Jennifer Guerra and Sarah Hulett host a special one hour documentary looking at school reform in Detroit and New Orleans. The program explores what’s working in New Orleans and what’s not, and whether the New Orleans model offers valuable lessons or a cautionary tale for education reform in Detroit.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.

There’s a lot of change happening in Detroit. And city leaders face a lot of challenges – like what to do with vacant land and dilapidated building and a lack of basic amenities in many parts of the city. School leaders have their own challenges.

DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb helps a student with his homework. (photo by Sarah Hulett)

For the last two weeks, we’ve been looking at education reform in New Orleans to see what, if anything, Detroit Public Schools might be able to learn. We looked at charter schools, special education, and teacher training, among other things.

So, for the last installment in our series, Rebuilding Detroit Schools, Michigan Radio’s Jennifer Guerra and Sarah Hulett decided to turn the attention to you and answer your questions.

SARAH HULETT: Hi Jen

JENNIFER GUERRA: Hey Sarah. OK. So we looked at the comments that came in after our stories aired. Thanks to everybody who wrote in.

SARAH HULETT: And we’re going to spend the next few minutes answering the questions as best we can. Here we go.

JENNIFER GUERRA: First one up is from a listener in Chicago.

AMI HICKS: Hello, I’m Ami Hicks and I’m an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. If you look at any success story about charters and other schools who are helping students achieve, why can’t public schools do the same things: Tutoring, longer class hours, longer school years, Saturday schools, and, you know, the list goes on.

JENNIFER GUERRA: So, basically, what Ami is asking is why can’t traditional public schools be more like charter schools? Well in some places they are, like in New Orleans. That’s this idea of a portfolio school district, where traditional public schools look a lot like charter schools. Most decisions are made at the school building level, and the central office has a very limited role.

Paul Hill is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, and here’s how he sums it up:

PAUL HILL: A portfolio district holds all schools accountable for student performance – basically whether students are learning. And it doesn’t care who runs a school. If it’s succeeding it sustains it, and if it’s not succeeding it tries to find an alternative.

JENNIFER GUERRA: Now one of the reasons New Orleans is able to do that is because its teachers union doesn’t have a contract with the district. So the people who run the district can dictate whatever work rules they want.

SARAH HULETT: Detroit on the other hand has a pretty powerful union. The Detroit Federation of Teachers would have to agree things like longer school days, or to work on Saturdays. So that’s something that the superintendent or – right now – the emergency financial manager would have to negotiate in the collective bargaining agreement.

The union’s current contract does include some provisions that move in that direction. There are plans for longer days and years at some schools. They’re developing a new evaluation process to determine teachers’ effectiveness. And there are also plans for teacher bonuses at schools where students make academic gains. So those are all pretty significant steps in the direction of school reform.

JENNIFER GUERRA: We also got a lot of questions and comments about our story on special education and charter schools. This one is from Tom Ackerman. He says traditional public schools have to pay into programs that take care of students with the most severe disabilities. And he wants to know why charter schools don’t have to contribute to those programs.

SARAH HULETT: OK, so we put that question to Jim Goenner. He runs the Center for Charter Schools at Central Michigan University. CMU is Michigan’s largest charter school authorizer.

Goenner says in Michigan, it’s the regional school organizations called ISDs that handle special ed services. Each of them does it a little differently, but he says charter schools are treated the same as traditional schools.

JIM GOENNER: So for example, if the plan in that particular Intermediate School District where the charter’s located says the charter pays for the service, they pay for it – just as any other public school does. If the Intermediate School District says we pay for that service, then the charter gets that service at no cost, same as the other districts.

SARAH HULETT: Alright, last one. It’s from Caroline Grannan, she’s a public school advocate in San Francisco. And here’s what she has to say about charters schools:

CAROLINE GRANNAN: They self-select and really sometimes actively select for students who are more motivated and who have supportive families, because those families are willing to jump through the hoops that it takes to get their student into a charter school. And then the less motivated, more oppositional students and the ones who don’t have family support … wind up in the traditional public schools, and then everyone proclaims the charters superior to the traditional public schools, which is not sound and not fair.

JENNIFER GUERRA: Caroline brings up a good point, and it’s actually a question that was addressed in a recent study that came out while our series was airing. Sarah, you want to talk more about that?

SARAH HULETT: Yeah, the study is from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty. It found that the New Orleans school system post-Hurricane Katrina has created – and this is a quote – a “separate but unequal tiered system of schools.”

