1. W
hen Dr. Betty Brown
graduated in 1965 from
George Washington Carver
High in New Orleans,
segregation was still firmly entrenched in
the nation’s schools. More than a decade
after the landmark Brown v. Board of
Education decision ruled that schools must
desegregate with “all deliberate speed,”
Carver High maintained an all-black
administration and faculty that proudly
served an all-black student body.
Built in 1958, Carver’s sprawling
campus included a junior high that fed into
Carver Senior, which served all of the Ninth
Ward, enrolling more than 2,500 students
from the Lower and Upper Nine, the East,
Pontchartrain Park, Gentilly, and the
Florida and Desire housing developments—
suburban subdivisions built for black middle
class families during the Jim Crow era that
housed proud, tightly knit communities.
The school’s champion football team—the
green-and-orange Carver Rams—and march-
ing band were the jewels of the community.
In addition, Carver offered tennis, music,
choir, woodworking, myriad student clubs,
and boasted an active student government.
“In those days, everything was
different,” says Brown, 65, who grew up
near the Desire and now teaches psychology
at Xavier University. “I could walk to
school from where I was. Teachers were
like family. They made sure that we were
exposed to other things that were considered
cultured at the time. It was a really, really
well-rounded experience.”
Brown credits Carver’s teachers with
grounding her racial identity during the
turbulent civil rights era. “They helped us
navigate the whole concept of what it meant
to be black in America. Not that we talked
about it every day, but it was an unspoken
expectation of us not just representing
ourselves as individuals but representing
to
In its day, George Washington Carver High School
was the “anchor of the community,” says Betty
Brown (in her signed senior photo, bottom right).
A young Betty Washington appears in the group
photo on the left (back row, second from right).
Yearbook photos (1965) courtesy of Charles Webb
one
‘one
road
DAY’?
to
Can a groundbreaking partnership
between a charter operator and
a community group honor the legacy
of a beloved school while forging
a new future for its students?
by Ting Yu (N.Y. ’03)
Photos by Ted Jackson

2. One Day • spring 2013 3130 One Day • spring 2013
It is a question that has come up
repeatedly across the nation in the last
decade, as school closures have climbed
by 54 percent. According to the Na-
tional Center for Education Statistics,
2,177 public schools were shuttered in
2011-12, up from 1,412 in 2001-02.
Three years ago, President
Obama set out an ambitious agenda
to turn around chronically failing
schools via harsh interventions that
include replacing principals and most
of a school’s staff, giving the school
to a charter operator, or outright
closure. Yet many of these changes
have triggered emotional and angry
uprisings from communities. Two years
ago in New York City, the NAACP filed
a lawsuit with the United Federation
of Teachers to stop the expansion of
charter schools, both embarrassing and
baffling reformers.
“Many of these communities have
lost a lot—jobs, facilities, housing,” says
Jean Johnson of Public Agenda, who
authored a report about partnering
with communities. “When the school
shuts down, it seems like the last blow.
There’s a sense of losing and losing and
wanting to hold onto what they see as
the glue of their community.”
Johnson says that “even when
schools are not performing well,
there is a great deal of sympathy for
the teachers and principal because
people feel it’s very difficult for the
school to turn things around in high-
poverty areas. They don’t always
blame the school.”
the collective. That was the creed of
the community. When you were doing
your best, it was not just for you—it
was for everybody.”
Yet over the years, as successful
families moved on and resources were
leached from Carver’s neighborhoods,
crime took hold, and Florida and
the Desire became some of the most
dangerous projects in America.
By the time Hurricane Katrina
ravaged the campus in 2005, the
shining community beacon that had
been Carver High had long since
dimmed. The storm took care of the
rest, destroying Carver’s buildings
along with 80 percent of New Orleans
schools. Families fled the flood waters,
and the school system collapsed.
Carver was razed, and the
Recovery School District banked
the land to sell, with no intention of
reopening the school. But a community
group, led by Brown’s classmate, a
charismatic Carver alumna named
Betty Washington, lobbied to save the
school and won.
“To me, Carver is the community,”
says Washington, an attorney who
grew up on the Florida side of the
Upper Nine. “It just meant everything.
It was my foundation.”
The school reopened, but Carver
continued to struggle. In 2011, only 56
percent of Carver students graduated.
