Building Excellent Schools founder Linda Brown (Jim Fields)

The woman who was arguably one of the most influential U.S. educators in decades died on Christmas day in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 81, with her fingernails freshly painted bright red — as always.

That would be Linda Brown, who tried very hard to remain private, and succeeded. To date, there has been just a single obituary that does not truly capture her far-reaching impact.

Why argue that Brown was such a major figure in the American education sphere?

Because Brown and the fellow educators in her tight circle demonstrated that demography does not have to determine destiny. That’s not what we hear from most school superintendents and teachers union leaders, who maintain that while they do their best to counter the headwinds of poverty, success is impossible.

When viewing education data on a macro level, the traditional educators are right: Poverty does drive outcomes. But on a more modest scale, where Brown operated, the many high-performing charter schools she helped launch around the country through her Boston-based Building Excellent Schools, known as BES, showed the opposite.

Just a quick example: At Uncommon Schools, which operates 53 schools in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, 58% of their graduates earn bachelor’s degrees within six years. That is just one percentage point lower than the college graduation rate for students from families in the top income quartile. (Before the pandemic, Uncommon’s college graduation rate reached 72%.)

Yes, it is possible. That kind of success requires relentless innovation and persistence. But it’s possible.

If Brown hadn’t been an advocate for charter schools, which are despised by teachers unions and disliked by many progressives, her passing would have been front page news.

Among charter insiders, she was called the godfather of the top charters, a nickname she both hated and loved. The first time I profiled Brown I called her the grandmother of the elite charters. She hated that and let me know! Clearly, godfather was the better fit.

(You can see and hear Brown talk about her work in a previous interview with The 74)

The BES fellowships designed by Brown started with a year touring top charters and designing your own school, followed by a second year preparing to open that school. Often BES would invest directly in the new school.

“There are so many people who say Linda changed the direction of their lives,” said Brett Peiser, now Uncommon’s co-chief executive officer. “I was one of those people.”

Peiser’s first charter school, which eventually led him to Uncommon, never would have happened without Brown’s tough-minded assistance, he says.

Uncommon is just one charter network of many that Brown had a hand in. And then there are all the high-performing “sister” charter schools that fellows visit to learn their secrets. In that way, they become part of the BES network.

Doug Lemov

Finally, there are the education leaders who rose to national prominence out of that Linda Brown world. Just two examples: former Education Secretary John King (Roxbury Prep) and Teach Like a Champion author Doug Lemov, a pioneer of several charter schools.

“It’s so easy to let school formation be about the ornaments on the tree and not the tree itself,” Lemov wrote when asked about Brown. “Linda was always about the things that mattered — real achievement and learning — and she never accepted cheap substitutes.”

Added Lemov: “It’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to introduce school choice to a place and to make sure there is the proof point of a school with real quality — radically, not just marginally, better — to reset people’s expectations for what is possible. And she did that over and over again.”

At a little more than 5 feet tall, she had furious energy and famous impatience. Each day, after arising around 3 a.m., she would check her phone to see if any new applications for fellowships had arrived.

Linda Brown, founder and executive director of Building Excellent Schools, and David Brown, founder of University Preparatory School in Denver, Colo. at a gathering of charter school leaders at BES’ headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo courtesy of Building Excellent Schools)

Immediately, or just after opening a Diet Coke, Brown would devour the application, still in her PJs.

“If she wanted someone, she would look at her watch and see it was only 4:30 in the morning,” said her BES partner Susan Walsh. “But by 6 a.m. she would call them, even though they might have submitted the application at 11 p.m. the night before. She would tell me, ‘If they are people who do things, they should be up.’ And then, when she talked to them, if she liked what she was hearing, she was simultaneously checking flights to Boston, and would say, ‘I see a 1:30 flight; let’s meet today at 3 p.m.’ She moved!”

Just for context, this was for a fellowship that at the time was hyper-exclusive: the acceptance ratio for the dozen awarded each year was 2 in 100.

One of those applicants surprised by an early morning call was Shantelle Wright. She had never heard of a BES fellowship until reading about it in a brochure and was astonished. You mean they pay you to do what I desperately want to do, she thought. She finished her application at 5 p.m. and, with a prayer, pushed the send button.

Brown read it first thing the next morning. It was a 13-page, single-spaced essay on what Wright wanted to achieve with a Washington, D.C.-based school. “This essay was on fire,” Brown told me in an earlier interview. “She talked about how the vast Black/white school achievement gap is not only a Black person’s problem; this is also a white person’s problem. Why can’t we have decent schools east of the Anacostia (the poorest neighborhoods in the District)?”

At 7 a.m. the next morning, Brown phoned Wright at home. Says she woke her up: When can you be here?

Wright: When do you want me?

Brown: Can you be on the next shuttle to Boston?

Wright made the 9 a.m. shuttle and sat down with Brown for a long talk. At the end, she was offered a fellowship. To complete a long story in a few words, Wright founded the successful Achievement Prep charter in Washington, ended up on the BES board of directors and went on to other education achievements.

Shantelle Wright, founder of Achievement Prep (District of Columbia Public Charter School Board)  

“This woman single-handedly changed the trajectory of my life,” Wright posted after Brown’s death. “I do what I do and fight like I fight because of her. Her belief in what was possible made it reality for me!”

Wright’s story is one of scores like it: fellows who spread out across states to launch their own schools after visiting and studying the best charters in the country.

There are many charter schools around the U.S. that are mediocre, hardly better than nearby traditional schools. And there are some that are worse than the traditional schools and warrant closing. And then there are the charters launched by Brown and BES that usually show what’s possible when true innovation is allowed to blossom.

Said Brown in an interview with The 74:

“Some folks from the West Coast would use terms such as ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom.’ We looked around after a year and a half and saw that a thousand flowers had bloomed there and, in fact, they weren’t all good. And we thought there it was. If you let a thousand flowers bloom, you’re going to have some bad ones, some good ones, some moderate ones and a few great ones.”

It was in Massachusetts that we were able to say we weren’t going to have a thousand flowers blooming. That being able to start a charter school by meeting Sunday after church, putting together a kind of helter skelter application, getting authorized, and then saying, ‘What do we do now?’ wasn’t enough. Because we were in the business of changing people’s lives, young people’s lives, and in some instances, very young people’s lives. We took that as our mission.

“The other thing we took as our mission was that we could be the people who chose the people to start charter schools. And that was really the birth of Building Excellent Schools.”

Since 2001, BES has selected and prepared more than 2,500 educators who went on to found more than 200 schools in 50 cities and 20 states.

Some examples by region (a long, if still incomplete, list):

• In Massachusetts, BES fellow-founded schools include Salem Academy Charter School, Excel Academy Charter Schools, Phoenix Charter Academy and Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School.

• Sister schools in Massachusetts (schools that fellows visit to study) include Brooke Charter Schools (“Linda always said we should be a BES school,” said founder Jon Clark), KIPP Lynn Academy and Roxbury Prep.

• In Rhode Island, RISE Prep Mayoral Academy.

• In New York City, there’s South Bronx Classical Charter School, Democracy Prep, Leadership Prep, Forte Preparatory Charter School, Legacy College Prep, Creo College Prep, Valence College Prep Charter School, Brooklyn RISE Charter School and BOLD Charter School.

• In Buffalo, there’s Buffalo Creek Academy Charter School, Persistence Preparatory Charter School and Primary Hall Preparatory Charter School.

• In Washington, D.C., there’s Achievement Preparatory Academy.

• In Ohio, the United Schools Network.

• In Nashville, Tennessee, there’s Purpose Preparatory Academy, Nashville Classical Charter School, Intrepid College Prep Schools, Liberty Collegiate Academy and Nashville Prep, which merged to form RePublic Schools. In Memphis, there’s Freedom Preparatory Academy, Memphis Rise Academy, Beacon College Preparatory, Memphis Merit Academy Charter School and Aurora Collegiate Academy.

• In Texas, there’s Compass Rose Academy, Houston Classical Charter School and Etoile Academy Charter School.

• In Chicago, there’s Great Lakes Academy Charter School.

• In Louisiana, Laureate Academy Charter School and Elan Academy Charter School.

• In Indiana, Circle City Prep and Allegiant Preparatory Academy.

• In Nevada, Nevada Rise Academy and Nevada Prep Charter School.

• In California, Equitas Academy Charter School, Mission Preparatory School, Valor Academy (joined Bright Star Schools) and Cornerstone Academy (joined Alpha Public Schools).

• In Colorado, University Prep.

Did Brown’s remarkable achievements reform American public education? Sadly, no.

Despite the consistent gains demonstrated by charter networks such as Uncommon — pushing up students’ college graduation rates to match their high-income peers — traditional education leaders focus more on driving charters out of business than adopting their hard-learned lessons for success.

Even in Massachusetts, which boasts several of the nation’s highest-performing charter schools, the powerful teachers unions there have easily beaten back charter expansion.

But those setbacks would never phase the indomitable Brown, whose feisty disposition, sharp wit and bright red fingernails — freshened regularly by a manicurist who visited her home in her last days — made her someone you never forget meeting. She was too busy hurrying along trying to achieve her lifelong mission: proving that when it comes to educating children, zip codes shouldn’t matter.

“Winning is about academic achievement,” Brown told The 74. And by that standard, Brown, whose family is planning a celebration of her life in August on her birthday, emerged the winner.

Preston Smith (Rocketship Public Schools)

In the fall of 2011, having hurriedly finished The Bee Eater, a book about Michelle Rhee’s tumultuous turn at the helm of D.C. Public Schools (hurriedly because Rhee got the ax when her protector-mayor got voted out of office) I was looking for a really, really fresh approach to public education, especially schools that serve poor kids.

If a fierce reformer such as Rhee couldn’t survive in a troubled urban district, then maybe charter schools were the answer. But which charter network to pick to profile?

I had never heard of tiny San Jose-based Rocketship charters, but several savvy charter school followers pointed in their direction. I flew out to San Jose, met with co-founders John Danner and Preston Smith, and they agreed to provide me complete access to their schools and expansion plans over the next year. Over the course of that year, I earned a lot of airline miles flying back and forth to California, and even more miles as they expanded to Milwaukee and Nashville. The result, On the Rocketship, was published in 2014. I then departed for other book projects.

Today, Rocketship Public Schools has turned 15 – celebrating its quinceañera, as long-time Rocketship leader Maricela Guerrero aptly put it, considering the network’s roots in educating low-income Latino students – with about 10,000 “Rocketeers” across the country, with 13 schools in California, two in Milwaukee, three in Nashville, three in Washington, D.C. and one in Fort Worth, Texas. Over its 15-year history, Rocketship has served 27,508 students.

This seemed like a good time to catch up with Smith, who today shares the title of co-founder and CEO. Back then, Smith and I spent many hours together on school tours and sitting across from one another with a digital recorder, so for me, this was a reunion of sorts.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

While I was researching the book you told me so many great stories about the early startup years, when you operated out of a tiny, unairconditioned space at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in San Jose. One of my favorites was about you having to move 40 traffic cones every morning and then move them again in the afternoon, to accommodate the parishioners. Your exact words during our interview when recalling those years: “I’ll never move a damn cone again for the rest of my life.” Do you have any better stories about that time?

You know, Richard, that is a great one. I’ll stick with that one. But once in a while, to help our school leaders during startup, I help out with moving cones. So, time heals all wounds.

Let me give you another story. In our church space we had different learning centers, a center with blocks, a center with enrichment, etc. There were all sorts of materials, carpets, tables. Every Friday the church group held a dance, so every Friday afternoon we had to clear out that space, moving everything. So it was like a huge fire drill. And then every Monday morning, we had to set it up again for the kids.

In some ways, Rocketship is a typical charter network, with an emphasis on academics and college readiness. But in other ways, you are very different, creating only elementary schools, putting parent empowerment as a top priority and keeping an eye on the biggest prize: social change around education. 

Let’s first discuss your K-5 model. The biggest charter networks have gone to K-12 models, mostly on the assumption that to make their students truly college-ready they can’t send them off to traditional schools where academic gains might be lost. Why doesn’t Rocketship do that? 

First is that it is unlikely that we, or anyone, can scale to the size of the challenge within public education, so we have to be innovative in how we think about sharing our model and impact with other kids, families and schools beyond directly enrolling more students. We do not want to be a parallel K-12 system, rarely interacting with other school systems. Rocketship does not believe that contributes to a larger ecosystem of impact.

Rather, by being K-5 it creates much larger catalytic effects for our kids, families and communities in regards to high-quality choices, district or charter. We believe that by creating a bunch of K-12 systems we would actually be undermining choice, which is a value we as a movement say that we value. That would encourage families to make the choice to opt into one K-12 network and then not make any further choices. Thus, the K-12 approach ironically undermines our value as a movement of choice.

Your theory of change has always been that Rocketship will take in low-income students, deliver a superior education, empower their parents and then send them to schools that will have to adapt to these students and their parents, who will demand better educations. And yet, at least in the early years, the traditional schools, especially the teachers unions, have fought you at every turn. Have traditional districts started to make changes as a result of your schools being in their district?

We’ve definitely seen it in each of our regions. What I’ve learned over time is this power of being only elementary, right? It starts with a great education, and then you couple that with parents who become super powerful through advocacy. From their years with children at Rocketship, they understand how to navigate and influence the system. They not only understand what a high-quality school is and what their Rocketeers deserve, but they also know how to navigate the political and leadership system and community. And that creates systemic change, community change. We’ve seen it in San Jose and every place we’re at.

Could you cite some examples?

Sure. Here in San Jose, where we have 10 schools, our kids are showing up in middle school a year ahead in academics, and those gaps actually grow in the subsequent years. They are going to be in really strong shape no matter what kind of school they choose. Several middle and high school charter schools have grown up here in San Jose and even the local traditional districts have innovated, opening up schools of choice, small autonomous schools, dual immersion schools [where English- and Spanish-speaking students learn together in both languages]. And if you look at the overall results of the surrounding districts, everyone is doing better. So I really think that has proven our theory of change.

