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.

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.

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Voices and Victories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.