Of those who took the ACT, just 4 and 23
percent met “college-ready standards” in
math and English, respectively.
When the RSD invited charter
applications to take over the school, a
community group led by Washington
bid for the Carver charter three times.
They were rejected each time.
In January 2012, the RSD
announced that two charter schools
awarded to Collegiate Academies
would open on the Carver campus.
Collegiate was a fledgling operator
run by a 33-year-old former civics
and English teacher named Benjamin
Marcovitz. Marcovitz, a Washington,
D.C. native, had opened Sci Academy
in 2008. It became the highest-
performing open-enrollment high
school in the city, sending 94 percent
of its first graduating class to four-year
colleges or universities.
The Carver campus would house
three schools. Two would be ninth
grade academies run by Marcovitz’s
team that would grow one grade per
year. The third school, the RSD’s
existing Carver High, would serve
10th through 12th graders and would
be phased out with its final class of
seniors in 2015.
“They were going to do away
with everything that had made
a difference in our lives,” says
Washington, who helped organize a
wave of demonstrations. “I’m a civil
rights baby, so being shut out of the
process is nothing new to us. Once the
charter was announced, the only way
we believed our voice would be heard is
through civil disobedience.”
Protesters bearing “Hands Off
Carver!” signs picketed outside Sci
Academy and Carver High. RSD
superintendent Patrick Dobard ordered
police on standby as the rallies grew
fiercer. The stand-off made headlines
and prompted the watching public to
wonder: Why would a community fight
so hard to save a failing school?
“You cannot separate a child from this community, because if this community is going to grow, we
have to have young people who understand their relationship to the community as a whole,” says
Carver alumna Betty Washington (front, leading the protests at Carver High School in April 2012).
andrewvanacore,thetimes-picayune
Carver Preparatory Academy principal Ben Davis (G.N.O ’07), far
left, grabs a few minutes with CPA scholar Alvin Brown before the
start of the school day. Students from three schools—two run by
Collegiate and one run directly by the Recovery School District—
share Carver’s post-Katrina campus of modular trailers.

3. One Day • spring 2013 3332 One Day • spring 2013
The legacy of distrust between
communities and school districts
doesn’t help matters, Johnson says.
“A lot of communities have seen a
revolving door of superintendents and
principals and teachers. There’s a
history that people bring to this that
isn’t repaired overnight.”
Nowhere is this mistrust starker
than in New Orleans, where 7,500
Orleans Parish school employees—
from principals to teachers to
custodians—the majority of whom are
African American, were dismissed in
the wake of the hurricane. (A ruling
last summer found that the teachers
were improperly terminated. The case
is being appealed.)
The changes “felt like being
retraumatized after Katrina,” says
Brown. Kids lost their schools and
were now in classes with students from
rival neighborhoods. “Then they took
out all of the veteran teachers, all of
everything that the kids knew, and
replaced it with something new.”
Still, reformers saw their narrow
window and pressed forward with
sweeping changes. Before Katrina,
less than 5 percent of New Orleans
public school students attended charter
schools. Today that figure is 80 percent
and growing, with only 12 schools
being run directly by the RSD.
The pace of progress has been
breathtaking. According to a report
from New Schools for New Orleans,
from 2005 to 2011, the city reduced
performance gaps against state
averages by more than half and posted
its highest student-performance scores
to date—scoring a number-one ranking
in growth across Louisiana. The city
is now beating state and national
averages for on-time graduation,
according to data recently released by
the U.S. Department of Education.
Not long ago, New Orleans
ranked dead last in Louisiana (out
of 68 parishes) for black student
performance. In 2011, for the first time
on Louisiana record, African American
students performed better than their
counterparts statewide. The percentage
of African American students in the
RSD who scored at grade level has
increased by 25 points since 2007, a
114 percent jump in four years.
Teach For America has been a
driving force behind much of this
progress, fueling the influx of human
capital post-Katrina. The organization
has more than quadrupled the size of
its New Orleans presence, to nearly
400 corps members, who join the
750 alumni who reside in the region,
up from just 100 in 2005. By Teach
For America New Orleans’ internal
estimates, one-third of all children
in the city are now taught by either
Teach For America alumni or corps
members. Forty-one percent of public
school leaders in the city are alumni,
including the principals at all three of
Collegiate’s schools.