In Milwaukee, where we now have two schools, what we saw is the district really wanted our Rocketeers, so they opened additional middle schools so they could serve our kids. Also, we used to partner with community organizing groups, but in 2015 we shifted, based on this theory of change, and made organizing part of who we are at Rocketship. Now, we have Rocketship employees who are education organizers who work with the families not just in our schools but with other district and charter schools to organize families to access power. That helps us drive this theory of change in a larger sort of community and ecosystem.

Most charter networks were launched with an end-goal of college readiness, which in more recent years expanded to college success – ensuring that students not only enroll in college but actually earn degrees, hopefully in four years. Now, suddenly, and partly as a response to the pandemic, an anti-college movement is afoot as seen in the rapidly declining enrollments. The belief that a college degree is necessary in life has begun to fade. Has that affected Rocketship?

I guess I’ll speak for our Rocketship community, that’s what I’m most familiar with, right? What we’ve seen is our parents are still all over college. They’re still very much motivated by that vision for their children. So, we do annual college visits in our schools, with the families. We’ve still got cohort names and college banners in our classrooms. This emphasis on getting a college education is something parents say is what really motivates them and what they appreciate about Rocketship.

That college focus is interesting for us because we have to wait, right? Our kids leave after fifth grade. And it’s years before that student gets to college. Now, we have our third class of college graduates, and we have Rocketeers who have graduated who come back to visit our schools. That has been super motivating to our families, to our team. So I’ll just say within our Rocketship community, college is what our families are still aspiring towards.

I’d like to ask the college question more broadly. Education is infamous for its ill-advised pendulum swings. Remember “whole language,” which got its start in California, swept the country and triggered years of reading instruction malpractice? Considering how fast the pendulum is swinging on college, is this another trend going too far? 

I would say I deeply believe that in the United States of America we need a public education system that regardless of zip code, enables kids to have the opportunity to go to college. And if they choose not to do that, that’s fine. Right? That is their choice. But I am still deeply motivated and deeply inspired by a country that believes in public education. You should be able to attend a free school that’s high quality and gives you the opportunity to go to college.

My question here is whether this [anti-college movement] is more a reflection of the reality of how our current public system doesn’t provide that quality education to prepare students for college. If so, we still have work to do.

A few charter networks have figured out ways to enroll better prepared students from more motivated families. In short, gaming the pool of low-income families. Not surprisingly, their academic outcome data consistently looks outstanding when compared to their close-by neighborhood schools. I spent enough time in Rocketship schools to know that doesn’t happen there. If anything, you lean in the opposite direction. And yet, that gaming has to be tempting, right? Great headlines when the test scores come out.

No!

Our challenge is serving kids in socioeconomically disadvantaged zip codes, often Black and Latino kids, right? For me, that’s the challenge, giving all those kids in those zip codes a chance to go to college. That’s what we’re obsessed with at Rocketship. The more we get into learning how to do that, the more we have to share with other schools to influence the larger system, right?

We’re not interested in designing magnet schools [that attract the strongest students]. There’s a place for them in the United States, sure. But the massive need is designing true public schools that serve all kids.

In San Jose, Rocketship clearly showed that it could succeed with low-income Latino students in ways the local traditional public schools could not. You pretty much wrote the book on that, and you could have stuck with that student population, nationally. But you didn’t. That sense of mission led you to expand into cities such as Nashville and Washington, D.C., where you started to serve mostly Black students. A lot of people (OK, maybe me as well, considering my D.C. reporting for the Rhee book) thought you would stumble at that abrupt transition. I know it was rocky, but based on school outcome data in those cities, you appear to be succeeding now. Please talk about that.

Now, I feel so blessed and grateful for the opportunity to open schools that are so disparate. Opening in D.C. meant opening in a very different community, where a third of our students were homeless in our second year. We had never seen anything like this. The amount of trauma, and the counseling that was needed was new for us.

Think about that. Our school was the largest charter that ever opened in D.C. Our authorizers were skeptical. That was hard. We were learning how to do this. What do we do? How do we raise the bar, push the bar, for kids like we’ve never seen before? The beauty of that was reconsidering our Rocketship model. Oh, we need counselors. We need counselors who understand trauma. We need to better discern the scaffolding of our behavior management to get smarter, better and faster.

And now, that’s all in our model, and not just in D.C., right? You fast forward to San Jose, and now we have mental health professionals in every school. Everybody should do that. We learned that. So that has benefited all kids, not just in D.C. If we had just remained in San Jose, I don’t think our model would be as rich as it is now. Being in Milwaukee, Texas, D.C., Nashville, we’re seeing very different communities, very different needs, very different learning styles. That’s how we have elevated our overall model.

Here’s the other thing. We got launched in San Jose with English language learner models we developed. And then you go into districts such as D.C., where people tell us those teaching techniques aren’t needed, because these students aren’t learning English. And meanwhile, we know that English is a hard language to learn, right? It’s not a natural language. At a young age, everyone is learning English. That skill, teaching English, and that model of teaching it, was a super powerful thing to bring to D.C. At the root of this is Rocketship as a learning organization. Always innovating, reflecting, always pushing ourselves.

For most of your startup years with Rocketship, there’s been a rocky and adversarial relationship between charters and traditional districts, especially with the teachers unions. Now, post-pandemic we see steep enrollment declines in all schools, especially the district schools. In some parts of the country, that has intensified the animosity, with traditional districts arguing they can’t afford to lose students to charters. From your perspective, how has the pandemic changed the relationship between charters and traditional schools?

There were definitely years when charters and districts were not all in this together. During the lockdowns, however, we all started sharing our resources. Overall, now there’s a shared sense of just how intense this work is trying to deal with learning setbacks. I would say at least among educators, there’s more collaboration between charters and districts, after what we all went through.

It strikes me that there’s one Rocketship practice that should be at the top of the list to share with other schools, both traditional and charter, and that’s parent involvement. You were able to do that with Latino parents, who traditionally have shied away from dealing with the education establishment. How did you do that?

It starts with making sure they’re truly treated like their child’s first teachers, making them true partners. That’s why we continue to do home visits with our families. Also, we make sure they share power, such as asking them to name new schools and help select the staff. When we hold meetings in the evening we offer food and day care to make it more accessible to our parents. Once parents are engaged with the school they are more likely to become education advocates, community organizers. That’s why we brought our community organizing in-house.

Let me give you an example. During the pandemic we established Care Corps, which placed a Care Corps coordinator in each school to help parents find the help they needed. That help included partnering with Second Harvest to deal with food scarcity, distributing boxes of produce, eggs, milk and chicken to our families.The coordinators help parents navigate support systems and get the assistance they need by overcoming language barriers, red tape and lack of internet access to connect them to vital services that are too often cumbersome and complicated.

For us, having a broader impact doesn’t always mean enrolling more students. It involves trying to share practices such as Care Corps with other districts.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

The nation’s largest group of K-12 charter schools said last week that the Ruth and Norman Rales Scholars Program will provide four years of mentoring, summer internship assistance, financial literacy training, networking advice and funding to defray college costs — supports valued at $60,000 per student. The grant covers 50 students a year, up to 250 students over five years.

Airam Cruz (KIPP)

For KIPP students such as Harlem-raised Airam Cruz, who landed a spot in a prestigious high school as a result of attending a KIPP middle school, and then entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, these networking-assist scholarships mean everything.

Cruz, who was chosen for a similar Dave Goldberg Scholarship Program (which inspired the Rales) got a summer internship at a computer gaming company as a result of meeting the company’s chief executive officer at a 2018 Silicon Valley dinner hosted at the house of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Goldberg is her late husband.

Also as part of that Goldberg scholarship program: Cruz, now 21, had his own mentor for four years of college, former Samsung Chief Innovation Officer David Eun. “I texted him almost any day about anything. Life advice, school advice.”

What’s truly newsworthy about the Goldberg and Rales scholarship programs is why they are needed in the first place.

Two decades ago, KIPP and other top-performing charter networks started out with a simple promise to parents: Send your sons and daughters to our schools and we will get them enrolled in college. As years passed, however, every charter network found out that enrolling in college wasn’t the same as graduating.

As early as 2009, KIPP leaders realized their college-going students were falling short on actually graduating, and in April 2011 released a starkly worded College Completion report revealing that only 33 percent of its KIPP middle school students were graduating from four-year colleges within six years.

While that rate was three times the national graduation rate for low-income, minority students, it was far below what KIPP had predicted: a graduation success rate of 75 percent. That was a wake-up call for KIPP, which launched aggressive changes including expanding its network to opening elementary and high schools to give students more time on task with KIPP teachers and counselors.

While those changes, and similar ones at other college-focused charter networks around the country, succeeded in boosting college graduation rates, KIPP and others soon discovered yet another unpleasant reality: simply earning a college degree wasn’t enough. Too often, their graduates settled for jobs that fell short of the kinds of professional opportunities landed by white and Asian college graduates.

That amounts to underemployment, explains Tevera Stith, senior director for National Alumni Impact at KIPP.

“We see more and more students not having access to proper networking who then struggle to get the kind of work experience needed to land the perfect first job that will propel their career,” said Stith For college students coming from middle- and upper-income families, those internships and first-job connections often come from family connections.

(Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce)

A 2016 survey of KIPP college graduates revealed that roughly half felt they were underemployed. The most common reason is having to pass on unpaid internships during their college years.

“When they can get a paid job at a local supermarket they are absolutely going to take that supermarket job,” said Stith.

Programs such as Rales offer students salaries for summer internships that don’t pay.

Underemployment is what I saw first hand when reporting the book, The B.A. Breakthrough, which documented the first graduating class at KIPP’s Gaston College Prep, a school in rural North Carolina located in a town where college graduation is not an expectation. But in this class, 61 percent of the graduating seniors earned four-year degrees within six years, a rate that exceeds the degree attainment rates for middle-class students.

While that success rate was impressive, it soon became clear that a fair number of those alumni didn’t consider themselves successes in life, at least not when compared to middle-class college graduates. While they were all employed, their jobs often fell into the category of underemployment, such as a finance major working as a bank teller.

These latest iterations in the learning curve around what it takes to get low-income minority students into college, through college and into a job commensurate with their skills, explains the multiple name changes for KIPP’s college promotion programs. It began in 1988 as Kipp To College, then in 2008 became KIPP Through College. In 2021 it became KIPP Forward, which acknowledges both the need to help students with non-college careers and that even college graduates need ongoing assistance.

Other charter networks make similar efforts. The New York City-based Success Academy schools, for example, have their own Rales Scholars Program.

The Northeast-based Uncommon Schools, which usually turns in the top college graduation rates, rivaling the success rates for middle-class students, also recognizes the need for follow-up support. Uncommon is building a network to link all its alums and connect them to outside organizations for career support.

Chicago-based Noble Network of Charter Schools offers one-on-one career counseling and networking events as well as employer programs like Noble’s Winter Externship Program.

Aide Acosta, Noble’s chief college officer, said a 2016 survey of their alums showed that six months after earning college degrees only 41 percent had full-time employment or were in graduate school. Compared to middle-class college graduates, she said, “our students were having different career exposures.” After launching Noble’s coaching/job placement efforts, that number is now up to 80 percent.

Kourtney Buckner (KIPP)

Some students get exposed to multiple programs. Kourtney Buckner, for example, attended a KIPP middle school in Atlanta. KIPP then helped her win acceptance at George Washington University. Buckner, a junior who plans on being a lawyer, has a KIPP college adviser who checks on her and the network helped her land a KIPP-supported summer internship at a Washington-based nonprofit.

At the same time, Buckner is also a Posse Foundation scholar, a program that ensures first-generation students find a network of similar students to support them in college. “Having a Posse cohort here has made all the difference,” said Buckner. “I have nine other (Posse scholars) here and I also have a Posse mentor.”

Applications for the Rales Scholars Program opened Oct. 1 to KIPP high school seniors or KIPP middle school alumni now in their senior year. The first group of Rales scholars will join the program in May 2022.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to KIPP and LA School Report’s parent company The 74 Media.

(National Student Clearinghouse Research Center)

Restaurants and airports may be filling up again as the pandemic eases, but not college campuses.

The continued steep drops in college enrollment, especially at community colleges which attract disproportionate numbers of low-income and minority students, are both surprising and worrisome.

This spring, overall college enrollment fell by 603,000 students, from 17.5 million to 16.9 million — a drop that is seven times worse than the year before when the pandemic first hit and marks the steepest year-over-year decline since 2011, the first year the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center began keeping track. The Research Center released the latest figures in a report this month.

Community colleges were hit hardest, declining 9.5 percent, or 476,000 fewer students. More than 65 percent of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring occurred in the community college sector.

“The final estimates for spring enrollment confirm the pandemic’s severe impact on students and colleges this year,” said Doug Shapiro, the Clearinghouse’s executive director.

In May, the Clearinghouse released preliminary data on spring enrollments based on 76 of the country’s higher education institutions. This report includes 97 percent of the nation’s postsecondary enrollments.

In this most recent report, California led the nation in enrollment loss by headcount with a decrease of nearly 123,000 students. New Mexico declined the most by percentage, dropping 11.4 percent. Michigan placed in the top five states for both declining enrollment and percentage drop. Only seven states showed enrollment increases from last spring, many of them modest, although New Hampshire added 18,152 students, for a 10.8 percent bump.

This report also confirmed a trend from earlier analyses: Enrollment among male students continued to fall at greater rates than female students. Men declined by 5.5 percent, or 400,000 students, while women dropped 2 percent, or 203,000 students compared with last spring.

The continued enrollment questions are troubling mostly because the declines have persisted longer than expected. Will enrollments ever recover, or have thousands of men and minorities abandoned their college dreams?

