IDEA Public Schools accepts the Broad Prize in Nashville. (Photo courtesy of National Alliance for Public Charter Schools)

IDEA Public Schools was awarded the $250,000 Broad Prize Monday for its efforts to inject hope and opportunity into the educational lives of some 24,000 mostly Hispanic and low-income Texas students in San Antonio, Austin and the Rio Grande Valley.

Accepting the award, co-founder and CEO Tom Torkelson gave an impassioned speech in defense of the tens of thousands of undocumented children IDEA educates — in schools close enough to see the border wall dividing the U.S. and Mexico — and sends to college. These kids pledge allegiance to the flag every morning, Torkelson said, his voice rising, they light fireworks on the Fourth of July and, in some cases, fight for their country “and all they want is the recognition and the respect of their fellow citizens.”

“Nobody gets to choose where they are born, but they made a choice to come to school,” he said. “How much more American do you want us to be?”

• Read more: IDEA plans to expand beyond Texas

Torkelson continued a recent Broad Prize tradition by announcing  that IDEA would split the $250,000 award —  given to the charter network that has done the most to boost student outcomes, close the achievement gap and increase graduation rates — with its fellow finalists, Houston-based YES Prep and New York City’s Success Academy. All three, he said, will put the money toward making sure undocumented students “have someone fighting for them.”

The spirit of combat was in the air of the grand ballroom at Nashville’s Music City Center where the prize was announced at the opening session of the National Charter Schools Conference.

Some 4,000 teachers, school leaders, policymakers, funders and education advocates flocked to the annual gathering, which this year had the added significance of marking the 25th anniversary of the nation’s first charter school law. (The 74 spotlights the must-see sessions of the 2016 conference.)

Nina Rees, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, used the occasion to issue a call for charter schools to enroll some 4 million students in the next five years — a million more than currently have seats. Rees said too many children linger on charter school wait lists by the thousands or their families simply don’t have a high-quality charter school within their geographic reach.

Meanwhile, Rees said charter school supporters are being outmaneuvered on many fronts, from social media — where Rees said for every positive charter school mention, there are three negative — to politics. She said their response was too often “scattered thought and research.”

“We are still busy in this movement making the academic case for charter schools when our opposition is out to destroy us,” she said. “We cannot let our future growth depend on people who oppose us. We need to play better offense.”

Rees also warned that while the federal government — under presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama — has traditionally been “one of our best friends,” that was about to change and advocates needed to shift their lobbying efforts.

“We will have a new president in the White House, and the Democratic candidate has not been as encouraging or as vocal about her support of charters as her husband was, and the Republican candidate is, shall we say, a little difficult to define,” Rees said, drawing laughs with her Donald Trump reference. “That makes the Senate and House races all the more important.”

Twice those in the packed ballroom were asked to take out their phones and text 52886 to signal both their support for charter schools and their numbers. The texts will be directed to Trump and Hillary Clinton.

By far the person who got the crowd most engaged was scholar, civil rights activist and charter pioneer Howard Fuller, whose emphatic speech touched on everything from scripture to the traumas of childhood poverty to a recently revived rift in the charter school movement between its more liberal and conservative forces.

Fuller said at age 25, the movement should celebrate the many wonderful schools it has created while acknowledging the terrible ones too, that it should thank the countless heroes fighting for children while calling out the “scoundrels and crooks who have used charter schools for their own personal gain and in the process have done harm to our children.”

He said he would not stop talking about the need for better medical and mental health care for poor children because it affects their ability to learn, and that the idea of charter schools must live in a room big enough to accommodate Black Lives Matter warriors, personal responsibility stalwarts, social justice advocates and free market champions. Sometimes that room is going to get hot.

“This is America and sometimes we got to fight. No, we can’t all get along,” Fuller said. “But the needs of our children dictate that we stay in the room and find common ground on what we agree on — the value of charter schools.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation is a partial funder of the National Charter Schools Conference, The 74 and LA School Report. Campbell Brown, The 74’s editor-in-chief, sits on the board of Success Academy.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

Jose Rodriguez and Alvaro Quintero recount their journey from a public charter high school in South LA to attending Yale and Harvard. (Credit: Kathy Moore)

By the time Alvaro Quintero and Jose Rodriguez reached the end of their senior year, they were no longer Alvaro and Jose.