While the academic progress of
New Orleans’ children is undeniable,
the years since Katrina have created
“two competing truths,” says Kira
Orange-Jones (S. Louisiana ’00), who
has served as Teach For America’s
executive director in the region since
2007. “The dropout rate has dropped
by 60 percent in six years—that’s
far faster than most cities. But we
were only able to make this kind of
progress because the governance
reforms, both pre- and post-Katrina,
dismantled perceived democratic
institutions like school boards and
collective bargaining.”
“But the other truth is we did it
at the expense of many other voices
being a part of the way decisions were
made,” she says. “What we have now in
place is a system for decision-making
that doesn’t reflect a broad set of
stakeholders. What we have is a new
system that is by and large comprised
of people who are not from here—and
the majority of them happen to be
Teach For America alumni. Which
raises the question now: What do we
do with that power?”
farther, faster, together?
Visiting the Carver campus today, it’s
impossible not to remember the wrath
of Katrina. The school, once hailed for
its avant-garde modern architecture,
is gone completely, replaced by rows of
nondescript modular trailers, segment-
ed into Carver’s three academies.
The roads leading to the school
are dotted with decaying houses and
pocked with holes so deep they could
crack a car’s axle. After just a few
days of rainfall, a quarter of Carver’s
parking lot is submerged, and the
football field has become a swamp.
“This is New Orleans,” said Collegiate
president Morgan Carter Ripski.
“When it rains, it floods.”
Despite the somewhat bleak
surroundings, something new—and
cautiously hopeful—is being pioneered
on the Carver campus. Since June of
last year, Marcovitz, Ripski, and two
members of Collegiate’s board have
met regularly with members of the
Carver alumni group, including Betty
Washington, Betty Brown, and fellow
alumna Sheila Webb as part of a
committee tasked with hammering out
a prototype for what it could look like
to govern the school together.
Washington, who researched
and proposed the idea of shared
governance, has made it clear
her cohort is not interested in an
advisory role. They hope Collegiate’s
board will agree to empower a site
council comprised of both school
administrators and Carver community
“[In the beginning] Kira and Doc Jones coached us through a lot because we really didn’t have a lot of trust in each other,” says Ripski (third from left)
of the shared governance committee (in January). “Now, we’re very open in these meetings. We say what we’re thinking. There’s not a lot of second
guessing, and I think part of that is just getting to know each other. We’ve spent a lot of time together, and we’ve built a certain relationship.”
Clockwise from left: Collegiate board member Susan Norwood, Eric Jones, Morgan Carter Ripski, Betty Brown, Sheila Webb, and Kira Orange-Jones.
“What we have
is a new system
by and large
comprised of
people who are
not from here.
Which raises the
question now:
What do we do
with that power?”

4. One Day • spring 2013 3534 One Day • spring 2013
members to establish and influence
policies and operations of the school.
“Right now among the day-to-day
decision makers, there are no African
Americans, and they’re primarily
people who are not from here,” says
Washington, recounting a Christmas
party where she and other Carver
alums were introduced to the Collegiate
staff. “Pretty much all of them were
leaving town that day to go home. Well,
we’re here, and the children are here,
so that’s a problem.” (Carver Collegiate
principal Jerel Bryant [G.N.O. ’07] is
African American.)
So far, Collegiate and the
Carver alums have sparred over
several issues, including the school’s
suspension policy, the lack of black
teachers, and the stringent discipline
code. In addition, the alumni group
has insisted that students from all
three schools—Carver Prep, Carver
Collegiate, and Carver High—
participate as one in extracurriculars
like football and band. It’s a demand
that has made it more challenging
for Collegiate to establish the strict
culture and identity they developed at
Sci Academy.
And building the right culture is
key to the ambitious outcomes to which
Collegiate holds itself accountable.
“We’re an open-enrollment 9 through
12 with no feeder that promises college
success to any kid coming in no matter
where they’ve been and what they’ve
done,” Marcovitz says.
It is an extraordinary promise
when 60 percent of Carver Collegiate’s
and Carver Prep’s incoming ninth
graders tested five to eight years
behind in reading—half of them
at a first-grade level or below. “We
wanted to make the statement that it
doesn’t matter how old you are, you
can always turn it around,” Marcovitz
says. “This idea of boundless growth—
boundless by age, boundless by
current performance level, boundless
by background—you can grow and
improve to an extraordinary extent,
always.”