“How long that impact lasts will depend on how many of the missing students, particularly at community colleges, will be able to make their way back to school for the coming fall,” said Shapiro.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

National Student Clearinghouse

Jacqueline Faulkner, vice president for student affairs at Southwest Tennessee Community College (Jacqueline Faulkner)

(National Student Clearinghouse)

Ivan Harrell II, president of Tacoma Community College (Ivan Harrell II)

The newly launched KIPP National Alumni Network grew out of a huge gathering of KIPP alumni in Houston last year. (Colin Pieters, KIPP New Jersey alumni)

A first-of-its-kind alumni network for K-12 KIPP charter school graduates launches today, drawing on its unique national alumni base of 30,000 students that’s expected to grow to 80,000 by 2025.

The National KIPP Alumni Network offers both alum-to-alum support as well as outside professional guidance. The three external players in the network programs, financed by California-based Crankstart Foundation, are:

• The Braven Career Booster Program, a two-week virtual career guidance bootcamp. The course will be free for KIPP alumni (classes of 2018, 2019, and 2020). It covers topics including building your LinkedIn, interviewing for jobs and how to network.
• YUPRO, a placement and coaching organization specializing in historically underrepresented talent, will create a pilot program focused on supporting KIPP alumni who do not have a college degree with coaching and job placement. Eligible alumni must have at least two years of full-time work experience to apply for the program.
• AYANA Mental Health will provide free mental health counseling services for alumni. The pilot starts with 300 alumni, who will have four free virtual counseling sessions per month. If the program works, it will expand. The sessions are designed to reach students who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and experienced trauma from the recent police shootings of Black men and women nationwide.

The idea for the network arose from a huge gathering of KIPP alumni a year ago in Houston. KIPP, which was launched in Houston in 1994, now operates 255 schools serving more than 100,000 students across the country.

“We found out that our college graduates were coming out of college and not landing jobs, or not landing jobs that helped them move up,” said Nancy Kyei, manager of KIPP’s Alumni Impact Team, which oversees the effort. “They were finding jobs, but not careers. It’s tough because our graduates don’t have a network of family and friends that generations of affluent students have had coming out of college.”

A survey of close to 5,000 KIPP alumni revealed their priorities: How to connect to successful people in their field, how to turn entrepreneurial ideas into businesses, how to advance in their careers, how to manage their finances and access to mental health resources. More than half said they would like to mentor another student from KIPP.

Some alums are already receiving support.

Sara Aranda, who graduated in 2017 from the University of North Texas with an accounting degree, works as an accountant for Pecan Grove Farms & Nursery at their Dallas headquarters. Aranda attended the Houston KIPP alumni gathering and signed up for a Managing Your Finances series offered within the network.

Sara Aranda

Why would an accountant need help with finances? Aranda, whose parents brought her to the United States from Mexico when she was 6 years old, is in the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. Only Spanish was spoken at home, and for understandable reasons her parents avoided banks. Even a college degree can’t make up for some deficits.

After the virtual seminars, she started a spreadsheet that keeps track of every expense, made some stock market investments, drew up a plan to buy a house and has plans for graduate school. The course was taught by a KIPP alum.

“Hearing from someone like me who has done it made me feel like I can do it too,” Aranda said.

Two decades ago, the leaders of pioneering charter schools such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Noble Street and YES Prep had a radical vision: We can build schools that will dramatically boost the number of low-income, minority students getting into college.

Great idea, and it worked — sort of. The problem they discovered was that students getting accepted at colleges is not the same as showing up for freshman year classes, and that getting through freshman and sophomore years is not the same as actually graduating.

So those same charter leaders turned their work toward boosting degree-earning rates, again with mostly successful results, as least compared to their counterparts from traditional high schools. The charter students were earning bachelor’s degrees at rates two to four times what might be expected.

Problem solved? Not exactly, which led to the KIPP Alumni Network. As laid out in my recent book, The B.A. Breakthrough, being a first-generation student earning a college degree doesn’t lead to the kind of career pathways that graduates from affluent families find. The lack of good internships during college left them with little job experience, and the lack of influential personal networks (mothers and fathers who contact other mothers and fathers to secure those crucial first-chance jobs) left them with a networking disadvantage.

David Segura, a KIPP alum from Austin, graduated from the University of Texas, Austin, in May and has yet to find a job in his field, marketing. Unlike a lot of KIPP students in college, Segura had summer job internships, but none in his field, which is hampering his search. Employers, he said, want marketing experience. It doesn’t help that he’s entering the workforce in the midst of a pandemic.

Over the summer, Segura participated in a Braven program. “I was able to get tips on how I should format my resume, how I should update it on LinkedIn, and how to prepare for interviews. It made me feel a lot more confident.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.

Left: Anthony Scales, who graduated from Washington University in St. Louis last year, is a College Advising Corps member who works with seniors at Sumner High School in St. Louis and with students from around the country referred to him by a chatbot. (Anthony Scales) Right: Sumner High School (Twitter/@jasonvoigt)

Last spring, college adviser Anthony Scales took on some extra duties that put him on the front lines of an effort to rescue the college dreams of tens of thousands of students — an effort best described by a cliche: They’re building it while flying it.

At the high-poverty, all-minority Sumner High School in St. Louis, Scales advises students as part of the College Advising Corps, which partners with universities to send their recent graduates to high-need high schools to advise students. Scales is one of 820 advisers in 782 high schools around the country.

The extra duties he took on were part of a collaboration between the Corps, Common App, which allows students a common application form to apply to hundreds of colleges, and AdmitHub, which pioneered “Oli,” an AI-guided chatbot that performs virtual college advising.

When it became clear that COVID-19 was about to thwart college aspirations for thousands of vulnerable students, the leaders of these three groups designed an experiment that works like this: A national group of roughly 173,000 students recruited through Common App, almost all of them low-income and would be first-generation college-going, started receiving virtual advising from AdmitHub’s Oli in April. Students who decide they need to go beyond Oli get linked to real-life advisers already working for the College Advising Corps, such as Scales in St. Louis. To date, nearly 4,000 students have asked to speak to an adviser.

This collaboration is not the only urgent guidance program playing out during the pandemic. Another two groups, City Year and Saga Education, are doing similar work. All three are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of its “No Dream Deferred” campaign.

Writes Gates in his blog: “COVID-19 could—on top of the horrific toll it has already taken—permanently derail the dreams of hundreds of thousands of young people.”

Will it work? Hard to say, but the early evidence looks promising.

The reason this collaboration is build-it-while-flying-it is there are no opportunities to stop and conduct research on how best to do this. The so-called “summer melt” rate — students who committed to college who never show up, usually low-income, underrepresented minority students — could soar to as high as 50 percent, far above the typical 30 percent, estimates Nicole Hurd, founder and CEO of the Corps.

That paranoia appears warranted. This month, the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks college students, released alarming data showing big summer college enrollment drops among Black students and at community colleges — the very first-generation, low-income students most at risk.

“These data offer the first opportunity to grasp the full range of effects on students and institutions of the host of disruptions the nation has weathered this summer,” said Doug Shapiro from the Clearinghouse. “The equity implications for higher education in the fall are becoming more clear: Many of those most affected by the pandemic also appear to be losing access to college classes, even at community colleges and rural institutions that have traditionally served them.”

If ramped-up college advising — all conducted virtually due to the virus — is going to arrest the plunge there’s no opportunity to conduct medical-style experiments, where some patients get the actual medicine and others get a placebo. That’s unthinkable. Who’s going to risk a student’s future with random assignment college counseling?

What’s left to do amounts to scooping up what appears to work at scale: A combination of computer-driven advising that can reach thousands with an option and when things get really confusing, to talk to advisers such as Scales.

Scales is a typical Corps adviser; he knows something about against-the-odds success. He grew up in Clinton, Mississippi and landed at the prestigious Washington University in St. Louis, where he graduated a year ago with a degree in international affairs and South Asian languages.

His usual duties at Sumner High School involve advising the seniors there. With the collaboration, he was assigned a slot of time to take queries from the collaboration students — the “Oli Bot” students from all over the country. The flow ranged from very light to a swarm, he said.

As the virus grew worse over the summer, and more colleges began signaling they would start up with online classes only, the queries from the Oli Bot students grew more serious and pegged to the virus news of the day. When colleges announced delays due to the pandemic, students needed to know how that changed their transportation, their housing, etc.

Then, as more colleges announced virtual-only openings, these low-income students started asking if it was worth it. Why not a local community college instead? What community college should I apply to?

• Read more: Will ‘free college’ survive COVID-19? How the pandemic could devastate college promise programs — and why the November election might be their only hope

Scales knows the odds of eventually earning a bachelor’s degree drop dramatically when a student shifts from a four-year college to a community college, but he didn’t automatically reject the community college option. Students who wavered on a four-year college because it seemed scary got pushback from him. “I’d question that a bit more, saying, ‘Let’s not make a decision because you’re scared of the newest thing.’”

Other students, however, got his support for making the switch. “These students would say, ‘I don’t really know if it’s the best choice for me anymore. I don’t want to be away from family right now, and there are financial issues, etc.” For these students, Scales laid out a positive case for community college.

“That can be a really great option if you know what you want to do (in life). It’s a much cheaper option and can put you in a much better academic position … Students who are barely motivated to go to a four-year school are just going to drop out, but if they can take their education at a slower pace, a more academically acceptable pace at a community college, then they might be more motivated to earn a bachelor’s degree.”

Students who won scholarships to attend elite schools — as he did at Washington University — almost always got counseled to stick with it. For low-income students, graduation rates from those universities are on par with the other students there, in the 80-90 percent range, and the financial aid packages are far better than at less elite institutions.”

Said Scales: ‘You don’t get any better than free.”

Whether this virtual advising works won’t be known until at the least the fall when enrollment data can be digested. But Hurd says she’s encouraged by the student active engagement rate, the indicator of how students are using it.

Nicole Hurd (third from left), founder of College Advising Corps, with students headed off to college. (College Advising Corps)

“We’re seeing an engagement rate of 61 percent, which is at least double the rate normally seen for these types of outreach,” she said.

Much of that is due to the quality of the initial advice coming from Oli, she said. “AdmitHub is amazing. We are excited by the quality of the messaging.”

The Oli chatbot is designed to be conversational, said Andrew Magliozzi, co-found of AdmitHub. It asks a lot of questions, such as: Are you the primary caregiver for someone in your family? Among these students, more than 10 percent fit that category, which in turns tailors the college advice. “We like to think of ourselves as tools for listening at scale so we can find the highest- leverage solutions for the advisors who are going to do the deep work,” said Magliozzi.

Common App’s Eric Waldo agrees.  “The bot can ask questions and communicate in ways that are great for students who don’t feel comfortable talking in person. It’s able to ask if you’re nervous about going to college, and then tailor the content around that.”

Although the collaboration experiment is sizable — 173,000 students — it’s still small compared to the larger need. Each year, another 1.4 million low-income seniors graduate from high school, said Hurd.

In the best of worlds, assuming if it proves effective, the collaboration could lead to a template for other organizations to follow, even after the coronavirus crisis is over. Already, the Corps has published a lengthy manual on virtual college advising.

“What’s exciting,” said Waldo, “is we’re taking the best part of the AI chat world, where students get quick responses, but also offer a real life human being, which gives them a place to go to.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Brandy Caldwell, Gabriela “Gabby” Zorola and Paulina Pereira Miranda

Just weeks ago, Brandy Caldwell was finishing up her senior year at Boston’s Brandeis University when she got the notice: The coronavirus was forcing a campus shutdown in two days.

For most students, that meant a hasty packing up and a quick car trip home to their parents. But for Caldwell, 22, it wasn’t that easy.

“I am a homeless college student. I went into foster care when I was 5 years old and aged out when I was 21,” Caldwell said. “Technically, I don’t have a place to go. I have no permanent address. Where was I going to go?”

From a public health perspective, the wave of short-notice college shutdowns may make sense. But for thousands of first-generation college-goers — and there are far more of them than ever — the closure of more than 200 schools across the U.S.  presents special emergencies. How do I pay for a plane ticket home? How will I replace the income from a campus work study program? If I can’t afford to return to my four-year college, how will enrolling in a local community college affect my life plans?

The challenges appear serious enough to threaten the fragile progress the nation has made in recent years in getting more low-income students both enrolled in college and earning degrees — progress I laid out in my recent book, The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America.

In that book I describe a college world foreign to most middle-class families, a world where students are one car repair away from dropping out. I tell the story of a student from a small high school in the South arriving at a chilly Pennsylvania campus without sufficient warm clothing. She became so isolated she didn’t seek outside help and almost flunked out her first semester. Finally, the principal of her high school learned of her dilemma and bought her a warm coat and some long underwear.

How many fragile students are buffeted by sudden changes such as a campus shutdown? A 2018 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce concluded that 70 percent of full-time college students hold down jobs.

MIT Graduate student Aubrey Simonson protests after students were asked to move out of their dorms by March 17. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

And the campus poverty level, which usually translates into worries about being able to afford meals, is far higher than most people imagine. A 2019 survey out of Temple University laid out the problem. An excerpt from that report:

During the 30 days preceding the survey, approximately 48% of students in two-year institutions who responded to the survey experienced food insecurity, with slightly more than 19% assessed at the low level and slightly more than 28% at the very low level of food security. Approximately 41% of students at four-year institutions who responded to the survey experienced food insecurity, with slightly less than 18% assessed at the low level and slightly less than 24% at the very low level of food security. More than half of survey respondents from two-year institutions and 44% of students from four-year institutions worried about running out of food. Nearly half of students could not afford to eat balanced meals. 

For Caldwell, a graduate of a KIPP charter high school in Washington, D.C., the first worry was, “Where do I go?”

“I called my KIPP Through College adviser,” Caldwell said, “and she told me to calm down, we can figure it out.”

