has 95 percent college acceptance rate and scholarships that total in the millions each year, including $8.2 million in the last two years.

Some of you may argue that Friendship is merely doing what schools are supposed to do, and I agree — but only to a point. And that point is that if Friendship is doing what schools are supposed to do, D.C. Public Schools doesn’t have much time to catch up. Other charters are following Friendship or breaking new ground in other ways. Talk about competition!