At Sci Academy, led by Rhonda
Dale-Hart (R.G.V. ’99) in the Upper
Ninth Ward, Collegiate has kept its
promise, sending 94 percent of its first
graduating class—many of whom had
come in four or more years behind
grade level—to four-year colleges.
The school’s success won notice from
Oprah Winfrey, who gave Collegiate $1
million in 2010.
Rachel Guidry has three children
at Sci Academy but comes from a
family of proud Carver High graduates.
She understands the tension between
the community and Collegiate, but is a
devoted champion of what the charter
school has done for her children. “It
was good for my kids to see the other
side of education in New Orleans
because they have suffered and lost a
lot,” she says. “They recovered a lot of
it through Sci Academy.”
A beaming smile spreads across
her face when she describes her kids’
achievements. Her daughter, Simone,
a senior at Sci, “has the second-highest
GPA in the class. So right now she is
looking at salutatorian,” Guidry says.
“She’s in everything; she is an actress,
she is a musician, she is an athlete.
She is engaged in her education and
in her life, and that was something
that was amiss prior to Sci Academy.”
Her youngest, now a freshman, is
also excelling. “And that’s brand-new
because he was a troubled kid in
middle school,” Guidry says. “He has
made an entire 180 because he has
felt the difference in the environment.
They’re doing better now than I could
have asked for.”
Given the extraordinary demands
of raising student achievement so
dramatically, Ripski has struggled
with the immense time commitment
the shared governance committee has
presented. “I’ve left a lot of things
aside to do this work, and I am
constantly asking the question: Is it
worth the value-add? I’m constantly
worried about it,” she says.
Ripski is also careful to shield her
first-year principals, Jerel Bryant and
Ben Davis (both G.N.O. ’07) from the
fray so they can focus on the arduous
work of founding new schools—though
this has meant they have had little
contact with the Carver alumni group.
Davis, who leads Carver Prep, recently
lost a math teacher and is now, in
addition to leading his school, teaching
five periods of algebra every day.
“This whole concept of shared
governance, I mean it’s scary,” Ripski
says. “I’m trying to look at this from a
perspective of us having 20 schools, 50
schools someday, in multiple markets
across the country. We haven’t gone
into structure, function, and outcomes
yet. Defining those components is going
to be the tough stuff, and potentially
where we end up butting heads.”
“We struggle at times,” Ripski says
of her relationship with Washington.
“We have lots of long talks about really
tough issues. It’s hard and it’s slow,
and Betty Washington does not like
slow things.”
Still, there have been glimmers
of hope. Ripski was touched recently
when Brown asked for more informa-
tion about Collegiate’s practices and
results so she could do more to con-
vince skeptics in the community. “She’s
an amazing resource,” Ripski says. “In
a community in which there is a lot
of warranted distrust of the system,
someone like Betty could change the
perception about our school and deepen
the roots of our school.”
“We’re still here and we’re still
talking,” Washington says. “We have to
continue. No matter how frustrating,
no matter how many detractors we
have out there in the community,
because at the end of the day we’re
here for the young people.”
And so they were. On the first day
of school, some 60 Carver alumni stood
in a receiving line outside, just before
the students boarded their buses. As
students streamed out, the alumni
shook hands with each child.
“The kids got to tell the alums
something they learned that day, and
the alums got to tell the kids something
about their past at the school,”
Marcovitz says. “I would love to open
every year like that—connecting kids to
what is about to happen for them and
also what has happened here decades
and decades before.”
A seat at the table
For a time, the very notion of shared
governance seemed like fantasy. During
the fall and winter of 2011, the Carver
alumni group had met with the RSD
two dozen times with little to show
for it. After one meeting, the deputy
superintendent of the RSD came out
to find his car windshield smashed. By
spring, the tensions between Carver
and the RSD boiled over.
“If you can imagine all of the
investment that had gone into fighting
to get the school off land-banking
and then all the work to redesign the
school—all just to be snatched away
from you,” says committee member
Sheila Webb, an advanced practice
registered nurse who had helped found
Louisiana’s first school-based health
clinic at Carver in the late ’80s. “That
was the anger, that was the anguish.