Like most top charter school organizations, KIPP maintains a staff that tracks their alumni in college. In KIPP’s case, that’s 15,000 students, almost all of them low-income and minority. Caldwell’s advisor, Kamilah Holder, advised her to ask Brandeis for the same accommodation afforded to international students: dorm space during the shutdown. Caldwell did, and that was granted.

With most of the Brandeis student cafeterias closed, the next worry was food. Caldwell also appealed to KIPP for grocery help.

As with other charter networks, KIPP does special fund raising for emergencies such as this. Within a few days, KIPP raised over $135,00 and started processing claims. That total has continued to grow with the network to date giving out 294 grants at an average amount of $247 per grant. For its alumni, 44 percent of those grants went to food assistance, 23 percent to computer and tech needs and 18 percent to transportation.

“I got a response within 20 minutes, and 20 minutes after that I got money through PayPal,” she said “Kamilah is like my mom; I love her.”

Gabriela “Gabby” Zorola graduated from an IDEA charter high school in Texas’s high-poverty Rio Grande Valley and improbably ended up at Boston’s Northeastern University. “They gave me the most financial aid money. The first time I ever saw the campus was at freshman orientation.”

But she quickly adjusted to the campus, thanks mostly to the Latinx Student Culture Center she discovered. First came the announcement the university was shifting online; then came the shutdown notice: How to get home? “It was horrible for me,” Zorola said.

IDEA stepped in to pay the airfare, but her worries haven’t lessened. She chose a challenging major, bioengineering, and now she faces the prospect of taking physics online with uncertain outside help. What about labs? “I know it’s going to be much harder.”

In theory, she could transfer to nearby University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, but she was counting on the advantages offered by the prestigious Northeastern University. Aside from the school’s reputation, the location is priceless. Boston is at the center of bioengineering. “Boston has everything, right here.”

Sancia Celestin, 21, whose family is Haitian, grew up in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area and ended up at George Mason University in northern Virginia. There, she’s a senior and also serves as president of the campus’s student group for first-generation college-goers. She is majoring in psychology and wants to work in education policy.

Celestin’s challenge is paying her share of an off-campus apartment. Her rent money came from a campus work study program in a testing center. When the campus shut down and shifted to online learning, her job evaporated. And while she has moved back home to Hampton Roads, she still owes rent and utilities. “I don’t have much choice other than paying it.” She is asking the leasing agent for a grace period on rent.

Paulina Pereira Miranda, who graduated from an IDEA high school in Texas, never imagined she’d attend school as far away as Kalamazoo College in Michigan, but that’s where she ended up — the result of a generous scholarship offer. Her biggest surprise about Kalamazoo: When she went to a Mexican restaurant there they served hard-shelled tacos that appeared to have come out of a box. “No, those are like fake,” she told her friends with a laugh.

Her mother is a house cleaner, her father a truck driver and she would be the first college graduate in her family. A freshman there, she was shocked by the sudden closure notice. “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.” Had IDEA not picked up her plane fare home, she guesses her father would have driven the roughly 1,273 miles — and back again — from Austin to Michigan to get her.

Not all universities are simply flushing out all their students. Many allow low-income students to stay. And the high schools that track their alumni, and arrange assistance, are proving to be lifelines.

But if those lifelines don’t broaden, the “B.A. Breakthrough” will become a sad retreat.

National Student Clearinghouse

School districts in high-income neighborhoods assume almost all their graduates will succeed in college. But often, their alumni fall short of expectations. Districts serving students in low-income neighborhoods cite their success in enrolling more students in college. But the number of their students who actually persist to earn degrees can be dismayingly low as well.

The only way for any school district to learn about actual college graduation rates for their alumni, and take steps to boost those rates, is to gather the data. And there’s only one source for that data: the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit located in Herndon, Virginia.

Michele Gralak, a senior business analyst for the clearinghouse who works with K-12 schools, spoke with us about the data they collect and the various ways schools use it to help their students. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What does the Clearinghouse offer high schools?

A: We can give them college enrollment and college degrees earned for their graduates. The schools give us their student data, including names and dates of birth, and we match that against our database supplied by colleges and universities. We let them know whether their graduates were continuously enrolled or stopped out. If they graduated from college, we can tell them where they graduated from, the state it’s in, whether it’s a two or four-year college and whether it was a public or private college.

A counselor or principal can find out if a student enrolled in the first year after graduation or the second year. And then the big key is persistence. Did they make it all the way through college to earn a degree? Our reports give educators data on outcomes eight years after leaving high school. Educators can also use the data to evaluate changes they made to their K-12 programming — did those changes boost college enrollment and persistence?

Do K-12 districts have any other source for this data?

No.

Doesn’t the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System give high school college counselors all the information they need to know about colleges, including their graduation rates?

IPEDS is a valuable resource about colleges. What the Clearinghouse tells K-12 educators is how their own students fared in college. For example, a college’s overall average graduation rate you see in IPEDS may be far higher or lower than the graduation rates for the students from your high school.

How much does it cost per year to get eight years of data on a school’s graduates?

$425 per school. It’s very low, and that speaks to our nonprofit status.

Many people think the Clearinghouse is more about tracking student loans than tracking student outcomes.

That goes back to the reason were created 26 years ago: to help the student loan community. It was a way the loan servicers, lenders and U.S. Department of Education could all know the current status of students — who could defer their loan payments, be eligible for more loans or if they had to start repaying the loan. But today, we track all students, not just students with loans. That gives us a powerful database to offer high schools, a database that tracks the postsecondary outcomes of their graduates.

How current is your data?

Colleges report several times a semester. Within the StudentTracker service, we set what we call effective dates in the fall, spring and summer that freeze the postsecondary data set so all high schools and districts get results based on the same data set.

I’ve heard that some school districts find it challenging to submit their data.

It’s simple information: We need the student’s name and date of birth. We ask for their high school code, and we need it in a certain format. So when you’re sending hundreds, possibly thousands, of names, it can be a little complex. It’s just some techy things that someone has to understand how to do, but you do it only once a year. It’s like when we do our taxes, once a year. It takes a while, because we’re not familiar with it. But once the data comes in, we do all the work.

To truly take advantage of what the Clearinghouse has to offer, don’t you have to send more than student names and date of births?

The basic report outcomes shed some good insight. But what makes the data most revealing is when school districts also send us information on gender, race/ethnicity, number of semesters of math and others —the demographic and academic data elements. Currently, districts that send us this extra data get one-dimensional reports broken out by these data elements. We have plans over the next couple of years to make that dynamic, so you could combine race and gender, or gender and poverty. We want to make it more interactive and dynamic.

How many districts send you that full data set?

About 20 percent. I wish more did. I think if they provided that information, they would be blown away by the results.

How many districts use at least some of your data?

About 13,000 schools receive our StudentTracker data, most of them every year. One advantage for districts is that they can compare outcomes for their students to the students we research for our annual Benchmarks analysis, which is free and available to everyone. But if you have StudentTracker data, you can determine, for example, how your male students, or female/Hispanic students, for example, fare compared with this national sample.

High school principals might want this data for one reason, college counselors for other reasons, right?

Yes, a principal looks at this differently than a guidance counselor. The student-level detail is extremely helpful for a counselor because they have a relationship with the student and want to know how particular students they counseled did after they left high school. Principals may be particularly interested in the aggregate counts, how entire graduating classes compare. Are the college-going rates rising over time, is their college persistence rate rising? That’s helpful to track the impact of any new programs or policies — are they working?

In Riverside, California, for example, several years ago, school officials launched a program to get far more students to complete the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). By using StudentTracker data, they could see that after this program started, their college-going rate increased, along with their college persistence rate. That was a powerful story. And that leads to other questions: What other programs do you have at your school that might have an impact on improving college outcomes?

The top charter school networks use Clearinghouse data to tweak their instructional programs to boost college success rates. Is it rare to see a traditional school district doing the same?

That’s pretty unique.

What is the Clearinghouse doing to make these reports more user-friendly for school districts that lack data experts? Currently, many districts lean on nonprofit partners to help with that.

Our goal is to make it easier to submit student data to us, and then make it easier to get the data back. In the short term, we’re creating a new report, calling it the Top 25 Institutions. These are the 25 top colleges that a high school’s graduates first attended. This report will track whether their students remained at these schools for the second year, whether they transferred and whether they got a degree. I think that’s going to be easier for school districts to read and get good intelligence from. That should be available in early April.

This is data that you don’t need data experts to digest?

I believe so, yes.

Beyond school districts, you also work with nonprofits, right?

Yes. A lot of organizations get federal funding to provide programs to help at-risk students succeed in college. The big ones are Trio and Gear Up. We work closely with a lot of them. They need to do reporting on their grants, so they will use StudentTracker to find out how many of their students go to college and then complete.

Most traditional school districts resist taking on postsecondary success as one of their missions. They prefer to focus on college readiness and high school graduation rates. Do you see any trends that indicate changes in attitudes?

At the local, state and federal levels, we’re seeing legislation that says to schools: Show us your results. Show us your impact. And we’re seeing businesses saying, “We need graduates with these kinds of skills.” This data is how you demonstrate that.

Richard Whitmire is the author of several books, most recently “The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Queen Kwembe, a student in UCLA’s summer transfer program, finds family issues, not academics, the biggest obstacle in completing college. (Photo: Richard Whitmire)

This is an excerpt from the new Richard Whitmire book The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America. See more excerpts, profiles, commentaries, videos and additional data behind the book at The74Million.org/Breakthrough.

Standing outside a lecture hall on a hot August Tuesday here at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ramses Denis-Romero looks like the UCLA underclassman he longs to be but isn’t yet. Denis-Romero was on campus to attend a six-week summer program for community college students aspiring to transfer to a selective four-year university such as UCLA. His story is similar to those of many of the community college students here on this day: Born in California’s Central Valley, Denis-Romero is the son of a field worker who, over the years, worked his way up to dishwasher at a restaurant and finally, today, manager of a tire store in Tulare, outside of Fresno. It’s a decent job, but Denis-Romero’s father has many less well-off relatives in Mexico who depend on his steady income, so there’s not a lot of money to spare for his son’s college education. That’s how Denis-Romero ended up at the College of the Sequoias, a community college in Visalia. He’s talented at math and science and aspires to be a doctor, but achieving that dream probably depends on winning a transfer spot within the prestigious University of California system. UCLA, in fact, would be the ultimate dream.

For most of his life, Denis-Romero has felt like he’s one step behind. Early in high school he knew little about college, so his lackluster 2.6 grade point average didn’t seem to matter. When he finally figured out the importance of college and learned what it took to land a spot there, he signed up for Advanced Placement courses and boosted his GPA. By senior year, he had an A average, but it was too late to improve his overall high school average much. “I feel like I’m always playing a catch-up game against everyone who has always known what they want to do in life.”

Denis-Romero’s dreams count, but what matters more about these summer programs at UCLA for community college students like him is that they represent the nation’s best shot at dramatically increasing the number of low-income students who walk away with four-year degrees.

Community colleges as a solution for turning around low college success rates for low-income minority students? Sounds odd. Anyone taking a hard look at why so many low-income students fail at higher education is tempted to view community colleges as bad actors. When researching The Alumni, I recall sitting down with leaders from L.A.- based Alliance College-Ready Public Schools and being told that well below 10 percent of their alumni who enter local community colleges end up with a bachelor’s degree. Just to make sure I heard that correctly, I had them repeat the numbers. But as I made my way around the country to visit other charter school networks, I heard similar grim numbers. Community colleges, I concluded, were pretty much dead ends for any student hoping to end up with a four-year degree.

And California community colleges? Among the worst. In 2017, California’s Campaign for College Opportunity released its “Transfer Maze” report saying it took an average of 6.5 years for a community college transfer student to earn a bachelor’s from a University of California campus, seven years from a California State University campus. Additionally, those transfer students pay an extra $36,000 to $38,000 to get their degrees. “It took me longer than it should have to transfer because I was taking all these courses unaware that they weren’t transferable to a U.C. system,” said one student quoted in the report. Plus, community colleges in California, and across the country, are famous for pushing black and Hispanic students into remedial courses that throw them off a degree-earning track.

It wasn’t until I came across the American Talent Initiative that I began to see things differently. What Dan Porterfield started doing at Franklin & Marshall College is going national with the initiative, which Porterfield will promote as the new president of the Aspen Institute. Aspen has partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies and Ithaka S+R, a higher education consulting firm, to run the program. The goal: graduate an additional 50,000 lower-income students at some 290 colleges and universities with excellent college success records — those that consistently graduate at least 70 percent of their students in six years. Closely connected to the effort is Bloomberg’s CollegePoint, which offers free college counseling to students who lack it.

The initiative focuses on a lot more than community college transfers, but the community college transfer system might be one of its most promising ideas. To explain why, Josh Wyner, who runs the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, points to the “Hoxby kids,” the now well-known group of students uncovered by economists Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner, from Stanford University and the University of Virginia, respectively. They found that the majority of high-achieving, low-income students never apply to even a single competitive college.

There are approximately 12,500 high school students with a grade point average above 3.7 and high test scores who are “mismatched” every year, applying to colleges well beneath their potential. Those students, the “Hoxby kids,” have since been targeted by top colleges and universities trying to make amends. But in fact, there’s a bigger potential change afoot from promising community college students. “There are 15,000 graduating community college students every year with a 3.7 GPA,” said Wyner, “and they’re not just mismatched; they’re not matched at all. They’re not going to a four-year college.” Find a way to pull those talented students into top colleges, the places likely to ensure they will come away with bachelor’s degrees, and suddenly you have a surge in the number of low-income minority students winning degrees. You have The B.A. Breakthrough.

