Our member schools work relentlessly to ensure that they are providing meaningful summer opportunities for their students. This summer, ten students from six different Texans Can! Academy campuses were the the first students from Dallas and Austin to participate in a week-long program  developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for students and teachers in Washington, D.C.    

They will be participating in the summer leadership seminar called Bringing the Lessons Home: Holocaust Education for the Community Leadership Program. Arthur R. Brown, the Museum’s Manager of Community Programs, will lead the students and four faculty and staff members in an overview of the Museum’s program, in which students and teachers explore Holocaust history and why it remains relevant today.   

Texans Can! students in the Dallas airport on the way to Washington, D.C.!

The following blog was written by Knycole Smiley, a sophomore at Texans Can! Academy who participated in the program.  

7/23/2010 

Yesterday, we went back the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to hear from Henry Greenbaum, a holocaust survivor. He and his family were sent to the ghettos when he was twelve years old – not even a teenager.  

The Nazis separated him from his mother, sisters, and younger family members. If you were too young to work, you were killed. Later, they were taken from the ghetto and sent to a concentration camp by train. Some were sent to the left, and others to the right. At that moment, he was separated from his mother and sisters, and never saw them again. He was not certain, but he believed that they had been murdered and buried in trenches that the Jews had been made to dig earlier. 

Greenbaum had to sleep in the barracks on a board with two other people.  There wasn’t a mattress, a pillow, or anything more than a small blanket to cover himself with. 

Knycole Smiley (fourth from left) with Texans Can! classmates, visiting the White House.

  I cannot imagine having to live under such conditions.  We only got a taste of it at The Catholic University of America, where we lived in dorms that were bare. We had one sheet and a thin blanket, but no pillow. I complained all night and woke up with a crook in my neck, but when Mr. Greenbaum talked about his sleeping conditions, it put things in perspective. 

After his speech, I went up to him and told him how grateful I was that he was able to share such a strong story with us. Many of the things he talked about reminded me of the segregation in America that was going on when my grandparents were younger. At that time, blacks weren’t allowed to walk on the sidewalks when whites were on the sidewalks. In Europe, Jews were being treated exactly the same by the Germans. 

Mr. Greenbaum taught me a lot that day. I complain about a lot of things and give my mother a hard time, but the things I go through are not even half as bad as what Mr. Greenbaum went through. After that day, I promised to be more appreciative. 

After this leadership training, I made pledge, a future commitment.  I pledge to be responsible and to take a stand against hate and enforce unity. I pledge to be confident and encourage others. I pledge to make a difference in my community. I pledge to be a leader, so that something this tragic and terrible cannot happen again where I live. 

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What do the students at your charter school do over the summer?  What kinds of summer opportunities do your students engage in? We’d love to hear from you!

Member school Rapoport Academy opened in 1998 with only 16 students.  This past school year, it served 375 students from 13 school districts in the greater Waco area.   Rapoport recently garnered some very postive attention from Baylor law professor, Mark Osler.  Below is an introduction from Rapoport Academy and then a guest column that Professor Osler wrote for wacotrib.com about his visit to Rapoport Academy.*

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Rapoport Academy fosters a college-going culture for all students (70% of whom are economically disadvantaged) through rigorous academics, high behavioral standards, an emphasis on STEM education, a college focus beginning in pre-K (with college tours beginning in 5^th grade and college courses in 9^th grade), and small class sizes (15 or fewer at all levels) that allow teachers to meet the individual needs of each student. Rapoport Academy’s Paul and Jane Meyer Public High School graduated its inaugural senior class on May 29, 2010. This class of 24 graduates earned 588 college credit hours through Rapoport Academy’s Early College High School Program, and each student was accepted to college. Rapoport Academy staff are mission-driven and passionate about knowing and meeting the needs of individual students in a rigorous, relevant, and relational school environment. 

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Mark W. Osler, guest columnist: Knowing the students right down to their pencils      — Wacotrib.com, Friday, July 9, 2010

The best things often reveal themselves in quiet moments. They are worth listening for, and worth celebrating when they are found in our midst.

8th grade students have science class outside with Ms. Jill Barrow!

There are three quiet moments that have told me everything I need to know about the Rapoport Academy, the no-tuition charter school which has developed three thriving campuses on the east side of the Brazos. Yes, Rapoport has achieved exemplary rankings from the state, but that doesn’t tell me much about what it is they do. To find that out, I had to listen.

I’m an eavesdropper, and it is this tendency that led me to that first quiet moment. I was sitting in a hallway in Rapoport’s middle school. There was a pencil on the floor with a design on it. A teacher walked over, picked up the pencil, and called to another teacher. “Whose pencil is this?” she asked.

“That’s Darius’ pencil,” the other replied.