People felt it was a great injustice that
had been done.”
More than once, protesters blocked
Carver High’s new principal, Isaac
Pollack (Greater Philadelphia ’06),
from entering the campus to meet the
teachers. Pollack had been a founding
teacher at Sci Academy (he won Teach
For America’s Excellence in Teaching
Award last summer) and had signed
on to run the phase-out of Carver’s
older students “to prove that you can’t
abandon these kids,” he says.
Close to the end of the year,
escorted by two police officers, Pollack
tried again. Seven protesters blocked
his path in the parking lot. “It was like
who was going to budge,” he recalls.
“Then a gentleman walked up to me
and was like, ‘Can I talk to you?’ He
was older, probably in his 60s or 70s,
and he had tears in his eyes. He said,
‘This is wrong. You have to know that
this is wrong, the way you are doing
this, this is not respectful.’ I was like,
“We’re still here, and we’re still talking,”
Washington says. “We have to continue
no matter how many detractors we have
out there, because at the end of the day
we’re here for the young people.”
To preserve Carver’s legacy, the school’s alumni
have insisted that students from all three academies
be permitted to participate as one in extracurricular
activities such as football and marching band.

5. One Day • spring 2013 3736 One Day • spring 2013
‘You’re right, this is wrong.’ I took the
security, and we left.”
Orange-Jones watched as the situa-
tion at Carver grew more heated by the
day. She decided to convene a meeting.
As it happened, Orange-Jones
had recently hired Dr. Eric Jones,
a longtime educator and activist, to
consult on community affairs. Jones
had run her grassroots campaign to
win a seat on the Louisiana Board of
Elementary and Secondary Education
(BESE). With his help, she had
unseated an 8-year incumbent and won
60 percent of the African American
vote. A native New Orleanian, Jones
had deep ties to the Carver alumni
community and had even helped write
their charter application.
Last June, Marcovitz,
Washington, Orange-Jones, and Jones
met at Ripski’s house for a family
meal. “We intentionally had it at
Morgan’s house to try and build trust
and start a relationship,” Orange-
Jones says. She asked each person at
the table to share a moment of pride
and regret in their work on behalf
of the city’s children. Washington
said she was saddened that she
hadn’t found a way to organize
her community and have a voice.
Marcovitz talked about the students
who dropped out in the first year
of opening Sci Academy. “It was
powerful to start with some shared
vulnerabilities,” Orange-Jones recalls.
Several weeks later, a larger
group that would later become the
governance committee convened
again and ended the meeting at
midnight with a memorandum of
understanding, signed by both sides,
that stated there would be no more
public protesting and that the next
year would be spent trying to find a
way to work together for the good of
Carver. Equally important, Collegiate
agreed that the school name would
remain Carver, and that its colors and
mascot would not change.
“I think it just took the right
person, honestly,” says Ripski. “Kira did
the legwork with both groups and really
built strong relationships. She was the
one who was able to bring us both to the
table and say, ‘This is happening. It can
happen with you fighting about it, or
it can happen with you trying to figure
out how to partner.’ ”
“I didn’t know Kira until Doc
[Jones] brought her to the table,”
Washington says. “Now I love her
like I’ve been knowing her all my life.
This would be very, very difficult to
do without them. Doc and Kira are
the people that everybody trusts.
We trust them on the Carver side
and Collegiate trusts them on the
Collegiate side. They are the bringing-
us-all-together piece.”
LISTENING DIFFERENTLY
Orange-Jones had been working
as a leader in Teach For America’s
New Orleans region for five years
when she decided to run for a seat on
the state school board. As she set out
to garner support, she realized how
few real relationships she had within
the community.
Seen as an African American
candidate who was largely supported
by white philanthropists, Orange-
Jones felt an unsettling rift between
her racial identity and the public
perception of her campaign. Then she
was introduced to Eric “Doc” Jones at a
Friday night football game.
Jones had been a teacher and
school administrator and, back in
the ’90s, had run the successful
school board campaign of Leslie
Jacobs, a prominent New Orleans
businesswoman and education
advocate. After Katrina, Jones helped
organize several of the city’s storied
high schools against RSD actions.