Elite UCLA embraces community college transfers

The champion of transfers here at UCLA is a ponytailed, earring-wearing experienced educator, Alfred Herrera, who spent 18 years in the undergraduate admissions department before founding the Center for Community College Partnerships. What started out small has grown to the point where the partnership now runs 11 programs, ranging from one day to six weeks, and in the summer of 2018 was serving 700 students. At UCLA, they learn the ins and outs of transferring, get a taste of college academics and, while staying in college dorms, a feel for what life could be like from inside a prestigious university. In addition, UCLA has developed partnerships with four local community colleges focused on increasing access to four-year universities, and will be expanding to other community colleges in the near future. These partnerships are focused at all levels — administrative, faculty, staff, and students — and are aimed at creating strong transfer programs to open the pipeline for deserving students.

Community colleges, says Herrera, are an important conduit for students, “particularly when you look at students who don’t have equal access to college prep. So, if we’re looking for students to come from inner city schools, students who don’t have the preparation they need to figure out how to get to a university, this is a good way.” Herrera gets plenty of support from UCLA chancellor Gene Block, who has embraced the American Talent Initiative mission of growing the enrollment of low-income students.

“One thing about being a first-generation student is that every lesson learned is learned the hardest way possible.”

—Queen Kwembe,  a student in UCLA’s summer transfer program

The goal in this community college initiative is to give these promising students a leg up to transfer to a top-run university, part of the University of California system, maybe even UCLA or Berkeley, the premier campuses. Usually, if these community college students transfer, it’s to the less prestigious California State University system (Cal State). What’s playing out appears to be working: Among students who participate in the summer program, the admittance rate to UCLA is 65 percent. That compares with its overall admittance rate of 25 percent.

What was striking about the students I interviewed, who were part of a STEM group, is that handling the more advanced academics at a place such as UCLA — the concern I was expecting — was the least of their worries. Classwork they get. Juggling chaotic personal lives — that’s the real challenge. Take Queen Kwembe as an example. A native of South Africa, she moved to the United States six years ago and graduated from high school in Anaheim, California. She tried Hawaii Pacific University but transferred to a California community college, Cyprus College, after just one year, in part for financial reasons and partly because she wasn’t sure what to study. “I didn’t want to waste the time and money.”

Kwembe told me what the others said, in different words. In high school, they didn’t know one college from another. Just like Denis-Romero, Kwembe feels she was always playing catch-up. “One thing about being a first-generation student is that every lesson learned is learned the hardest way possible. It’s like you hit a bunch of brick walls before you realize that the door is right over there. It’s like trying to find your way in a dark room.” Now, however, she gets it: Going to a top university, she realizes, is her best pathway to a bright future.

The biggest impediment she faces? Not academics, but family issues. Kwembe and her sister help support both her father and an unstable brother. Home, she says with a deadpan voice, “is not a conducive learning environment.” Looking at the lives of some of her friends who come from two-parent households with few financial problems, such stability seems a world away. “Having to pay rent and focus on school and what you want to achieve is challenging.”

Another student there that day was Estrella Rodriguez. She grew up in Cudahy, a small, very high-poverty city in Los Angeles County. Her father died when she was 13. “There was a lot of gang violence in my community, which was distracting, but after high school I went to Cal State L.A. for one year. I had no mentoring; I didn’t know what classes to take. I was just lost.”

So Rodriguez dropped out of college and began working at a donut shop. “The next thing I knew, I was pregnant, and that really motivated me to go back to school. So I entered a program for youth who are at risk, and they helped me go back to school, at East Los Angeles College.” She was pregnant the first semester and still earned straight A’s. Her daughter was born in the fall of 2014. Then came a downward turn, with domestic violence issues, and she dropped one class and suffered from depression.

“Everything has been challenging, because I’m not sure if my mental health will affect where I’m going, or whether it will even be possible.” Then she found the Center for Community College Partnerships and won a spot at a four-day program for aspiring STEM students. Her goal is to one day get a degree in microbiology.

As with the other students, her most daunting challenges are personal, not academic. “I’ve never had a stable home, always bounced around, renting rooms here and there. Being financially stable is a big problem for me because I don’t have any support from anybody. My mom is a widow and can’t work. It’s really hard for me to just rely on scholarships and financial aid that I receive. It’s so little. That’s really hard.”

Paulina Palomino, who directs the transfer center at East Los Angeles College, a two-year college that is nearly entirely Hispanic and is one of UCLA’s close partners in the program, said survival is the most pressing concern of students and their families. “That’s what it is, survival. Every family here is an integral part to the family’s survival. Senior members of the family may need caring for; it’s a variety of things. And it’s very common for the students themselves to be the voice of the family in navigating different institutions, especially medical care. They know the language, and family members depend on their presence.”

Students who transfer to a university outside their neighborhood, such as a University of California campus in San Francisco, Merced, or Riverside, are considered lost to the family’s fragile existence. The result: students are more likely to transfer locally, probably to a Cal State campus, despite that diminishing their odds of earning a degree. “We have conferences where we bring the parents in and tell them how important it is to support their child through their journey so they will be successful,” Palomino said. This is a national problem, not just a California problem.

Why selective colleges look down on transfer students

So if bumping up community college transfers to a top-tier university looks like a silver bullet, why isn’t it being done? Just to put things into perspective, at highly selective colleges and universities, transfers, especially from lightly regarded community colleges, are not common. In a much publicized move in the spring of 2018, Princeton University announced it had just accepted its first transfer students since a moratorium on transfers began in 1990. The elite university gave itself a pat on the back and issued this statement, which made me think of a favorite professor who always described such utterances as “penetrating glimpses into the obvious.” “Experience at other universities shows that transfer programs can provide a vehicle to attract students with diverse backgrounds and experiences, such as qualified military veterans and students from low-income backgrounds, including some who might begin their careers at community colleges.” True enough, but why so little so late?

The number of transfers Princeton settled on: 13. The number of community college transfer students UCLA accepts every year: roughly 4,000. Of those, about 3,000 enroll. What’s happening here, which is a rarity, just doesn’t happen elsewhere at this scale, not even at the fellow elite UC Berkeley. Why?

Here’s the rather obvious “secret” why colleges and universities for decades performed miserably with first-generation students, admitting too few and doing far too little to ensure their success. It’s because colleges are conditioned to exclude, not include, students. “Status is more and more based on how many people you don’t serve,” Scott Ralls, president of Northern Virginia Community College (who in the spring of 2019 took a new job as president of a community college in North Carolina), told a gathering at the Aspen Institute. Exclusion, which requires building up massive numbers of applicants and admitting few, makes them look highly selective. That, in turn, draws in top-scoring students, who boost the colleges’ standing on rankings such as the U.S. News & World Report listings — not to mention their bottom line, given that those same students are likely to come from wealthy families who can afford to pony up full tuition, and make those wonderful donations to boot.

There are other reasons why selective colleges and universities look down on transfers. Elite universities like to think they “build” their students from the ground up, meaning you’re not really a Harvard or a Princeton graduate unless you start there your freshman year. And even if some transfer students are allowed, those from community colleges are generally spurned. I mean, aren’t community college students there because they muffed high school? At a conference I attended at the Aspen Institute in Washington about community college transfers, I heard one higher education expert refer to it as the “private college disease.”

Private colleges, however, are not the only exclusivity snobs. At that same conference, I heard George Mason University president Ángel Cabrera talk about the resistance he ran across while trying to expand his school’s community college transfers. Many of the professors and administrators at Mason, he said, wanted to push Mason more in the direction of the elite University of Virginia, which, like most top public universities, basks in the aura of exclusivity. Aligning more with Northern Virginia Community College, he was advised, was moving the other way. It was never uttered directly out loud, he said, but it was the “unspoken tone” of many conversations. Cabrera ignored their advice and instead tapped the accelerator on transfers.

A breakthrough model in northern Virginia

For years, UCLA has been the national leader in promoting transfers to a four-year university. In the fall of 2018, however, a partnership launched in the sprawling Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., that in years to come is likely to match and perhaps exceed what UCLA does. The two players are Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), one of the largest and most respected two-year colleges in the country, and George Mason, one of the country’s fastest-growing universities. For years, the two have cooperated on transfers: Each year, roughly 3,000 NOVA students transfer to Mason, and those transfers have a remarkable success record: Within four years of arriving at Mason, 74 percent of those transfers earn bachelor’s degrees, slightly above the success rate for freshmen entering Mason, which is measured at the six-year mark.

Good, but not good enough, concluded NOVA president Ralls and Mason president Cabrera. The two presidents are close. On the first day his appointment was announced, Ralls got a call from Cabrera, and the two have breakfast together monthly. What got launched was a new initiative, called Advance, that works like this: An incoming NOVA freshman declares a major (let’s use cybersecurity as an example; currently, 21 majors are options) and then is assigned a “success coach,” trained by both NOVA and Mason, who lays out a pathway that guarantees that essential courses are taken, both courses related to cybersecurity and the required general education courses. That gets around the huge problem of community college students taking courses that don’t get accepted when they transfer to a four-year university — a waste of money these students don’t have. At the end of the two years at NOVA, that same success coach guides the student at Mason, putting them on track to graduate in four years, assuming they attend college full time. The savings to the student by starting out at NOVA is significant: about $16,000, or 30 percent of the overall tuition bill.

The first 129 Advance students started in the fall of 2018. By the year 2023, the most conservative estimate holds that 8,000 students will be in the program. But Michelle Marks, who oversees Advance, believes the numbers will be far larger, perhaps in the 30 to 50 percent range of all of NOVA’s 75,000 students. Why? Because NOVA students have every incentive to sign up. Why wouldn’t they?

“They don’t come to us for our degrees. They come to us to get to a better place for them and their families.”

—Scott Ralls, former president of Northern Virginia Community College

The reasons to expand transfers, Cabrera told the Aspen Institute gathering, go beyond trying to reverse social inequities. It’s what the major employers in Northern Virginia want, he said, pointing to the presence of both the CEO and president of Northrop Grumman, a global aerospace and defense technology company, at the press event announcing Advance. “The top employers of our region are constantly hitting us that we’re not producing enough talent. You know, we need 3,000 more cybersecurity folks, so this is a talent solution, and everybody gets that.”

Avoiding, and mishandling, transfers, said Marks, is “one of the largest failures in higher education.” Among students entering NOVA, 80 percent say they want to earn a bachelor’s degree, but only 20 percent actually do. The potential leap in numbers is huge. “We’re designing a new kind of program that will be a single institutional experience,” said Marks. “It could be a commonwealth model and a national model.”

Ralls from NOVA agrees. “For over 20 years, I’ve worked in community colleges that have helped thousands of students. When I ask why they came here, never has one said, ‘When I was a little girl, I dreamed of always having an associate’s degree.’ They don’t come to us for our degrees. They come to us to get to a better place for them and their families, which means they’re trying to get to a career where the next stop is either the university or into a job … That’s why, for us, when we look at success, we should try to see how many students after six years have a bachelor’s degree, not just an associate’s degree.”

What’s already working at UCLA, and launched in Northern Virginia, is a breakthrough model.

Are UCLA, George Mason University, and Northern Virginia Community College alone here? Hardly. The American Talent Initiative has many partners willing to help out in achieving the goal of graduating an additional 50,000 low-income students at the 296 college and universities that currently graduate at least 70 percent of their students within six years. And over three years, the University Innovation Alliance, a national coalition of 11 public research universities with the goal of increasing diversity, says it has boosted the number of low-income graduates by 25 percent, which translates to another 6,000 graduates per year.

The University of Texas at Austin is a notable standout, having committed to improving its once-low graduation rate for high-poverty students.4 The university uses predictive analytics to identify more than 2,000 first-year students who need extra support. That support program offers financial scholarships, academic counseling, and peer mentoring. It’s resulted in a dramatic spike in college success rates, with the percentage of first-generation students graduating in four years rising from 41 percent in 2012 to 61.5 percent in 2018.

By creating programs that track students in trouble and offer grants for miscellaneous expenses, Georgia State University is yet another pioneer in making college work for low-income students.

Fighting the isolation of first-generation students

A striking story from researching The Alumni series involved a Dartmouth camping trip and was told to my by Yaritza Gonzalez, who was born in California to parents who picked strawberries when she was young and later moved to Inglewood near the LAX airport, where they work as restaurant servers. English was not the first language for many of the people who grew up in Gonzalez’s neighborhood, and the schools she attended were heavily Hispanic. But after graduating as salutatorian from a Green Dot charter high school, Gonzalez won a full scholarship to Dartmouth, where she was immediately immersed in a primarily white, privileged culture.

Dartmouth College’s get-to-know-you freshman traditions can feel completely foreign to some first-generation students. (Photo: Dartmouth College)

The first shock came after showing up for the traditional outdoor get-to-know-your-classmates adventure at Dartmouth. She ended up on a strenuous hiking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “I never really hiked before in my life. My parents never really took me or they didn’t have time because of work. A lot of my classmates had been Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. They had done this before, so they were pretty prepared with the equipment, the hiking boots, everything. I had to buy new hiking boots and hadn’t been able to break them in. And I had to borrow some equipment from the college, which was kind of broken. So the experience was not the best. I definitely learned a lot and I challenged my mental capacity to just keep going even though I was all the way in the back most of the time.”

Whenever she was asked to talk about her background, she found stunned silence among her classmates. “They weren’t being mean, they just had no way of relating. Better to say nothing than something inappropriate.” In classwork, she had to fight what nearly all first-generation students experience: the lure of isolation, the reluctance to build a campus community, the fear of asking for help. “Many [first-generation] students are intimidated to ask a professor for help or an extension,” she said. “We feel like we’re being judged, that it would show we’re not prepared, that we can’t handle the rigor.”

Before The B.A. Breakthrough reaches a true tipping point, students such as Yaritza Gonzalez have to be fully welcomed at colleges, including on the freshman get-to-know-you backpacking trips. In East Los Angeles, it’s an accepted fact that backpacking is not a neighborhood sport. At Dartmouth, this may be considered a revelation.