“Before we left, we got our names changed to Harvard and Yale, respectively,” Rodriguez recalled. “That is how we were referred to.”

At once they had lost their familiar identity in the halls of Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in Los Angeles and taken on instead the weight of becoming the first graduates in the 10-year history of the Green Dot school to reach the Ivy League.

That they won admission to two of the most elite colleges in the country coming from a heavily Latino community where 74 percent of the residents don’t have a high school diploma and 72 percent of families live on less than $40,000 a year was no small feat.

“The first school I got into was Princeton. I remember getting home and being super excited,” said Quintero, who ended up at Harvard. “My dad didn’t know what Princeton was until I got in. I told him it was ranked the best school in the country and I was getting to go for free. ‘Where is it?’ ‘New Jersey.’ ‘You can just go the community college down the street. It’s the same thing, right?’”

“It’s been great for the most part,” Rodriguez said. “My parents are super proud of me, but even to this day I don’t think they understand what it means for me to be at Yale. And they probably won’t have the chance to visit me until I graduate, which is kind of a bummer.”

But that was only part of the story they told Tuesday in Austin, Texas, at the South By Southwest Education Festival panel From South LA to the Ivy League. What happened to them once they got to those bastions of East Coast privilege and how they are surviving their critical first year was the other.

With them on the panel was Joel Snyder, a teacher and advisor at Pat Brown who is tracking the college outcomes of 10 graduates from the class of 2015 who ended up at places ranging from community college to Cal State, to the University of California, Berkeley, to the Holy Grail of Harvard and Yale.

Some of these students have special education classifications, some were undocumented. All, including Rodriguez and Quintero, bore the statistical burden that they were not likely to graduate.

“A lot of the excitement when an alum comes back to see me is tempered by a lot of concern with what they are going to say,” said Snyder, who taught for several years at Morris High School in the South Bronx before moving to the West Coast. “There are too many stories of students coming back with an explanation of why they are no longer in school or why they won’t be after this current semester.”

Panel moderator Ellie Herman said afterward that a recent study from high-performing charter network KIPP showed that only 33 percent of their graduates who went on to college graduated in six years. The two additional years were already tacked on to recognize the extra courses that students might need to take or that some would be forced to leave school to help support their families.

“For me, the most difficult part was the academics,” Rodriguez said. “Green Dot does a wonderful job preparing kids for college, but as hard as they try, there is no way they can prepare for the vast change of what is expected of us.”

Rodriguez and Quintero said they took advantage of study groups, support networks with other first-generation college kids and professors’ office hours. Some of their classmates from more privileged backgrounds might need the same help, they said, but were embarrassed to seek it. They were not.

Quintero said he didn’t speak to a soul for the first month he was at Harvard and can recite without hesitation that Cambridge is 2,295 miles from LA. Eventually, both he and Rodriguez were excited to encounter students so foreign to them, ones who who flew home on the weekends (they won’t go home again until summer vacation), were from countries they never heard of or are majoring in obscure subjects like elliptical metallurgy.

“Meeting people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds is a little intimidating at first, but it’s fun,” Rodriguez said.

“No matter how different they might be, no matter how much the gap might be in wealth, they are still very much like me,” Quintero said.

Going home and fitting in with old friends has its own challenges.

“They fall into two categories. They are either super proud of us, we are like goals to them, or they fall into the category where they kind of resent us,” Rodriguez said. “We have to be careful talking to them about our experience at college or they feel like we are showing off.”

“It’s gotten to the point where I can’t tell people about my school. It’s kind of like I’m ashamed,” Quintero said. “I never thought I would be judged by the school I went to. They treat me like the guy that goes to Harvard, not as Alvaro. They treat me differently.”

As for moving from South LA to the Ivy League, Quintero and Rodriguez credited their teachers: a chemistry teacher who stayed after school to prepare students for the AP exam, or any number of teachers who would still be in the building at 6 or 7 in the evening doing work or “sometimes just talking, trying to get to know them, and it was wonderful,” Rodriguez said. Quintero recalled the guidance counselor who paid for some of his college application fees.

Snyder said these educators should be commended but the bigger issue was figuring out a system of sustainable support, to help students surrounded by family and friends without college diplomas get through to earning their own.

“It’s a dirty, messy complicated question and no one really wants to get in the middle of it,” he said. “We won’t get by on heroes.”

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.