The Four 'R's' - a Charter School That Works
From the San Francisco Chronicle
Bruce Fuller
"Good audience skills are imperative," Danielle Johnson reminds her restless 10th-graders as one, Raquel, nervously fiddles with her laptop before holding forth on her project portfolio at City Arts and Technology High School (known as CAT), a charter school of 365 students on a green knoll above the blue-collar southern reaches of Mission Street in San Francisco.
"I decided to use the story of my mom getting to this country as an immigrant," Raquel says, moving into her personal-memoir segment, sniffing back tears as a blurry photo of her mother at age 18 appears on the screen. "I had never asked my mother about how she got here."
CAT exemplifies President Obama's push to seed innovative schools that demand much from all students, echoed by Sacramento's $700 million reform plan that goes to Washington this week. How to bottle the magic of CAT teachers like Johnson - listening carefully to each teen, strengthening each voice with basic skills and motivating ideals - is the challenge facing would-be reformers.
Moving to a team project, Raquel clicks on a futuristic image of her apartment building, which has been transformed into an energy-efficient structure with vegetables sprouting on the roof. Then, Raquel reflects on the hazards of group-work with classmates, both timid and articulate as her lecture unfolds.
"We have our four R's - rigor, relevance, relationships and results," says Bob Lenz, who taught at Drake High School in Marin before creating Envision Schools, a network of charter schools that includes CAT. "Every teacher who comes in understands this."
Caring and demanding teachers like Johnson then devise ways of making classroom activities relevant to - at times liberating from - these kids' working-class lives.