WATCH: Why America needs a ‘B.A. Breakthrough’ — and how ending diploma disparities could become the most effective anti-poverty program in history https://t.co/xFfKdlCepe pic.twitter.com/0oNH3zuBvq

— The 74 (@The74) April 9, 2019

This is an excerpt from the new Richard Whitmire book The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America. See more excerpts, profiles, commentaries, videos and additional data behind the book at The74Million.org/Breakthrough.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation funded a writing fellowship that helped produce The B.A. Breakthrough and provides financial support to The 74, the parent of LA School Report.

A group of Noble Network’s college-bound seniors. (Photo: Richard Whitmire)

A fresh look at the college success records at KIPP and other major charter networks serving low-income students shows alumni earning bachelor’s degrees at rates up to four times higher than the 11 percent rate expected for that student population.

The ability of the high-performing networks to make good on the promise their founders made to struggling parents years ago — Send us your kids and we will get them to and through college — was something I first reported on two years ago in The Alumni. Writing the new book I’m about to publish, The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending the Diploma Disparity Can Change the Face of America, provided the chance to go back and revisit those results. (You can track B.A. Breakthrough updates here.)

The baseline comparison number is slightly different but still dismal — just 11 percent of low-income students will graduate from college within six years — while for the big, nonprofit charter networks that serve high-poverty, minority students in Los Angeles and other major cities, the rates range from somewhat better to four times better and, in some cases, even higher.

• Read more: Inside ‘The B.A. Breakthrough’: Richard Whitmire’s New Book Uncovers a Sea Change of Success Happening for First-Generation College Graduates

The improved chances of earning a degree held while the ranks of charter alumni grew and the data became more robust. In some cases, the numbers are getting stronger and at least one prominent network, Uncommon Schools, predicts its graduates will close the college completion gap with affluent students in the next several years and surpass it a few years after that.

“Our mission is to get students to graduate from college, and that has influenced everything we do while we have students in elementary, middle, and high school,” said Uncommon CEO Brett Peiser. “We’ve learned a lot about what works in helping students succeed in college and everyone is focused on that goal.”

Ever since the first charter school got launched in Minnesota 27 years ago, educators watching the experiment have asked the same question: What lessons do they offer traditional school districts? Now, we may have that answer: Greatly improved odds that their alumni will earn college degrees.

Assuming that the charter completion rates persist, there’s a reasonable chance that their lessons-learned could transform the way traditional school districts see their obligations to their graduates: How do they fare in college, and what effective methods from the charters could they start adopting to improve their outcomes later in life? Currently, almost no traditional districts, including LAUSD, track their alumni through college.

All these issues get laid out in The B.A. Breakthrough. The book’s theme: The college success strategies pioneered by these charter networks are combining with entrepreneurial programs to spread data-driven college advising to high school students who lack it and with a growing commitment from colleges and universities to embrace low-income, first-generation students and ensure they walk away with degrees despite their vulnerabilities. Together these efforts add up to a breakthrough.

The charter network leg of the breakthrough

Given that college success is measured at the six-year mark, only recently has it become possible to evaluate the charter networks. In 2017, The 74 published a first-ever look at those rates as part of its series, The Alumni.

As with that project, the 11 percent college success rate used for comparison comes from The Pell Institute. That statistic provides an imprecise measurement, however, because it doesn’t take into account that most of these charter students are not just low-income, but also minority students living in urban neighborhoods whose college completion odds are even more daunting.

Comparing college graduation rates across charter networks is not easily done. KIPP, for example, tracks all alumni who completed eighth grade with KIPP, regardless of whether they go onto a KIPP high school. That puts KIPP in a category by itself. The other networks use the traditional approach of tracking only their high school graduates.

Even among the charter networks that track their high schoolers from graduation day, there are significant variations. While all the networks draw on the same foundational source, the National Student Clearinghouse, which matches the IDs of high school graduates to enrolled college students, some networks invest in their own tracking system, which picks up students missed by the Clearinghouse system. That makes their data more accurate, and likely to produce higher rates.

Given the complexities, I divide the charter data into three groups:

Category 1 — Tracking from eighth grade, record-keeping that KIPP says is necessary to account for dropouts:

KIPP (national): As of the fall of 2017, KIPP had 3,200 alumni who were six years out of high school. The network’s national college completion rate is 36 percent for all alumni who completed eighth grade at a KIPP school and 45 percent for those who graduated from a KIPP high school. That counts students who entered a KIPP high school in ninth grade and stayed a year or more. In the national group, another 5 percent earned two-year degrees; in the group that graduated from a KIPP high school, another 6 percent earned two-year degrees.

Category 2 — Networks that use both Clearinghouse and internal tracking data:

Uplift Education (North Texas): Thirty-seven percent of the 1,075 graduates of the classes of 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 earned a bachelor’s degree within six years. When associate’s degrees are included, that climbs to 40 percent. If calculated just on the classes of 2011 and 2012, the rate would be 57 percent.

Uncommon Schools (New Jersey and New York): Fifty-four percent of their alumni earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Among those, 39 percent earn a bachelor’s within four years. Drawing on data that tracks students currently enrolled, Uncommon predicts that it will close the college graduation gap with high-income students (58 percent) in the next few years. Within six years, Uncommon expects to hit a success rate of 70 percent.

DSST Public Schools (Denver): Among the 1,075 alumni, starting with the class of 2011, half earned bachelor’s degrees within six years.

YES Prep (Houston): Among the 974 alumni six years out, 48 percent have either a two- or four-year degree. The network was unable to break out the differences.

Category 3 — Charter networks that rely solely on National Student Clearinghouse data:

Green Dot Public Schools (California): Green Dot has 6,601 alumni from the classes of 2004-2012. Of those, 14 percent earned bachelor’s degrees by the six-year mark. Another 15 percent completed two-year degrees. (Green Dot has a less aggressive college success program than other networks, and as seen in its absorption of the failing Locke High School in Watts, takes on significant challenges.)

Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (California):  At Alliance, 610 of their 2,617 alumni have reached the six-year point. Of those, 23 percent have earned four-year degrees. When two-year degrees are added in, the percentage rises to 27.

Aspire Public Schools (California and Tennessee): Aspire has 619 alumni from the classes of 2007-2012 who have reached the six-year point. Of those, 26 percent earned bachelor’s degrees, a rate that rises to 36 percent when associate’s degrees and certificates are included.

Noble Network of Charter Schools (Chicago): Noble has 2,259 alumni who are six years or more out of high school. Among that group, 35 percent have bachelor’s degrees, 7 percent have associate’s and another 9 percent are still in college.

Achievement First (New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island): There were 74 alumni from the classes of 2010-12. Of those, 34 percent earned bachelor’s degrees within six years. Another 2 percent earned associate’s degrees.

IDEA Public Schools: (Texas, Louisiana): At IDEA, 508 alumni have reached the six-year mark. Of those, 38 percent earned a bachelor’s. Another 4 percent earned associate’s degrees in that time. (Another 2 percent earned either a bachelor’s degree or an associate’s, but it’s unclear which due to reporting issues.) The network says it is experiencing steady improvements: Whereas only 31 percent of 2009 IDEA graduates completed college in six years, 50 percent of its 2012 graduates did.

Single charter schools:

There are a few solo charters, not part of networks, with significant numbers of alumni who have passed the six-year mark.

One example from Boston, a city which has some of the longest-running charters, is Boston Collegiate Charter School. There, 51 percent of the 177 alumni six years out earned a bachelor’s degree; another 8 percent earned two-year degrees. The school appears to be experiencing sharp increases in success rates: For the class of 2014, 79 percent graduated from college within four years.

More on the data

Consider this an early take on the promise charters made to offer better odds on college success. For many of the networks, the number of alumni who have reached the six-year mark is modest. We’ll know more as larger classes graduate and reach that milestone.

Comparing the networks is difficult because some use internal tracking systems that pick up students missed by the Clearinghouse. For example, networks using only Clearinghouse data miss students exercising their privacy rights, known as “FERPA blocks” for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. That shields their college transcripts from outside review. In a time when immigration issues are contentious and parents (and some students) could face deportation, FERPA blocks are an attractive option for families. The number of blocks varies greatly by region, with few on the East Coast exercising the option and as high as 6 percent of all students attending West Coast colleges opting to shield their records, according to the Clearinghouse..

Translation: Charter networks such as IDEA Public Schools, with many of its schools located in Texas border towns, that also rely on only the Clearinghouse data, are likely to show lower success rates.

• Read more: 74 Interview: IDEA Schools COO Irma Muñoz, on Being a Living ‘Proof Point’ for Undocumented Students
  

Also tricky: When comparing the charter alumni to the broader student population, what’s the right comparison number to choose? The 11 percent Pell number I’m using should be viewed as a rough marker. First, that makes the denominator all low-income students — not just low-income high school graduates — which suggests the 11 percent figure is low. But the fact that most of these networks enroll minority students from urban neighborhoods suggests 11 percent is high because the Pell number would include low-income Asian and white students, who across income levels have higher college graduation rates than black and Hispanic students. Bottom line: The 11 percent emerges as a useful if imprecise comparison figure.

Watching a network do the math

By necessity, all the college graduation data is self-reported. Outcome figures from the National Student Clearinghouse, which is private, are proprietary to the networks, which pay the Clearinghouse for the information. For the sake of transparency, I asked one network, Uncommon Schools, to open up its books for me so I could observe both processes, the Clearinghouse data combined with its own tracking data.

In April 2018, I met Ken Herrera, Uncommon’s senior director of data analytics, in Newark at North Star Academy Charter School. There, Herrera clicked on his laptop and showed me a listing of alumni. For privacy reasons, the students had been “de-identified” and showed up only as numbers on the modified Salesforce (the customized business software Uncommon and other networks use to track their alumni) program. Twice a year, said Herrera, usually in March and October, Uncommon sends a list of alumni names and their dates of birth to the Clearinghouse for tracking. Why just some? Because Uncommon saves money by omitting names of alumni who, for example, already had their college graduation confirmed through a university. In about two weeks, the Clearinghouse sends back an Excel sheet with the information it collected on the asked-about students: where they are in school and what term — fall semester, for example — they are in.

If Herrera sees a “no match,” which happens about 10 percent of the time, he and the counselors investigate. At networks that don’t track alumni individually, that student would be counted as a dropout. When digging into it further, Uncommon finds out whether they truly have dropped out by contacting the university or the family or the student, whatever means is available. They also track down whether it’s just a matter of entering the wrong birth date or a name mixup, such as a nickname used when enrolling in college. If it is just a bookkeeping issue, the counselors request a copy of the college transcript so the error can get fixed.

Another reason for the “no match” might be the FERPA block, which prompts the Uncommon team to contact the students and convince them to unblock their records. Some universities make records disclosure an opt-in process, done every semester, which makes life especially difficult for Herrera, because if the student fails to take action the default status is a FERPA block.

In early April each year, Herrera meets with the counseling team to sort out data omissions, a painstaking, student-by-student process. “We’ll say, ‘This is what the Clearinghouse says about the student, here’s what Salesforce says about the student. What are we going to do about this conflict?’” That leads to a counselor personally investigating: Where is the student? When all the data issues get settled, Uncommon can calculate its college success figure.

Now the trickier issue: Unlike most other networks, Uncommon predicts where its college success rate is headed. Here’s what Uncommon predicts, as noted above: In roughly six years, the college success rate will rise to about 70 percent. Given that 70 percent exceeds the rate for well-off white students, that’s a remarkable prediction. What’s it based on? Uncommon tracks its alumni by cohorts, so it can establish a historical rate for, let’s say, how many students drop out between their freshman and sophomore year in college.

“When we look at each of those (dropout points) we can predict where an individual cohort is going, based on those historical rates, and predict what we think their graduation rate is going to be,” Herrera said.

Currently, Uncommon is seeing significant improvements, such as half the historical rate of dropouts between the sophomore and junior years. Also an issue: Uncommon is growing: by the year 2022, they project 1,000 graduates a year, compared to the roughly 400 current graduates. That also figures into the math, because younger cohorts, which are showing better persistence rates, have a bigger impact on the overall college success math. The newer cohort, for example, is showing a 50 percent success rate at the four-year mark (older cohorts only achieved that at the six-year mark). Thus the prediction: 70 percent overall success rate within six years.

So why the improved persistence? Most of that, says Herrera, comes from strengthening the high school curriculum and programs such as Target 3.0, a mandatory class to boost the grade point averages for all students with a GPA less than 2.5.

“What we found, perhaps unsurprisingly to many people, but I think really profoundly for us, was that students with higher GPAs were more likely to graduate from college,” he said. “When we cut the data, getting above a 3.0 GPA (in high school) was very significantly correlated with future college success.”

Where all this leads

Yes, it is early to be judging college success among these networks, but not premature. There are thousands of alumni in these calculations, and their academic outcomes are crucial. If their success persists, and more importantly, if their lessons-learned are picked up by the far larger traditional school districts, we could be looking at one of the most successful anti-poverty programs ever seen in this country.

There’s no guarantee it will happen, but the seeds are there, all explained in the upcoming The B.A. Breakthrough.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation funded a writing fellowship that helped produce “The B.A. Breakthrough” and provides financial support to The 74, the parent of LA School Report.

About a decade ago, 15 years into the public charter school movement, a few of the nation’s top charter networks quietly upped the ante on their own strategic goals. No longer was it sufficient to keep students “on track” to college. Nor was it enough to enroll 100 percent of your graduates in colleges.

What mattered, concluded the charter leaders, was getting your students through college — ensuring they earned a four-year bachelor’s degree within six years of graduating from high school.

Hold us accountable, the educators said, for how our kids do once they leave us, marking a remarkable paradigm shift in the way charter schools define success.

The initial spark may have happened in the 2008–09 school year, when KIPP realized its graduates were struggling in college. The network changed the name of its college success program from “KIPP To College” to “KIPP Through College” — a seemingly small tweak that signaled huge changes ahead.

The Alumni: A New Paradigm in Charter Network Success — Graduating College

Uncommon Schools was hearing similar feedback from its alumni, who faced financial challenges, struggled with being away from home, and felt uncomfortable at predominantly white colleges. Changes were required to ensure alumni not only gained access to college but actually earned degrees.