JENNIFER GUERRA: Yeah, the application process in New Orleans is really complicated. Parents not only have to research where they want to send their kids to school, they have to drop off applications at each individual charter school, which takes a lot of time. That is something Paul Vallas is aware of and he’s working to fix it, he says. Vallas runs the Recovery School District in New Orleans:

PAUL VALLAS: Right now we have what is known as the consolidated application process, where you can go to any school and apply to any school using the same standard application form. So what this does is it makes charter schools accessible perhaps to less-engaged parents, or the parent that doesn’t have time to shop around. Eventually though we hope to have a single form where you can apply to multiple schools on the same form and actually have a centralized lottery.

JENNIFER GUERRA: There is a lot to learn from New Orleans, and the way it’s reorganized its school system since the Hurricane. Test scores have gone up since the storm. There’s an urgency, and a commitment on the part of students and teachers and school leaders that you can feel when you walk into a classroom.

SARAH HULETT: There are also some problems, which the folks in charge there acknowledge are working to fix.

JENNIFER GUERRA: But there also some people who say New Orleans is on the wrong track with its almost singular focus on charter schools. And they worry about what the New Orleans experiment means for public education in Detroit and the country.

SARAH HULETT: So the question for school leaders in Detroit is whether the city should copy the New Orleans model…or learn from it.

To see the study from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race & Poverty, click here.

The Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University has written a response to the IRP report, which can be found here.

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.

Dennis Black will graduate from Detroit’s Cody High School on June 9. (photo by Sarah Hulett)

For the past two weeks, we’ve been hearing experts and adults weigh in about school reform. We want to wrap up our series Rebuilding Detroit Schools by talking to some students in Detroit and New Orleans. We starts our story with this profile of Dennis Black, who will graduate from Detroit’s Cody High School in a couple of weeks.

SARAH HULETT: A few years ago, Dennis Black was one of those kids the adults worry about. Because Black flunked his first year of high school.

DENNIS BLACK: I kind of slacked off. I did more than slack off. I wasn’t prepared, nor did I care how important school was.

SARAH HULETT: Black had gotten into the prestigious Renaissance High School in the Detroit Public Schools system. And he expected success would come easy.

DENNIS BLACK: I went in there real arrogant, kind of cocky, thinking I was going to get all 4.0s, things like that. And because of that arrogance I was off track and I didn’t understand how important high school was. Missing assignments. And this is what led to me getting kicked out.

SARAH HULETT: Now, a lot of experts will tell you that ninth grade is a make-or-break year for kids. It’s when many of them – far too many in Detroit – decide school’s not for them, and they drop out. And Black says he thought about dropping out. But he was still close with one of his middle school teachers, who helped talk him out of it.

DENNIS BLACK: He told me after I told him about Renaissance that it doesn’t matter how hard you fall, it matters how quick you pick yourself back up. So I just focused on picking myself back up.

SARAH HULETT: But Black says he knows plenty of kids who didn’t recover from similar setbacks.

DENNIS BLACK: The students I know that dropped out, I talk to them every now and then but not that much because I got to keep myself around positive people that influence me positively. So when I do talk to them, they’re either in a bad situation, need some money, or if I see them in the streets they’ll be like “What up, you got some change? You got some money?”

SARAH HULETT: Black avoided that scenario. He repeated the ninth grade at a charter school, and got his grades back on track.

And dropping out wasn’t the only trap he avoided. Violence, both in and out of school, is something that many Detroit kids know. Four of the kids Black knew in childhood have been shot to death.

DENNIS BLACK: One of my friends Avandre, he was killed on Dexter. He was shot on Mother’s Day. No one knows why he was shot, they just say a man was shooting and Avandre caught a few rounds, and he died in the hospital that night.

SARAH HULETT: Black says the violence on Detroit’s streets made him appreciate school, and how an education could keep him out of trouble. And he also found something that helped him get engaged with school again: he joined the Cody High School debate team.

DENNIS BLACK: Debate was one of the after-school activities that I found that interested me and kept my attention. Everyone in the world has one of these activities that can keep their attention. Every dropout you know, they always wanted to be something when they were little, but they never had the classes in high school that you could achieve these goals.

SARAH HULETT: Black says Detroit Public Schools should have more extracurricular activities like debate. He says more needs to be done to encourage parents to get involved in their kids’ education. And he says teachers need to up their game too.

