First Impressions: RISE

I confess, before I started the News21 fellowship I had never written an education story, or entered a school as a reporter. The only story remotely close to education I’ve covered was the Police Athletic League’s push this past year to give 16-year-old teenagers elected to New York’s community boards a qualifying vote. And I didn’t have to go to a school for that story.

But over the past two weeks I’ve received a crash course in education reporting and the charter school movement in the U.S. and I’ve learned a lot so far. The focus of our story in Newark will be on two charter schools that bring starkly different philosophies of education to their classrooms.

The first school I visited with my reporting partner, Sharon McCloskey, was RISE Academy. It’s a part of Newark’s TEAM Schools network that is affiliated with the famous or infamous KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) national charter school movement, depending on your point of view.

KIPP is a national franchise with 66 charter schools in 19 states, all designed to serve children who live in areas with high levels of poverty. Its fairly standardized teaching methods and curriculum emphasize college as a goal for all children. But since New Jersey law forbids any charter from naming itself after a national franchise, RISE is instead referred to as part of a TEAM of four such schools in Newark.

TEAM is expanding throughout Newark by purchasing buildings of shuttered Catholic schools from the Diocese of Newark. TEAM also has the support of the Newark’s political, civic and business elite to aid its expansion. In addition to its four schools, TEAM in Newark has a business plan in the works for one more, that will bring its capacity to 2,500 students, serving 5 percent of Newark’s public school students.

RISE currently educates 270 students and will expand to 360 students in the 2009-2010 school year. The school is led

Drew Martin pictured with students. Photo courtesy of KIPP.

by Drew Martin, a 29-year-old Massachusetts native. Martin may seem young but he’s considered old for a KIPP-mentored leader. Most of the teachers I met at RISE were not older than 26 but they have teaching experience in some of the country’s poorest school districts. According to Kathleen Nugent, TEAM’s spokeswoman, 80 percent of the teachers at RISE are Teach For America alums.

Martin claims that TEAM Schools are ahead of schedule and already serving close to 5 percent of Newark’s public school students. When we were at RISE, Martin told us about TEAM’s immediate ambitions for the next two to three years, “Unofficially we want to grow to 10 percent of Newark’s students, ” he said.

Students waiting in line to go to the restroom at RISE (Photo Sharon McCloskey)

The Economist recently sent its education reporter to RISE, who wrote, “The day turns out to be the most fun I’ve ever had visiting schools.”

“Fun” was not the first thing that came to my mind when I visited RISE. But then again, I didn’t grow up in an inner city like Newark, with high crime rates and a concentrated collection of substandard schools.

Instead, my first impression took me back to my days as at Missouri Military Academy (MMA), where I went to school from 5th to 9th grade. From what I saw at RISE, there’s definitely a miltaryesque aspect to RISE’s approach to maintaining order in the classroom. From the snaps, claps and calls by RISE’s teachers for silence, to the orderly lines of students standing in-line to go to the restroom one-at-a time, I was reminded of my years of salutes, marches to meals and standing at attention when an officer entered the room.

I begrudgingly admit that the discipline I received in military school was probably a good thing for me. And there’s no doubt many of the kids at RISE will benefit from the school’s KIPP-based approach to educating and instilling discipline in students.

It seems Newark’s leaders are overwhelmingly committed to the KIPP-based model for charter schools. Yet this approach is but one among many that is working to educate a population of Newark’s high risk children.

One very different model is Discovery Learning Center, a community based charter and one of Newark’s first. Its project-based curriculum and looser approach to discipline seem polar opposite of RISE’s. And yet, if achievement scores are any indication, Discovery is equally successful at moving children forward.

I’ll give you my initial impressions of Discovery for my next post.