He was an outspoken champion of
the Carver alumni cause as well as a
staunch opponent of the organization
Orange-Jones happened to be leading.
“I never believed in Teach For
America,” says Jones. “I thought
they were coming in with young,
inexperienced talent. I felt like they
didn’t care about community. Being
a veteran teacher, being a union
member, I was influenced by what they
were saying.”
But he liked Orange-Jones.
He was impressed with her deep
knowledge of education issues and the
humility with which she approached
their conversation. “She listened
differently, which sold me on her,”
he says. Jones agreed to help her.
“Doc was a gatekeeper for me and
validated me in certain communities
where I was seen as an outsider,”
Orange-Jones says. “I was brought
in as a friend and so I was listening
through that lens, and as a result, I feel
like I was able to hear different things.”
With Jones as her guide, Orange-
Jones embarked on a listening tour
through the state, meeting with
constituents from the state’s most
underserved communities on less
familiar turf: churches, football games,
and in people’s living rooms. “This was
all new for me,” she says. “It helped me
think differently about the way I was
getting the work done.”
After her win, Orange-Jones
convinced Jones to join her team at
Teach For America—a move that
stunned colleagues on both sides.
“There were people saying to Kira,
‘How could you hook up with this guy
here, who has no appreciation for
reform, who’s always attacking us?
He’s our worst nightmare,’ ” recalls
Jones. “And people were saying to me:
‘She’s a TFAer, she’s horrible. What’s
wrong with you, Dr. Jones?’ ”
The Carver alums had supported
Orange-Jones’ opponent in the
BESE race, but she didn’t forget her
conversations with Betty Washington
and her peers. She was troubled
by the extent to which passionate,
caring people like Washington felt
disempowered to improve the lives of
children in the city.
“I started thinking, what is it that
we want for our kids and their futures?”
Orange-Jones says. “When we think
about ‘transformational change’ what
are we really driving at? The idea that
this many people would not be a part of
something so important just felt wrong
to me. If we are fighting for education
equity, which is ultimately about social
justice, then what is our vision if we
don’t feel a deep sense of responsibility
to give power back?”
She admits that conversations with
many of her colleagues in education
reform were disheartening. “They were
so fixed on the fact that it was OK. That
was the part that really rocked me—how
resolved they were that the perspectives
of so many could be sacrificed in the
name of a set of outcomes for children.
They saw those things as so binary.”
Orange-Jones had been warned
about Betty Washington. “They said she
was crazy; there was no reason to talk
to her,” Orange-Jones recalls. “But I
thought what she was saying was per-
fectly reasonable. I thought there was so
much there about bias and language. It
was like speaking different languages.”
Though not formally part of the
shared governance committee, Orange-
Jones and Jones continue to play active
roles as conveners and mediators—
scheduling meetings, helping craft
agendas, and translating across cultures
when necessary.
“Doc Jones is brilliant at coming
into conversations and facilitating,”
says Ripski. “He’ll stop me when I’m
interpreting Betty in the wrong way,
and stop Betty when she’s interpreting
me in the wrong way. I think him doing
that initially was just huge.”
Jones says that education reformers
need to shift the way they think about
building relationships. “We have to
define what community partnership
is,” he says. “What are we trying to
accomplish? It can’t be a selective
partnership. It can’t be a partnership
just when I need it and when I select
the conversation and who I want at the
table. It can’t be a drive-by—we have to
invest time.”
But time—and resources and
stamina—are often in limited supply.
When the futures of children are at
stake, many overtaxed school leaders
feel they simply can’t prioritize the
difficult and slow process of winning
over resistant communities. Instead
they focus on boosting student
achievement as quickly as possible.
When the results come along, the
community will too, they reason.
“I don’t think it’s easy—I do think there are real tensions,” says Orange-Jones of forging authentic partnerships between education reformers
and local communities. “But saying it’s either going to be student achievement or community engagement—that’s such a cop-out.”
“Doc validated me
in communities
where I was seen
as an outsider,”
says Orange-Jones.
“I was brought in
as a friend, so I
was able to hear
different things.”