DENNIS BLACK: Teachers should do more to relate to their students. They should not so much have a smaller amount of work, but have more focused work where they actually learn something.

SARAH HULETT: And Black says another group that could do a better job when it comes to Detroit’s schools is the media. He says there are plenty of good stories that don’t make their way into the newspapers or onto the airwaves – like Cody’s debate team winning championships, or the chess master at Mumford High School who’s ranked among the top players in the nation. But we can at least give those accomplishments a mention here.

JENNIFER GUERRA: Exactly. Hi Sarah.

SARAH HULETT: Hi Jen.

JENNIFER GUERRA: So what’s next for Dennis?

SARAH HULETT: Well, he’s competing in the world debate championships in the Netherlands in July. Then he’s off to Wayne State, where he’s got a full scholarship. He plans to major in political science, and in 10 years he says he wants to represent the district that includes Cody High.

JENNIFER GUERRA: Very cool. And in the spirit of giving students the last word, we asked students in both Detroit and New Orleans what their ideal school would look like. Let’s take a listen.

KAI PITTS (Detroit): My name is Kai Pitts, I’m 14 years old and I’m in the 8th grade. My idea of a good school is a school with a strong curriculum, a school that prepares you for future success, and a school that has a safe environment.

ALVIN DEMERY (New Orleans): think a good school should be like listening to others, the students’ opinions.

JESSICA GREEN (New Orleans) Teachers who won’t just sit there and throw a book in your face and say do page whatever instead I would like to have teachers that help you and if you really don’t get it, they’ll come sit next to you and help you and work out what you want so you can get it better.

JAYLIA MILLER (Detroit): My idea of a perfect school is for the school to get the kids ready to go to college. EARL POOLE (New Orleans): A school with no violence, where people that focus on their school work and trying to build a future at least.

SAVANNAH ALLEN (Detroit): My idea of a good school is a school that reduces and reuses and recycles and cares about all the kids opinions, and the school is clean and organized.

RODISHA JENKINS (New Orleans): Like if they have better lunches, better teachers and better classrooms to study in, and better books, and better computers where you can search up stuff.

NIJEL BANKS (New Orleans): The students at the school, it’s like they don’t really have anything to really make them want to behave because, you know, at schools, it’s like they want you to be robots or something like that, just to be good and sit down and be quiet all day without really having anything to do. That’s how I see school and that’s why I don’t really enjoy it.

CHRISTINA CARRUTH (New Orleans): I think that a good school is a school that has discipline. I would like to see more discipline, more learning, and maybe sometimes a little recess.

NEESHA RUFFINS (New Orleans): I guess more encouraging, passionate teachers, the ones that that actually know that they can learn from students and not just teach.

TRINITY TATE (Detroit): A good school looks like a clean school, when the kids are happy and the teachers care about the kids.

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.

Students at Carstens Elementary in Detroit; it's one of more than 40 schools on the list for closure. (photo by Mercedes Mejia)

For the past several days we’ve been looking at school reforms in New Orleans and Detroit. Yesterday, we heard about efforts to close or take over “failing” schools. But the steep enrollment decline in Detroit means even some schools that are doing well could have to shut their doors. As we continue our series Rebuilding Detroit Schools, Sarah Hulett has this look at one of the schools slated for closure this year.

Carstens Elementary is one of those “little engine that could” stories.

The school sits across the street from two houses that are empty shells separated by a weedy vacant lot. Almost all of the students come from poor families. And the school building looks like it hasn’t had many updates since it was built almost a century ago.

But against what look like long odds, the students at Carstens are some of the top performers in the state.

One hundred percent of third and fourth graders were proficient on the math portion of Michigan’s standardized test this past fall. Ninety-seven percent were proficient on the English test.

Abby Phelps handles outreach at Carstens, which she says is more than just a school.

“We are the staple of the community that keeps it alive. Without us, it would be dead here,” explains Phelps. “There’s no recreation centers, there’s nowhere parents can run to get assistance for utility payments, can get emergency food. They’re not gonna get that anywhere. Where they gonna get it? Where they gonna get it? So it’s impossible for them to close this school. It cannot be done.”

But according to the school closure plan announced by Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, that’s exactly what will be done. Bobb wants to combine two schools: Carstens, which is a kindergarten through fifth grade, with a K through 8th grade school about a mile and a half away.

But it’s an idea that has few fans.

