A charter school's promising success

DETROIT — In 1999, Doug Ross and his colleagues made an outrageous "90-90" promise. In 2007, they would graduate at least 90 percent of ninth-graders going through their brand new University Preparatory Academy, an inner-city charter school. And 90 percent would go on to post-secondary education.

Next week, as the 128-student senior class marches in red and black robes across the stage of Detroit's Opera House, receiving their diplomas and calling out the name of their college or trade school, the promise will be fulfilled. The graduation rate is expected to be 95 percent; of those, the college enrollment rate will likely be 100 percent.

How could this be achieved in a city with an abysmal 50 percent to 60 percent public-school dropout rate?

University Prep is deadly serious about the important critical "gateway" skills — reading, writing, math and science. But the secret to its success is a far cry from drilled instruction to ratchet up students' scores to satisfy "No Child Left Behind" bureaucratic mandates.

Instead, this school's secret is the intensely personal, persistent, caring way it deals with each student. We develop, says Ross, "a deep knowledge about each child — academically, emotionally and socially." A single faculty member engages personally with the student over successive school years. Class sizes are 16, compared with an average of 28 in Detroit's regular public schools.

Ross, the academy's founder-superintendent, has credentials rare in public education: formerly director of Michigan's Department of Commerce and assistant secretary of labor during the Clinton administration, he'd just lost a primary race for governor. His co-conspirator and co-founder was William Beckham, a prominent African-American civic leader in Detroit and former U.S. undersecretary of housing and urban development.

This prestigious pair could have found other, perhaps easier, public-policy jobs. But they were personally angered by the short shrift for kids being offered by Detroit's big factory-like, assembly-line schools — a mirror, they believed, of auto plants time-warped in Henry Ford-era production methods. Unable to manage quality on a student-by-student basis, overburdened by expensive central bureaucracy, the system, says Ross, inevitably turned out an "astounding number of lemons."

Surveying what did work for inner-city students, Ross and Beckham decided to emulate Rhode Island's now-famed MET schools, especially their focus on "one student at a time," individualized learning plans and internships with businesses or nonprofits — a way to build on each child's interests and give him or her exposure to the "real" world.

The original setting for the University Preparatory Academy was less than promising — the basement of the Promise Land Baptist Church surrounded, in the words of Pete Plastrik, a collaborator and lead writer about the process, "by boarded-up homes, trash-strewn lots, an abandoned and dilapidated Catholic school and two crack houses."

But concerned parents were reassured by the newly whitewashed walls, the poster-covered classrooms and the warmth of welcome by concerned staff. Today, University Prep has grown from sixth grade with 112 students to a kindergarten-to-12th grade school with 1,225 students on three campuses.

Tragically, co-founder Beckham died four months before the school's opening. But Ross promised a decade of his life to the school. With 70-hour working weeks he's still at it, and told me recently he's pledging another decade (until he's 75).

The good news is that there are examples, sprinkled coast to coast, of inventive and inspired schools succeeding in unlikely places — a story chronicled in a new Harvard Education Press book, "It's Being Done," by Karin Chenoweth.

But have these schools erased the entire disadvantage of inner-city schools? Not fully, Ross notes. His school's test scores have become competitive. His faculty has discovered that with caring attention, most (though sadly not all) of the toughest targets — low-income young black males — can be engaged, and held back from the destructive spiral of the streets.

But what of the real fruits of learning — high-quality literary essays, science projects, history research projects? Students' efforts, even in breakthrough inner-city schools such as his, notes Ross, still lag the quality found in affluent suburbs, where children's systemic, early exposure to language and culture is greater.

Yet, the new evidence of ways to engage and excite inner-city kids is a sure beacon of hope. When will all of America's schools meet the "90-90" challenge? That will be the day!

Neal Peirce's column appears alternate Mondays on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com