I was stunned. The children at this school are known. What they do, who they hang around with, how their studies are progressing, what pencil they use — they are known. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully identified that remarkable trait of this school, and my subsequent encounters confirmed it: The teachers were more engaged with the full lives of their students than I could have imagined possible.

The second moment occurred at lunch months later. I was sitting with five middle school kids, eating. I told a funny story and everyone laughed; I was loving it. It got a little loud. The lunch monitor came and gave me that look that lunch monitors have: “Quiet down.” Me. It didn’t matter who I was — she knew that I was the one causing the problem, and she was right.

In the quiet moment that followed, I reflected on the meaning of such properly equal treatment. My belief in the school deepened.

Finally, there was a day about a year ago that I had to meet with the superintendent, Dr. Nancy Grayson. I went to the desk at the middle school and asked where I could find her. The receptionist pointed over the driveway to a field, so I walked into the blistering heat in the direction she had given me.

In this 7th grade science class, students dissect frogs with a local physician.

There, in the middle of the scorched field, was Dr. Grayson. She was laboring in an orange jumpsuit, spraying weeds. If you want a lean staff, it appears, look no further than Rapoport, where the esteemed and successful superintendent meets with community and national leaders, then straps on a tank of weed killer and gets down to work.

Yes, the best things do reveal themselves in the quiet moments, but they’re created in quiet as well. The lesson from Rapoport may well be that a great school is not about what curriculum you buy, your PR campaign or the pre-existing advantages students might have, but about something more lasting and eternal: That there is no substitute for hard work, high expectations and the value of knowing the students right down to their pencils.

Mark Osler, professor of law at Baylor University, is a Yale Law School graduate and a former federal prosecutor. As lead counsel, he won the case of Spears v. United States (2009) in the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the court held that sentencing judges can categorically reject the 100-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine in federal sentencing guidelines. He will leave Waco to teach at the University of St. Thomas (Minn.) School of Law this fall.

*Reprinted with author’s permission.

Member school system Uplift Education currently serves students in the greater Dallas area and was recently ranked the 14th best public high school in America – and highest ranking public school from Texas – by Newsweek magazine. Read their take on how they accomplished this achievement:
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Newsweek magazine recently ranked North Hills Preparatory, Uplift Education’s oldest campus and one of the original charters granted in Texas, as the 14th best public high school in America. This marks North Hills’ fifth consecutive appearance in the Top 20 – a showing that Newsweek itself was quick to point out was quite an accomplishment. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way and that we keep in the forefront of our minds as we scale our model to educate 10,000 students in underserved communities by 2020.

1. College access and success for all students is the goal

This is the first and last measure of success in everything we do at Uplift. We take pride in our ability to be an incubator for innovation in education and embrace best practices to develop a model that advances student achievement for all students in meaningful ways.

2. Entrepreneurial innovation is critical to our human capital strategy

Having the best school leaders and teachers drives student achievement. We’ve invested considerably into recruiting and retaining the best through professional and leadership development efforts, “pay for performance” measures, Master Teacher career paths, and using predictive research to recruit teachers who will be successful under the Uplift model.

Students in class at North Hills Prep

3. ALL students can be successful academically – regardless of their ZIP code

Uplift offers a proven model that emphasizes high expectations and rigor, based on our belief that ALL students can benefit from a rigorous curriculum including Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. In addition to North Hills, we have successfully replicated this model at our six urban campuses – Peak Prep (East Dallas), Hampton Prep (South Dallas), Summit International Prep (Arlington), Williams Prep (Northwest Dallas), Heights Prep (opening in West Dallas in August 2010), and Laureate Prep (opening in Downtown Dallas in August 2010). We set the bar high for our students and continually move expectations forward, using data to tailor student plans and key initiatives. We are committed to spending more time on task and being relational with our students and families. The result? Our students will continue to outperform their peers and have a passionate desire to succeed in college.

4. If college is the end goal, it has to be the focus from day one

The Uplift culture stresses that every student will go to college. By providing a K-12 continuum, we’re able to ensure rigor and college readiness from the first day a student comes into one of our kindergarten classrooms. Participation in our Road to College program gives all students access to college field experiences, test prep, and help applying to schools and scholarships. Because we work with many first generation college-going students, we work closely with both students and their parents, ensuring they believe in their ability to enter and succeed in a college environment.

– Yasmin Bhatia, Uplift Education CEO

Yasmin joined Uplift Education in 2009 after having been a consultant at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, for 9 years.  While at McKinsey, Yasmin served the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the City of Dallas, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

Yasmin holds an undergraduate degree in Finance and Business Honors from the University of Texas in Austin and a MBA from Stanford University.  She and her husband reside in Dallas with their daughter Isabel and son Ian.