In the cafeteria after school, Monique Roddy says she’s not happy about the prospect of her granddaughter being in the same building with middle school kids. She says closing Carstens would devastate the neighborhood.

“It saddens me. It actually breaks my heart, because this is the lifeline for these children in this neighborhood.”

Carstens is just one of more than 40 schools on the list for closure. Some parents will decide to send their kids to the schools picked to replace the old ones. But the danger for the school system is that some parents will leave it altogether – and send their kids to a charter or suburban school.

Because school funding in Michigan is based on student enrollment, the exodus means a kind of death spiral for the Detroit Public Schools: fewer students means the loss of millions of dollars each year. Schools get closed as the classrooms get emptier. But each round of school closures pushes more kids out of the district.

Anita Starks’ story bucks that trend. She took her kids out of the charter school they were attending, and drives them across town every day to go to Carstens. But now, she says, she’s not sure what she’ll do.

“I thought about that this morning, and I don’t even have an idea right now, which direction I want to go in. Because they’re closing so many public schools, where do you go to another public school and find another good one? Where are some of these teachers going to where maybe your child could possibly have the same teachers, same special ed education if you needed it?”

Starks says she hopes Robert Bobb, the state-appointed financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, will reconsider Carstens’ fate.

“I know he has a job to do,” says Starks. “I know he’s trying to do the best job he can, and maybe there are some schools that are not as productive as Carstens, but to me why kill something that’s working?”

Robert Bobb says he’s not killing anything. On the contrary, he says he wants Carstens to do what it’s been doing – but for more kids, in a different building.

“The goal is to take the strong programs and put the strong programs into schools where you have weaker programs so you can get more kids the experience of…you know you can bring more kids into the strong programs.”

Bobb says people need to get over the idea that a school is just the building it’s in. And he says they also need to realize that the school district cannot afford to keep every building open.

Tyrone Winfrey is a member of the Detroit Board of Education. The board is in the middle of a lawsuit challenging Robert Bobb’s school closure and academic plans.

Mr Winfrey, what do you make of what Bobb says about closing schools, that a school is more than the building it’s in.

“I’m a life-long Detroiter other than going away to college,” says Winfrey, “and what I found about people in Detroit is that they hold onto their schools very dear because it’s symbolic of the community, symbolic of the neighborhood. However, my concern is not necessarily with the school closures overall, but the process of how we got to that and then also how can we re-grow the district so we won’t have to continue to close certain schools in certain areas.”

When you talk about re-growing the district, academics are of course an important part of that. Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb has an academic plan, but the Detroit Board of Education has sued Bobb, saying he doesn’t have the authority to handle academics. Setting aside the legal question, how does Bobb’ss academic plan match up with the Board’s?

“Well one of the main things is rigor in the classroom,” explains Winfrey. “Both plans look at, for instance, Advanced Placement. That is very key; there are some high schools that don’t have an AP class within their schools. When that student gets to the collegiate level and they haven’t taken classes like that, they’re at a disadvantage. So both plans look at that. Both plans look at strengthening our middle school curriculum because in order to have a strong high school, you have to have a strong middle school. Some of the differences are basically looking at the overall school closure situation as well as how we select principals and how we select administrators. Those would be some of the differences that I would see, and I think that again we can work these things out and work together on this particular situation.”

During this series, Rebuilding Detroit Schools, we’re taking a look at what lessons – if any – New Orleans might have for Detroit in terms of school reform. We might be talking about more school-level decision making, longer school days, longer school years, allowing for more charters, which certainly New Orleans has done. What kinds of education reforms do you think Detroit needs right now?

“We have talked about even in both plans looking at longer school days and making sure that not only when the school ends that you have quality after school programming, plus making sure that school is pretty much a hub for the community. That’s very important. We had also at one point looked more at a form of site-based management where [it's] basically [a principal's] decision so far as the teachers, so far as the custodians, so far as the support, so far as in the office, or whatever. And it may behoove the Detroit Public Schools to look at charter schools, but chartering our own schools. In fact we charter some of our schools now, but maybe expand that to charter more schools. So I’m open to that.

What most concerns you about sending a child to Detroit Public Schools, and what do you hear most from parents who have their kids in DPS?

“When you put your child in a school, you want to make sure that when you drop them off at school, or they walk to school or ride the bus to school or whatever, you want to make sure that child is safe and that child is being educated properly. But I think we’re turning the tide with the academics, and that we’ve got to continue working on the safety and facilities and making sure our money is managed properly.”