6. 38 One Day • spring 2013
Chris Meyer (G.N.O. ’04), the
former deputy superintendent for the
RSD who led most of the meetings
with Carver alumni, says that too
many reformers “create a false choice”
between getting results and engaging
with the community. “You actually
can do both,” he says. “One lesson we
learned loud and clear: You can’t bring
reform to a community, you have to do
it with them. You have to be willing
to actually dig in and understand
what really matters to them. It’s just
a smarter way—if we take the time
before we rush to create change, I
think we may find we can do change
a lot faster. Instead of taking three or
four years to turn around a school, we
could do it in one or two.”
Jones says reformers must enter
communities not as authorities but
as listeners, first reaching out to
churches and leaders who command
respect with the residents. “You can’t
bully your way in just because you
have a ‘proven track record.’ Until you
build that trust, integrity, respect,
honesty, caring, and love, you have to
prove your credit.”
Since their tense stand-off in the
parking lot last spring, Carver Senior
principal Isaac Pollack and Washing-
ton’s group have come a long way. Not
long after that confrontation, Orange-
Jones facilitated a meeting with Pollack
and the Carver alumni, similar to the
one she had convened at Ripski’s house.
“Kira helped us tap into what we
really love and care about, but also
what we’re scared about—things we
think we’ve done wrong, and where we
need to grow,” Pollack says. “All of our
stories sounded very similar because
we all care about the same things. It
showed us that we’ve all had successes
in the past, so we should respect each
other, but we all have had struggles,
too, so we should be humble in each
other’s presence.”
Over time, Pollack has come
to embrace the presence of Carver
alumni in his school’s day to day life.
Every other week he holds a forum to
hear student issues, a conversation
facilitated by Carver alums. Pollack
says the conversations have helped
him better understand his students’
needs, and the alumni have backed him
on many important issues. “When the
students complained about having too
much homework, it’s the alumni who
were saying, ‘They’re preparing you for
college.’ For the scholars to hear it from
those alumni was much stronger than
hearing it from me,” he says.
Pollack says his relationship with
Washington’s group is less complicated
because he is phasing out his school.
Given the limited time his juniors and
seniors will spend at the school, Pollack
did not make the same commitment
Collegiate did with their promise to
send every student to college. And
since he is not establishing a shared
governance model, he’s freer to take
input without having to worry about
setting a precedent.
However, without the pressure
of those constraints, Pollack has
experienced first-hand the deep
value of the community’s presence in
his school. Last fall, Carver alumni
planned an emotional dedication
ceremony when Carver alumnus and
NFL Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk
returned to present his plaque to the
school. The alumni also planned the
school’s Homecoming festivities and
school dance, even coaching Pollack on
the traditions of a flower ceremony at
the big football game.
“It turns out there is a tremendous
amount of stuff that had to be done
at the game by me,” Pollack says. “If
it were my deal, I wouldn’t have done
any of that, and then the 300 people
who were sitting at the game would
have seen that and been like, ‘This is
ridiculous; where is my Carver?’ Instead
they said, ‘This is my Carver; it just has
a different person holding the flowers
than I would have expected.’ ”
Recently Dr. Betty Brown ran
a cultural awareness workshop for
Pollack’s staff about what it means
to educate and work with African
American youth. She also welcomed
a group of high schoolers to sit in
on one of her psychology classes at
Xavier “to experience what it was like
to go to a college class and also to see
what it felt like to be surrounded by
African Americans in a college setting,”
Pollack says. “We had one girl who
got expelled last year come off the
trip saying, ‘That’s it. I’m going. I’m
going to college. It’s done.’ That’s the
moment where I felt this is what this
partnership could be.”
Washington, for her part, has
learned some lessons, too. “The
relationship we have now with Isaac
is wonderful,” she says. “We listen
to him, and he listens to us. I had
prejudged him. Now my takeaway
is that even if you disagree with
something, sit down and talk to that
person, understand where he’s coming
from, give him an opportunity.”
Pollack says he now sees his role
as a leader in a new light. “In the
beginning you think you have all the
answers. But when you accept that you
don’t and that you want—not just want,
but need—input, then you realize no
one needs me to have all the answers.
They need me to be able to listen.”
And these days he’s committed
to hearing from a much broader set of
stakeholders. “Community isn’t a nice-
to-have or an add-on,” Pollack says. “It’s
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“You can’t bring reform to a community,”
says Meyer. “You have to do it with
them. If we take the time, I think we
may find we can do change a lot faster.”