So Uncommon Schools moved in the same direction as KIPP, and other charter networks followed. The shift is yet another example of the intense sharing of best practices between America’s top charter networks, as documented in The Founders.

Today, the college graduation goal has been widely adopted, even by many single-site charters. At the small, relatively new Boston Prep, which serves students in grades 6-12, for example, classes are referred to not by the year students will graduate from high school, but the year they expect students to graduate from college. Next month, incoming sixth-graders will begin introducing themselves as the Class of 2028.

For several reasons, this dramatic strategic shift has drawn limited attention outside the charter school world, in part because to outsiders it seems to be a cross between brash and outlandish.

For starters, the proof of achieving the goal seemed nonexistent, at least at the time. Many charter networks were first launched only with elementary grades, and were too new to even conceptualize future alumni who could become college graduates.

Another reason the new goal has drawn so little attention is the common acceptance that students and the colleges they attend — not the students’ high schools, or even middle schools, in some cases — are responsible for whether those students earn college degrees.

But the charter networks are sticking to their new strategic goals, despite skepticism that high schools should be held responsible for whether their graduates earn college degrees. KIPP kids, CEO Richard Barth told me, are like family. You don’t just let family members leave home without helping them achieve their future goals.

At most, traditional high schools publish “college readiness” reports. In California, for example, parents can learn how many students at their local high school met the “A-G” course requirements required by the University of California system.

Many traditional high schools and private schools also grade themselves by calculating the number of their graduates accepted into colleges — but then rarely follow up to ensure that those students even enroll in their freshman year of college, let alone complete their studies to earn degrees.

Problem is, the traditional high school measures of college readiness are crude, as seen by the shockingly high number of incoming college freshmen who require remedial coursework before they are even allowed to take for-credit courses — a fault that leads to millions of degree-earning failures.

(Credit: The Pell Institute)

This makes the new goal set by the major charter school networks, to grade themselves on the percentage of their students who go on to earn four-year college degrees in six years, all the more radical — especially given the fact that these networks educate low-income, minority students, whose college graduation rates pale in comparison to their more affluent white peers — a mere 9 percent earning degrees within six years, compared with 77 percent of students from high-income families as of 2015.

If public and private high schools across the country catch on, this seemingly small ideological tweak in the charter sector has the potential to transform the entire American education system.

A LOFTY GOAL

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to start answering the question of whether that goal is achievable.

We identified nine large charter networks with enough alumni to roughly calculate degree-earning success rates. Chicago-based Noble Network of Charter Schools, for example, has more than 10,300 alumni, 1,444 of them past the six-year mark. Other networks have far fewer at the six-year point, but a sufficient number to measure meaningfully.

At this point in time, the quality of the data available for tracking their progress ranges from rough estimates to moderately precise, with the bulk coming from the non-government National Student Clearinghouse, which matches high school, college, and other identifier records to track students as they progress through higher education. The charter networks purchase the data from the Clearinghouse.

To account for imperfections in the Clearinghouse data, some charter networks also use internal tracking systems to ensure no student falls through the cracks. Others rely solely on the raw Clearinghouse numbers and don’t have systems in place to track on top of the Clearinghouse.

Another important notation about the data, which we explore in greater detail here, has to do with the denominator.

KIPP New Orleans (Photo credit: KIPP)

KIPP is a fervent believer that college graduation cohort data should be tracked from ninth grade — not 12th grade, the starting point that the other charter networks included in this study use.

For students who attend KIPP middle schools, KIPP tracks them when they graduate from eighth grade to ensure they are kept track of, regardless of whether they go to a KIPP high school.

For students who go to non-KIPP middle schools and start attending KIPP as high schoolers, they track them when they start ninth grade.

The problem with starting in 12th grade, argues KIPP, is that it could tempt schools to push out weaker students during high school years, thus allowing the stronger students to boost the schools’ college-going and college-completion rates.

KIPP may be right. But in The Alumni, where KIPP is the only network that is currently tracking students from ninth grade, we have decided it is important to share cohort graduation rates that start in 12th grade. What’s key to this series is learning what works in boosting that college graduation rate — lessons that could be passed along to all schools, not just charters. Moving everyone to the gold standard is the next step.

Below are the reported numbers of students who have earned a four-year college degree within six years of high school graduation.

For the one charter network that tracks students from ninth grade:

• KIPP Public Charter Schools: Across KIPP, a network of more than 200 schools with 80,000 students located in multiple states, 38 percent of the students who graduated from a KIPP middle school, or enrolled in a KIPP high school in ninth grade, are earning college degrees. (This number would certainly be higher — and closer to the rate at Achievement First and Uncommon — save for KIPP’s radical and model honesty policy of starting the graduation clock earlier to catch any high school dropouts.) In its New York region, profiled later in this series, the graduation success rate is 46 percent. KIPP uses both Clearinghouse numbers and its own tracking system.

For the eight charter networks that track students from the beginning of 12th grade, three compile their own data on top of Clearinghouse tracking:

• Uncommon Schools: For the New York–based network, the only alumni who have reached the six-year mark graduated from North Star Academy Charter School in Newark. (The alumni from its Brooklyn high school just reached the four-year mark. Of the 142 North Star students who reached the six-year mark, 71 earned four-year degrees: a 50 percent success rate. Based on factors such as rising GPA and SAT scores, Uncommon predicts a rising college success rate. For example, of the 80 students in the class of 2013, half graduated this June with a Bachelor’s degree, four years after leaving high school, and 23 percent are still enrolled in a four-year college. This fall Uncommon will have 570 alumni enrolled in four-year colleges; by 2020 Uncommon will serve 22,000 students in grades K-12 and have about 2,000 college-age high school graduates.) Uncommon uses both Clearinghouse numbers and its own tracking system.
• Achievement First: The network’s first two graduating classes to reach the six-year mark had only 25 and 19 students. For those students, the college graduation rate was 32 percent, a rate they say has risen rapidly. But their subsequent classes, which have not yet graduated college, have far more students and thus can better represent the network’s success. Achievement First, which has schools located in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, has 839 students currently in college, 314 of whom are upperclassmen who can be analyzed by three criteria to project whether they will earn a diploma:
  1. The student has been in college for at least six semesters
  2. The student has earned at least 10 credits per semester
  3. The student has at least a 2.3 GPA, and the most recent semester was at least a 2.3.

Of those 314 upperclassmen, 162 fit the above criteria for being on track to graduation. This places Achievement First’s projected six-year college graduation rate at 52 percent.

• YES Prep Public Schools: For this Houston-based charter network, 46.7 percent of the graduates earned a bachelor’s degree. That number is based on 569 graduates who reached the six-year mark, 266 of whom earned four-year degrees by then.

The remaining networks that track students from the beginning of 12th grade rely solely on Clearinghouse data:

• IDEA Public Schools: At this Texas-based network, which got its start in the high-poverty Rio Grande Valley, the rate is 35 percent.
• The Noble Network of Charter Schools: Among the many alumni of this Chicago-based network, the six-year degree-earning rate is 31 percent.
• Alliance College-Ready Public Schools: At this Los Angeles–based network, the rate is 25 percent.
• Aspire Public Schools: At this Oakland-based network, where the first graduating class was in 2005, the rate is also 25 percent.

One outlier:

• Green Dot Public Schools: This Los Angeles–based network will be included among the project profiles, but its graduation rate data are too cloudy to list here. For example, Green Dot says its “unmatched” Clearinghouse data are between 55 percent and 60 percent, which is unusually high. All the Green Dot graduation data will get discussed when the Alumni project profiles the network.

(The figures above raise numerous questions. Where do the numbers come from? How accurate are they? What about the dropouts? Why the big differences among the networks? For a more thorough discussion of the data, click here.)

IDEA Public Schools seniors (Photo credit: IDEA Public Schools)

HOW THE FIGURES STACK UP

If you are a high-income white or Asian parent, these degree-earning rates will not impress. Among those parents, 79 percent of their children earn four-year degrees within six years after graduating from high school.

But because these charter networks almost exclusively educate low-income and minority students, the question has to be framed differently. The challenges faced by these students are incomparable to children from most upper-income families.

One quick example: In a 2017 internal survey of KIPP alumni currently in college, 43 percent said they had missed meals so they could have money for books, fees, and other expenses. Most alarming: 57 percent worried that food would run out before more money for food arrived.

So, let’s put these charter success rates in context. Among all students attending all types of schools in America, only about 9 percent of students from low-income families earn college degrees within six years. That means some of the top charter networks listed above, those in the 50 percent range, are doing five times as well.

Further, there’s tantalizing evidence in the college “persistence” data kept by these charters, where they monitor alumni still in college to determine if they are on track to earn diplomas, suggesting that bigger gains may be unfolding within a few years. Since the 2010–11 school year, for example, KIPP’s New York region was able to boost its six-year diploma-earning rate from 33 percent to 46 percent.

Individual charters that were early pioneers also have sufficient numbers of alumni to take a measure of their college success. Boston’s Academy of the Pacific Rim, for example, opened its doors in 1997 and now has 489 graduates since the class of 2003, its first graduating class, including 220 who have reached the six-year mark. Among those: 70 percent earned four-year degrees, the highest success rate we’ve come across in this project for a charter that targets low-income students.

If these rising success rates prove to be true, the civil rights and anti-poverty implications are significant. Is it possible to identify any anti-poverty program that has demonstrated effectiveness of this magnitude?

In the education field alone, consider Head Start, an early childhood education program that platoons of statisticians have argued about for decades, citing evidence of either small gains or no gains, depending on which study. What these charter networks are doing with college graduation goes far beyond scratching around for small-bore gains.

Celebrating graduation. (Photo credit: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools)

NEW PLAYERS ON THE FIELD

As part of this series, we profile most of the major players who have graduates past the six-year mark and describe their college preparation and tracking strategies.

Interestingly, the most compelling stories about improving college graduation rates may arise from the charter networks new to the push to make sure their graduates make it through college.

Los Angeles–based Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, for example, has a lower college success rate of 25 percent. That’s in part due to their rapid push into expanding the number of high school students they serve. They were also late to shift their focus toward tracking alumni in college, and they strive to limit additional spending on expensive guidance programs, for example, so they can offer themselves as a model that succeeds with low-income students relying on the same funding that goes to traditional public schools.

Can Alliance’s recent, low-cost method of using alumni and mentors boost their low degree-earning rates? That lesson may prove more valuable than lessons learned from KIPP’s more expensive college-tracking network, especially to traditional school districts unable to afford teams tracking their students into and through college.

If Alliance can make meaningful gains, then so could thousands of traditional school districts. And the same observation holds for what Green Dot, which started its college-tracking effort only two years ago.

KIPP students (Photo credit: KIPP)

THE WORK OF PIONEERS

The charter networks profiled in this series are pioneers in this campaign — fulfilling one of their original charter school missions of becoming incubators of innovation. As such, their discoveries matter greatly.

Here’s a taste of what the front runners are learning: High school grade point averages matter far more than expected, and efforts to bolster GPA in high school give students the persistence skills needed to make it through college.

Another key lesson-learned: Like it or not, SAT scores matter a lot — not just in getting admitted, but also in persisting — which means pushing high school juniors into extensive preparation work for the test.

And the bottom line of every charter network: Research the hell out of which colleges work for their kids, and make sure they go there!

What readers are likely to find compelling about the charter networks profiled in this project are the different approaches used. KIPP, for example, throws its muscle into KIPP Through College, a hands-on campaign that tracks their students all the way through college.

At Uncommon Schools, the muscle focuses more on revamping and strengthening the academic program in grades 5–12 to give their graduates a tailwind through college.

Which works better? At the moment, both networks show roughly equal results.

There are some lessons that all the networks are discovering independently. Higher-ranked colleges do a far better job seeing their students through to a diploma. (In some cases, that range can be dramatic: 90-plus percent success at an elite college, compared with 15 percent or even lower at non-selective universities.) Thus, college counselors do their best to push students to apply for their “reach” schools.

Among the middle-ranked and lower-ranked universities, some do far better than others at ensuring that low-income students win degrees. So, all the charter networks employ aggressive counseling to keep their seniors away from the lesser-rated institutions. Noble network charters has a particularly interesting story there.

Another surprise finding: Many small but selective colleges that have traditionally enrolled nearly all-white student bodies, and are located in rural communities in states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, are proving to be great collaborators with inner-city charters. Those colleges are seeing graduation rates above 90 percent with charter students. Who saw that coming?

To diversify their campuses, these colleges eagerly seek out well-prepared minority students (not just minority students from the middle and upper-middle class who went to suburban or private schools, but urban minority students truly in need of a boost) and are willing to take dramatic steps to ensure their success on their campuses.

The challenge for college counselors at these urban charters: getting their students equipped to survive far from home in an environment where few of their classmates share similar backgrounds as theirs: low-income minorities, some of whom are undocumented.

College signing day. (Photo credit: Uncommon Schools)

IT’S A REVOLUTION

While college-degree-earning rates may be important, the longer-lasting and still barely noticed development here is the declaration by the KIPPs, Uncommons, Achievement Firsts, YES Preps, and other networks across the country that earning college degrees should be the ultimate accountability measure for their high schools.

This is something new — and potentially revolutionary.

In years past, K-12 accountability measures focused on data points such as third-grade reading scores, the number of ninth-graders taking algebra, or setting new records for the most number of AP tests taken and passed. My prediction: Those data points will remain markers but will be subsumed by the far larger data point of college completion.

Like it or not, college is the new high school, regardless of the chosen career. Who doesn’t need to be a careful reader and writer to work in sophisticated blue-collar jobs? We need to judge high schools by how many of their graduates earn college degrees within six years.

And while charter leaders don’t want to stir up more controversy by saying it out loud, the implication is clear: Traditional high schools need to get on board with the same goal. Again, college is the new high school. And that rule applies equally to low-income minority students, who make up half the student bodies of our nation’s public schools.