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.

On 3/25/10 at 3pm, Charity Nebbe hosted a special call-in show called “A Tale of Two Cities: Lessons the Motor City Can Learn From the Crescent City.” It aired on both Michigan Radio and WWNO New Orleans and will take a look at the two school systems. We discussed what’s working in New Orleans and what’s not, and whether the New Orleans model offers valuable lessons or a cautionary tale for education reform in Detroit.

We also hosted a web chat during the show, which you can read here.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.

Gary Robichaux’s charter management organization will take over two failing schools in New Orleans. (photo by Jennifer Guerra)

No matter how many education reforms are in place, it’s inevitable that some schools won’t succeed – whether it’s failing to make adequate progress with student test scores or failing to have their finances in order. Michigan Radio’s Jennifer Guerra and Sarah Hulett take a look at what happens when a school fails as part of our series, Rebuilding Detroit Schools.

Gary Robichaux and two of his colleagues are hunched over a laptop. They’re fiddling around with a design program, trying to make a new banner. Robichaux owns a charter management company called ReNew and they just announced that they will take over two traditional failing schools in New Orleans.

“We’re actually designing a sign to put on the side of the building to let them know where to call to enroll for our new charter school for next year.”

What Robichaux and company are doing is pretty typical in New Orleans: Having charter schools come in and take over failing traditional schools. In this case, they got more than $2.5 million from private foundations to do it. But what happens when it’s the charter school that’s failing?

Neerav Kingsald says “it’s very difficult, and it’s actually been a huge Achilles heel so to speak in the charter movement.”

Kingsland is with New Schools for New Orleans, an organization that helps develop new charter schools. He says the city is trying to get better at closing failing charter schools; so far, only one charter in the city has been shut down since Hurricane Katrina.

“The school was in its third year of existence, technically it had a five year charter so it could have fought to stay open for two more years. And the Board of the Directors of that charter school did something very noble and courageous in some respects: They handed back voluntarily their charter to the state.”

A similar story is playing out in Detroit at a charter school called Colin Powell Academy. But the people there aren’t going away quietly.

Here’s what’s going on.

In Michigan, you’ve got universities holding the charters of most schools. School districts and community colleges can also authorize charters, but universities are the biggest players. And the biggest of them is Central Michigan University. They hold Colin Powell’s charter. But CMU is revoking it after the school year wraps up. Jim Goenner is the director of the Center for Charter Schools at CMU.

They’d been on probation for several years. And we came to a point where we said: We’ve talked about corrective action plans, we’ve had a lot of promises, but they’re not being able to be sustained in a quality, sustainable manner that’s going to make a difference for kids and for the taxpayers’ dollars, and that we can longer continue justifying authorizing this academy.”

Goenner says the school’s been plagued with money problems. It’s had 10 administrators in 15 years. And the school failed to out-perform Detroit Public Schools on the 2008 state standardized test. So as of July First, CMU will no longer authorize Colin Powell. In theory that means the school notifies the parents about what’s going on, and then there’s a process for shutting everything down. Teachers have to find new jobs, and the school’s assets get auctioned off.

But Phyllis Noda, Colin Powell’s executive director, says the school is “being cut down in our adolescence.” She says Colin Powell is on a path to turn things around. The school’s test scores from 2009 show significant improvement over 2008. The scores are up an average of 21 percent across all the grades and subjects. So Noda says she’s not ready to give her students’ names over to competing charter schools who might want to pick them up.

We are trying to package our proposal to a local district to consider us, and if we have no students to offer, then we might as well close our doors.”

Noda says about 100 students have already left the school since finding out Colin Powell might close next year.

But not Shania Pearson’s kids. She has four of them at Colin Powell, and she hopes to keep them there.

“I love how you can just come to the school, and they can see you and be like: oh, you’re here to pick up Hasan, and they can name your kids personal, just by face,” explains Pearson.

Most parents at Colin Powell think the school is doing a good job. And they feel like it’s safer than the traditional public schools in the DPS system. The school’s administrator is trying to get a suburban school district to authorize them, and she hopes they’ll be able to stay open.

But if a school really is in terrible shape, can they just reopen under a new authorizer without fixing the problems? Gary Naeyaert heads the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, that’s the group that represents charter schools, and he says no:

“Well it’s the uniform opinion of the charter school movement that schools that do not make the grade, schools that do not make good things happen for children, shouldn’t be operational.”

