Daniel Gennaoui ’11Journal #1
During my first few weeks at Uncommon Schools, I had the chance to visit Excellence Boys Charter School. Excellence Boys is one of Uncommon’s premier schools currently serving 360 boys from Bedford Stuyvesant. Tim Saintsing, director of operations for the school, facilitated my visit. The first thing I noticed was the facility. It was beautiful, large, clean, covered in student work, and just felt like the kind of place where you want to send your kid every morning. I was going to be working out of the office for the day and would have the chance to observe the weekly morning meetings. During this time, the school gathers in the auditorium to reflect on the week, plan for all of the upcoming learning to be done and celebrate students who were working hard every day to be successful. The message was clear: if you work hard in school now, you will go to college later. During the morning meeting, I saw parents sitting in the back smiling as they supported their children. On the way out, I overheard two fathers talking about how they remember this building as a blown out factory.
The day is long — starting at 7:30 a.m. and extending to 5:00 p.m. — but the boys go to physical education every day and also attend either art or music daily as well. The rest of the time is spent on academics. The bare bones of reading, writing, and arithmetic that is necessary to master in the earliest years of one’s education. Currently more than half of African-American males will drop out of high school. Fewer than 8 percent will graduate from college. I followed Tim on a tour of the school with a group of education leaders from out west. One asked, “Is it really right to keep the boys here all day?” I think the answer is yes — absolutely. The boys are in an excellent school; they are learning, and they are beginning to perform at or above their peers at high-performing schools around the country. Their parents are showing up mid-morning just to watch what is going on. It is not difficult to see that these boys are on a path to college.
I talked to Tim on the way out that day. He was sitting in a classroom on his blackberry making sure that all of the buses were hitting their destinations as scheduled. He said to me, “I just know there is so much more to do here. Every day, I look and see more that can be done better.”
Journal #2
I had the chance to attend Uncommon’s Master Teacher Retreat, which was basically a four-day professional development conference for the organization’s top teachers and school leaders. The conference is organized by the Human Capital Team, headed up by Columbia Business School alumnae Lindsay Kruse and Jessica Ochoa-Hendrix. The focus of the retreat was “Building Landmarks,” and teachers were re-thinking what it meant for a school to be a community landmark.
My project this summer was related. In high-performing charter schools across the country, teachers are remaining on average about two years in the classroom at a specific school. For many of us who may have grown up in schools where the best teachers have had 20 years of experience, this may be hard to fathom, but the landscape is different now — 20 years seems like landmark status.
Our generation is a different group of teachers. Many have come into the profession through alternative pathways like Teach for America or NYC Teaching Fellows where they teach in a traditional public school for about two years. Afterwards, they may decide to devote two more years in a charter school setting like Uncommon Schools. By this time, they are pretty good. They can control a classroom, motivate kids, and know how to teach effectively. Their test scores prove this, and their classrooms are places where the achievement gap shrinks. I saw many of these teachers at the retreat. The problem is that at this point, many are leaving — perhaps to go to graduate school, move to another job, or leave the classroom for a leadership position. Currently, high-performing charter schools have done pretty well. Their schools’ successes have been their strongest recruiting tool, but as these schools scale, the issue of teacher retention comes directly into play.
This summer I have been working specifically to figure out how many teachers are leaving Uncommon each year as well as to identify some of the key drivers for teacher retention. We have been trying to answer the question, what would it take to keep the best teachers in the classroom? The methodology to do this has been to look at the historical records. I’ve been scouring old human resource trackers to try to splice out what characteristics correlate to those teachers that have remained the longest at Uncommon and what are the characteristics of teachers who have left the quickest? So far there are a few leads that may result in specific organizational changes.
Journal #3
Today, I completed my summer internship at Uncommon Schools. My work this summer focused specifically on talent: how to retain and develop excellent teachers. In this final journal entry, I would like to write a bit about another pool of talent in our country: our students. In this week’s New Yorker, there was a piece by Ben McGrath that described a group of Chinese students on a field trip to the United States touring cities and top universities. The students were learning from the best in our country what it means to achieve and succeed. McGrath also described how this group would most assuredly be the inheritors of their parents’ companies down the line in their homeland. I wonder what it would mean to give all of the kids living in Bedford Stuyvesant the same opportunity. What if we actually believed that out of our public schools in our poorest neighborhoods, the next generation of great industrial leaders could emerge? What if we actually believed “those kids” could go to MIT or Columbia? What would that mean?
It is all about the expectations we will set for our children. I believe that great teachers realize this and that the leadership at Uncommon Schools sees this vividly as well. But that is not enough. Tom Friedman wrote in a recent article, “There is a movement stirring in this country around education.” He is right, but it is just stirring. One of the greatest criticisms of high-performing charter schools is that they only reach a small percentage of the actual student population. To scale is terribly difficult and requires people, commitment, and an unwavering focus on quality. We can be the generation that assures that every child growing up in the United States has the opportunity for an excellent education, and it can be done in our lifetime. If we accomplish this, we will be undoubtedly be handing off a better country to our own children.