The Alumni: How Major Charter Networks Are Leading a College Revolution With Their Graduates

By Richard Whitmire

Without a doubt, pro-charter school forces took a beating over the past year. There was a big setback in Georgia, and the Massachusetts vote on allowing charters to expand was nothing short of a money-losing, brutish beatdown.

Things only worsened with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of the wildly unpopular Betsy DeVos as education secretary. To charter supporters, especially in deep blue cities and states, their loving embrace of charters looked more like a kiss of death.

But then came Los Angeles, where only a few weeks ago, two pro-charter school board candidates won unexpected victories, creating a charter-friendly board in the heart of deep, deep blue L.A. — a shocking development.

So the curse has lifted? We can expect more charter school victories around the country?

Wishful thinking on the part of charter advocates.

Let’s break that campaign down into pieces and see how each piece might play out in other cities. Observations come from mostly background interviews with key players, with the exception of the United Teachers of L.A. (UTLA), which did not respond to my request for an interview:

1. The “Trump-DeVos agenda” attack tactic.

This is what the pro-charter forces feared most, and for good reason. Internal polling before the election showed this to be potent. Who in L.A. supports Trump? There’s a reason the president, to date, has not chosen to land Air Force One in California.

So if Trump and DeVos love charters, and school board challenger Nick Melvoin is pro-charter, then twinning the two should be easy, especially since he was challenging school board president/charter skeptic Steve Zimmer. The union spent millions on firming up that association in the minds of voter.

Should have worked, but it didn’t.

The problem for the union was that Melvoin has considerable Teflon on that tie-in. He’s a deep blue Democrat who worked in the Obama White House and was endorsed by both former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan and California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is about as blue as anyone in the Senate. Maybe bluer.

Sure, the unions had millions to spend, but the Melvoin campaign and its supporters in the California Charter School Association (CCSA) could more than match their millions with messaging that laid out his anti-Trump credentials. (Full disclosure: A family member works for CCSA; she was not consulted for this analysis.)

Bottom line: The Melvoin victory in California doesn’t mean the “Trump-DeVos agenda” tactic won’t work elsewhere against other candidates. It just didn’t work that well in L.A., where even lightly informed voters understood that people such as Boxer and Duncan wouldn’t endorse a Trump supporter.

2. The unions (inexplicably) never dropped the big political bomb most feared by pro-charter forces.

That bomb, so skillfully deployed in Massachusetts, was a simple calculation of the dollars lost by traditional school districts as a result of students leaving for charters. There, the unions spent millions drilling this message into every voter: Charters DRAIN $400 million a year from districts!

Then, to make sure that message got localized, the anti-charter forces broke it down district by district: This $ amount is EXACTLY how much charters are hurting your child’s school!

For the moment, let’s step around the obvious question of whether school districts should get reimbursed for students they are not educating and point out that from a political perspective it was a highly effective message. Some towns without a single charter school — not even the prospect of one arriving in the future — overwhelmingly voted against the initiative. Just in case!

So why didn’t the Los Angeles district and its unions break down the dollar loss per school and spend millions spreading that message, Massachusetts-style? Not clear, especially given the close involvement in the L.A. race by the national unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, whose top players knew exactly why they won big in Massachusetts.

Bottom line: In other states, and other cities, it is highly unlikely that anti-charter forces will make that same mistake twice.

3. The “billionaires are out to privatize your school” tactic. Why didn’t it prevail?

Unlike traditional schools, which are built with public dollars, charter startups must find their own facilities money. Thus has unfolded a key role for education philanthropists. Or, as the unions would phrase it: profit-seeking “billionaires” out to ruin public education.

This was such a favored tactic in L.A. that UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl used it to explain the loss. The headline for his take on the defeat: “Billionaires Bought the Election.”

In L.A., at least, the “billionaires” tactic didn’t prove to be a winning strategy. But while pro-charter forces might like to believe that facts negated the tactic (there isn’t a single for-profit charter school in all of Los Angeles), the more likely explanation is that in L.A., being a billionaire isn’t necessarily seen as evil.

Take billionaire Eli Broad, for example, a prime target for the union. Broad may have given millions to charter schools there, but he’s generally seen as a pretty nice guy, about to turn 84, who is giving away his fortune not just for schools, but for medical research and art museums as well.

The newly opened Broad Museum in downtown L.A. is a favorite. And it has FREE ADMISSION. How evil can he be?

Is there a single Angeleno who believes that Eli Broad has a hidden plot to make money off struggling urban schools? Other than union fanatics, doubtful.

Then there’s billionaire Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix and another big charter supporter. Especially in movie star-oriented Los Angeles, who doesn’t like Netflix?

Is there a single Angeleno who believes Reed Hastings hopes to profit by turning Los Angeles Unified into a Netflix movie offering? I doubt even the union leadership believes that.

Bottom line: In other cities, especially where evil-sounding “hedge funders” (who prefer to remain unidentified but inevitably get “outed,” expose-style, in newspapers) are the big charter funders, the “billionaire” argument is far more likely to fly.

4. Money made all the difference.

This was the priciest school board race in history, with the latest figures showing nearly $17 million spent. And the pro-charter side outspent pro-union groups 2 to 1, pouring at least $9.7 million into the race. There’s no question the money helped, especially in fighting back against the “Trump-DeVos agenda” association leveled against Melvoin. Saturating voters in sprawling Los Angeles with the message that Melvoin’s background is true-blue Democrat didn’t come cheap.

But what I found interesting in the interviews with the pro-charter side was the downplaying of the money advantage. That may sound like poor-mouthing on their part, but consider Massachusetts, where the spending on behalf of charters was even more lopsided ($24.2 million to $14.5 million), according to The Boston Globe.

The ballot initiative went down by a very lopsided 62-38; massive pro-charter spending definitely didn’t matter there.

Instead, what gets cited in L.A. is the solid base of charter school students, more than 100,000, whose parents are increasingly willing to turn out for causes that support their schools. It didn’t hurt that shortly before the election, the L.A. school board, led by Zimmer, embraced a charter-killing law that would have given districts such as L.A. absolute authority to shut down any charter school deemed to pull resources away from their district. (By definition, that would be all charters.)

That vote definitely motivated the charter school base — mostly Hispanic parents who rely on those schools, to both work on the campaign and turn out to vote.

“Once you reach a certain threshold (of charter students), there’s a powerful dynamic,” said Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who tracks education politics nationally. “They are an actual voting bloc, real live constituents who have lots at stake. That is a game changer.”

Bottom line: Repeatedly, I was told the same thing by those in the campaign. What mattered most was having quality candidates and a motivated charter parents who vote. Where that same factor is at play in other cities, you can probably expect similar outcomes, regardless of the millions spent on TV advocacy ads. Absent that, the millions in TV buys will probably prove useless.

5. The Los Angeles Unified School District has legitimate problems; really big problems.

By the district’s own math, it faces an unfunded liability of $13.6 billion for retiree health care benefits. The district is a rarity in generosity: Retirees — and their dependents — get lifetime medical coverage. And that’s only somewhat related to the district’s more immediate $1.6 billion projected deficit.

Any voter paying close attention knows that the district hasn’t taken these deficits seriously for years. In a period when the district was losing 100,000 students (roughly half to charters), it was actually adding staffers. Plus, the best research shows that charters are doing a much better job educating the district’s many low-income students.

So if you happen to be the board president overseeing all this, and you also happen to be closely tied to union President Caputo-Pearl, it’s not hard to imagine how a barrage of attack ads might carry a pretty potent message: What were they thinking?

Bottom line: Elsewhere in the country, you’re not likely to find school districts this out of control, and therefore vulnerable to campaign messages about mismanagement.

All this may sound dismal to school reformers. So we’re not over the Massachusetts setback?

Actually, the final bottom line is more hopeful. As Petrilli points out, Massachusetts-style initiatives are tough. If voters can find a reason, any reason, to vote no, they will. Winning that was always a long shot.

The good news: There are no more charter initiatives on the near-term calendar. In California, there are a governor’s race and a state schools superintendent race coming up, which are likely to echo the issues of the L.A. school board contest.

What’s coming up nationally next year is a slew of governor/legislature races, many of them flavored by school reform issues, especially charter schools, which unions and school superintendents (correctly) see as the biggest threat.

Is there hope emanating from L.A.? Probably, in one very big area: campaign financing from wealthy donors (aka “billionaire privatizers” in union verbiage).

In my interviews, I was told repeatedly that those donors were getting weary of losing. Billionaires, after all, tend not to think of themselves as losers. Now, based on the L.A. victories, they have a reason to keep spending.

As Petrilli put it: “The best way to get pro-choice policies is to elect legislators who are pro-choice.”

And, as L.A. proved: Quality candidates, good funding, and a solid ground game can carry the day. In Massachusetts, the teachers unions owned the ground game. In Los Angeles, it appears just the opposite played out. Hustle counts.

On the other side of the ledger, any competent pushback campaign will go full bore on the charters-draining-our-budgets strategy that proved so effective with middle-class progressives in Massachusetts.

What’s the answer to that argument? An appeal to social justice and civil rights is probably the right path. Shouldn’t all students have access to good schools? But good luck making that work: It didn’t overcome the more persuasive “charters are draining us” argument that persuaded voters in well-off Massachusetts suburbs.

No shortage of tough fights ahead.

Richard Whitmire is the author of several education books, including The Founders: Inside the revolution to invent (and re-invent) America’s best charter schools.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

(Photo: Agatha Bacelar, Emerson Collective)

Often, big social movements start with just one worried parent. That’s the case in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, where two new charter schools recently opened their doors.

In Redwood City, that worried parent was Maritza Leal, a mother of three who, along with her husband, played a major role in bringing a Rocketship charter school to her community.

Redwood City is a community tucked into Silicon Valley that once was a working class suburb of San Francisco. Today, some of the town still reveals that history, with car repair shops and former assembly plants. In recent years, however, it has transformed quickly in two ways: an infusion of well-off tech employees looking for cheaper housing to upgrade and a large Hispanic community that performs the must-do chores for the wealthy: cleaning houses, busing tables, hanging drywall.

Leal, a full-time housekeeper for a family in a nearby wealthy suburb, fits into that latter category. There’s an easy way to separate the two groups: Whose kids get admitted to North Star Academy, Redwood City’s test-based magnet school for gifted children.

Quick answer: Not many from Leal’s Hispanic neighborhood.

The school options for most Hispanics are some of the lowest performing elementary schools in the region for English language learners. And the Hispanic parents know it. So when Leal sensed that things weren’t going well for her oldest daughter, then second grader Daniela (Leal said she disagreed with her girl’s teacher, who assured her that her daughter was doing just fine) she sought other options. Eventually, she settled on a Rocketship charter school in San Jose.

The challenge: That’s a 100-mile round-trip commute through some of the toughest traffic in the country. Leal’s husband, Enrique Esparza, did most of the driving, eventually organizing a small car pool after buying a used Dodge van from a church. That commute, and that van, gained fame in a documentary made for the California Charter Schools Association.

But those hours spent every day in a car weren’t sustainable, and the eventual answer for Leal and Esparza: Convince Rocketship to open a school in Redwood City.

(Photo: Agatha Bacelar, Emerson Collective)

Rocketship co-founder Preston Smith had heard about the family making that grueling daily van commute, and one day he met Maritza at school: “It’s a story of tenaciousness and persistence.”

Still, the initial response from Rocketship, which at the time was awash in fresh challenges, was polite but cautious. “We are very focused on engaging our parents to become education advocates in the communities we serve,” says Rocketship co-founder Preston Smith. But Rocketship had not seen parents organize independently to open schools in new communities. “At the time, Redwood City was not in our growth plan,” Smith says.

Smith’s counsel to Maritza and Enrique: Gather 300 names and get back to us. Privately, Smith assumed it would go nowhere. That instinct was wrong.

Leal, Esparza and another key Redwood City parent turned out to be natural-born canvassers. With guidance from Jose Arenas, a community organizer for Innovate Public Schools, they soon organized an “action” that led to 425 parents crammed into a community center — an event witnessed by school board members and other local officials. One reason the signature gathering was so easy: The parents wanted a school with standards as high as North Star, and they suspected Redwood City wasn’t likely to deliver for their kids.

By the time an actual vote came on both a Rocketship and KIPP school, the Redwood City board approved it unanimously. They had never before witnessed a community uprising like this, and weren’t about to stand in the way. You don’t say no to Maritza, Enrique and 450 of their friends and neighbors.

Thus was born Redwood City Prep, a school that opened in the fall of 2015.

Leading a movement, speaking before hundreds, might have seemed a stretch for a housekeeper whose family immigrated to Redwood City from El Salvador in 1998. But she says she never nervous. Years of singing in a choir, including solos, prepared her.

“I have the ability to talk to others in public. I think that’s a grace given from God, so I’m not afraid to talk, especially when I’m targeting problem like this.”

As for the van? They still have it, with 200,000 miles on it. Only they don’t have to drive as much.

(Photo: Agatha Bacelar, Emerson Collective)

Until recently, top charter school founders — most of them out-of-town Anglos educated in elite universities — could make an impassioned appeal to a school board and stand a reasonable chance of getting a charter. That was yesterday.

Today, 14 communities have 30 percent or more of their students in charters. (Ten years ago, only one city had that many charters.) Los Angeles alone has 150,000 charter students (101,000 enrolled at independent charters) and there’s now a movement to push that dramatically higher.

Scores of school districts are feeling the heat from families switching their kids to charter schools and are pushing back hard. Saying no to a well-off, out-of-towner is easy. So they often do. That means in the future more charters will have to won by parents demanding better schools. Parents like Maritza and Enrique.

“You don’t say no to Maritza,” said Smith. “She is a force of will.”

A version of this article was published at EmersonCollective.com. Richard Whitmire is a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and the author of several education books.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.