Hard Lessons The Promise of an Inner City Charter School

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Chapter 1 Reality The rage in Lillian Lopez had been burning for some time. Her anger began with her neighborhood, the Fruitvale district of East Oakland, the citys greatest Latino stronghold. She didnt want to live there anymore. For nearly a quarter century, she had worked at one good position after another in the corporate offices of Wells Fargo Bank; certainly, between her income and her husbands, they could afford to move to a safer, quieter area. She endured the blast of the boom boxes, the screeching cars that made the front bedroom no good for sleeping, the unswept streets. But the hardest part was being scared. Her two younger boys, with their typical walk, their typical clothes, their typical haircuts, looked so much like every other boy in the neighborhoodeven she, driving down the street, would mistake other peoples children for her own. One day, she feared, gangbangers with guns would make the same mistake. She couldnt even let her children ride bicycles on the sidewalk, for fear of the speeding cars turning oedonuts? in front of the house. But her husband, Jose, refused to abandon the neighborhood. oeThis is Mexican town,? he declared, and he wasnt about to call a moving van to take him away from his roots. The deepest daily wellspring of anger for Lopez came from her search for a decent school for her boys. In those days, she had no notions about creating a new school, nor even that it was possibleshe just wanted to find a place where her two younger children could get an education. Her oldest son, MartA?n, now twenty-seven and born long before her marriage, had enjoyed a relatively easy journey through private elementary and then public middle and high school. But by the time she married Jose and had her next son, Chipito, timesand schoolshad changed. Lopez enrolled Chipito at Jefferson Year-Round Elementary, the neighborhood public school. It was a decision she would come to regret. For starters, Jefferson had run out of places to put children. Designed to house some 700 children, Jefferson had burgeoned to more than 1,100and in bad years, that number might jump by another 600 or so. Californias grim recession had left it with the most crowded classrooms in America, and struggling Oakland had not built a new school in thirty years. Yet in the Jefferson neighborhooda mostly poor area dominated by Latino, Southeast Asian, and African-American familiesthe population had swelled during that time. Bereft of new building funds, the district had responded to the rising tide by hauling one portable classroom after another onto Jeffersons weathered, cracking blacktop playground. The more the numbers of children grew, the more playground disappeared, until the campuswhich sprawled across two unbroken city blocksresembled an odd little city, with narrow, isolated alleys between the yellowish-tan trailers. The gaps between adjoining portables were covered by plywood, which eventually decayed, opening holes big enough to admit rats, or in some cases, children. The innumerable hidden spaces let graffiti artists work with little fear of interruption. Yet even with the extra classrooms, Jefferson was still overcrowded, and sought to accommodate the high numbers of students by running year-round. This solution depended on a complicated system of