GOING FROM A NATIONAL STILL AT RISK
TO A NATION STRONG

Michael Moe, Merrill Lynch, Moderator
Yvonne Chan, Vaughn Learning Center
Leah Vukmir, PRESS
Reverend Ellis Smith, Colin Powell Academy

        With explosiveness, Yvonne Chan, legendary reformer and principal of Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, describes with passionate detail her defeat of "Mission Impossible" and the creation of "Mission Possible." The setting: Los Angeles inner city schools. The time: 1984. Her mission: To boldly go where no principal would ever want to go, to boldly do what no principal had ever done before.

        After a principal received multiple death threats and consequently left his school, L.A. County Public Schools sent Chan, staffed with three bodyguards, to take over. The K-5 School, just a mile and a half away from the Rodney King incident, had major problems. Overcrowding, students with limited English, major poverty, illiterate first generation immigrant parents, no health care, and test scores ranging in the seventh percentile in reading and the ninth percentile in math. To make matters bleaker, nineteen out of the thirty-eight teachers did not have teaching credentials.

        Yvonne Chan then found a tool to guide the turn around of Vaughn school — the state’s charter school law. In 1992, the school became the very first conversion school, and through its metamorphosis, Chan has learned five key rules to reform education.

        First, in true renegade spirit, she explains the importance of taking a chance with or without approval. When she "declared independence, the system declared war" by completely cutting off school funding. Luckily, she found businesses to donate funds for computers and after school programs.

        The second key, according to Chan, is to utilize resources. Her school formed an alliance with a university by exchanging space for evening classes with free courses for the teacher. Parents also became a resource by developing a family center.

        Third, Chan espouses "pushing the limit." Refusing to follow traditional reform movements of the past, her revolutionary steps developed new resources and saved money. She bought neighborhood crack houses and from them built fourteen new classrooms. She was also able to lengthen the school year, after receiving profits made by private investments. With this additional money, they are building a second facility, a community library, a professional development center, a museum, and a business co-op

        The fourth key is to utilize "seat money." Chan encourages educators to lobby and get laws passed. By obtaining the Governor's support, the public school system not only began paying again but also reimbursed the school for what they had previously spent.

        Fifth, Chan suggests replication and "scaling up." Because of Vaughn’s financial and educational success , many other neighboring schools have converted to charter schools.

        The results are worth the effort. Ninety-nine percent of Vaughn’s children attend school every day and scores have jumped from the seventh and ninth percentiles to the thirty-sixth and fortieth percentiles. More than 1,000 students have gained English proficiency while at Vaughn.

        Chan concludes by stating she will not leave the front line or the trenches "until all fifty states have strong charter school laws." All that is "hard is not impossible, it will just take a little bit longer."

        From macro to micro, Leah Vukmir’s parent crusade all began seven years ago when her daughter began a program of "inventive spelling" in her Kindergarten class. With a concern for her daughter's education and finding a lack of research to support the program, Vukmir "began the journey" to create the organization, PRESS (Parents Raising Education Standards in Schools).

        Vukmir began the process by pouring through school district curricula documents, attending school board meetings, and writing letters to the editor. Although the school district administrators vilified her, she and like minded parents eventually found each other, began to meet on a regular basis, named themselves PRESS, and after a successful spot on the airwaves, PRESS "literally mushroomed."

        Vukmir began to hear from parents all over the world that there "was an incredible thirst" for information about what was going on in the schools and about good instructional practices. PRESS became an information source for concerned parents and educators, not only in Wisconsin but nationwide.

        PRESS's informs, galvanizes and trains parents to speak out in front of a groups, such as school board, in a positive manner. Its plans also consist of becoming activists in the charter school movement, changing past failed ideology, pedagogy and methodology, and developing "a clearinghouse of research-based practices, a mechanism to review and evaluate education research."

        Vukmir believes choice is vital, and hopes all the combined approaches will "chip away…the wall holding children back from learning."

         For Reverend Ellis Smith, the recognition that educational apathy had infested both the students and parents in his Detroit neighborhood was enough to draw him toward a cause, one of starting a better school for children.

        He converted a dilapidated community building (which he bought for one dollar) into a charter school to serve the neighborhood. Because of the general family breakdown and influence of area gangs, the community based K-5 charter school, named The Colin Powell Academy, formed a "holistic approach" towards learning to focus specifically on the African-American male.

        Besides the general curriculum, The Academy offers classes that adjust the educator to the students' needs. It offers parenting classes, emphasizes a smaller classroom, and reinforces character, integrity, and honesty.

        The Academy also offers rewards for learning. Reverend Ellis believes the students "have to know there is a prize at the end of the rainbow." The students are given field trips and others benefits, but the big prize comes with the type of learning found in the following Detroit headline: "A Public Charter School Used a Battle Plan Worthy of its Namesake to a Fifty-seven Point Turn around on State Math Tests This Year."

           (CER’s guests learned first hand the kind of education that Colin Powell Academy delivers. They had the chance to meet twenty of its students, all part of the tremendous choir, and the demeanor, attitude and hard work they displayed demonstrated that the learning institution to which they belong is indeed a jewel.)

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