You’ll find it in downtown Oakland, in a neighborhood of barred windows and strip malls. Its name is the American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) — though most of the students are Hispanic, Asian, or black. As with a lot of inner-city public schools, there’s a significant achievement gap between its low-income students and the statewide averages for middle- and upper-income white kids. But as I found when I studied the state’s schools earlier this year, it’s the poor minority students at AIPCS who come out on top.
AIPCS is just one example of the many great schools in our nation’s inner-cities, yet the overall poor performance in these areas persists. The problem is not that we lack models of excellence for serving low-income students, but rather that we lack a means of bringing those models to scale.
Education reformers have spent the last half century searching for and trying to invent teaching methods and materials that would bring educational excellence to America’s poorest and most troubled neighborhoods. The assumption has been that once a recipe for success was demonstrated in one place, schools around the nation would inevitably adopt it, discarding their old, less effective practices.
It hasn’t happened. Take the now famous example of Jaime Escalante, whose low-income Hispanic students at Garfield High School were, by the mid-1980s, already besting their peers at Beverly Hills High on the Advanced Placement (AP) calculus exam. Though staggeringly successful, Escalante’s program was not replicated. On the contrary, his own fellow teachers voted to relieve him as head of the math department after Escalante drew the ire of the local teachers’ union because he welcomed over 50 students in his classrooms, while the union contract required no more than 35.
We already have successful models for helping low-income students. What is missing is the means to bring those successes to schools all over the country. In every other field, it is routine for the top services and products to reach mass audiences, but there is no Google of education, no Starbucks, no Apple. Why not?
Almost 20 years ago, I decided to leave a career in computer software engineering to search for the answer. It’s a search that took me back to the origins of formal schooling in ancient Greece, and forward through a dozen historical times and places.
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