Now, another authorizer could decide that Colin Powell deserves another chance. It does happen. But until then, teachers and students are in limbo. Some parents said they’ll probably send their kids to a DPS school if Colin Powell closes. But the closest elementary to Colin Powell – it’s actually just down the street – looks like it won’t be an option. It’s on the list of schools the district wants to close next year. We’ll take a look at that school tomorrow.

But first, we’re going to talk about money with Western Michigan University professor of education, Gary Miron.

A report from the Cowen Institute at Tulane University shows that, after the hurricane, the federal government gave $196 million in federal grants to reopen schools in New Orleans. So those are one-time funds. What happens when those dry up?

“That’s a big question for a lot of people who are looking at this reform: Is it sustainable and so forth? I’m a little bit concerned about that. I think we shouldn’t overplay that amount though again because after [Hurricane Katrina] there’s been an incredible need for infrastructure. And yet not only have we got those federal sources of monies that have come into the district, but we have an enormous influx of private monies, especially from large foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the Walton Foundation and some others that are promoting a charter school agenda.”

Does the money follow when you start saying charter, charter, charter? Do these national foundations pour money into whatever district?

“I think Detroit would be an attractive target for them to promote these ideas,” says Miron, “and I think Detroit would be successful if they push that model to bring in private resources. The question is for how long and whether it will stay.”

With regards to money, are there any advantages one type of school has over another?

“In terms of planning, charter schools have an advantage because they can limit the number of students and so they can plan for that efficiently. Charter schools also have advantages because they tend to serve fewer high cost students like students with special needs, children that are classified as English Language Learners. And in terms of programs, many charter schools tend to serve lower elementary or middle schools where it’s less costly per pupil. The big advantage of the traditional public schools…is economies of scale,” says Miron. “They can use their resources more efficiently, especially when it comes to administration. Our research has shown charters are less sufficient when it comes to administration and part of that is because you have single administrators and there are fewer students per administrators in a charter school relative to a school district.”

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.

It’s 7:15 on a chilly spring morning…kids from all over New Orleans are coming in by the bus load to KIPP Central City Academy and Primary. A group of sixth graders is hanging outside, waiting for the bell to ring. So I ask them what they think about their school. Three of the boys say they like it just fine. The fourth one, Troy Picard, is not a fan.

“No, their rules are just too strict for me,” says Picard, prompting a quick rebuttal from his friend Carl Lacoste.

“Troy, I disagree what you said about strict rules,” Lacoste says. “The only rules we have are work hard and be nice.”

“But a lot of other rules fall under that category,” Picard says.

Students aren’t the only ones with rules. Jonathan Bertch, who runs the business side of things at KIPP Central City, says adults at the school have rules, too. The main one is “no excuses.” As in: All those excuses you hear about why inner city kids can’t succeed? Out the window.

“Oh their home life, oh they didn’t eat breakfast, there’s a million excuses that you can make,” Bertch says, “but what we have to do in order to make this work is we have to eliminate the excuses and say we’re gonna take responsibility, we’re gonna make sure this works.”

In other words, you get your kid on the bus, and KIPP will take care of the rest. The school provides breakfast for all the kids, or KIPPSTERS, as they’re called, and nearly all the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The teachers give out their cell phone numbers, so students can call and get help with their homework. And every new student gets a home visit from the principal or a teacher before the school year even starts.

“We’ll go and sit down with that family and spend about 45 minutes talking about the school, talking about the expectations, answering questions and starting to build that relationship with the child and with the parent,” he says. “And I think that’s the foundation of a lot of what we’re able to do at this school.”

The students are in school for nine and a half hours a day, plus three weeks of summer school, and homework every night. There are also mandatory Saturday classes where the kids go on field trips and do community service.

6th grader Waynell Fountain is like a lot of kids at the school. She was at a failing school up until last year and came in at a 3rd grade reading level. Today she’s caught up. She’s says has her teachers at KIPP to thank for that.

“We have to read for 30 minutes, write about what we read, and that’s what made me grow more and I was reading more challenging books,” she says, adding that she didn’t do a lot of reading at her last school. “I don’t think they really had a library,” she says.

But the KIPP model isn’t for everyone, even for kids in the same family. Audrey Stewart has two sons. She sent her oldest son to a KIPP school in the French quarter:

“It’s really, really regimented and I just wasn’t sure it was what he needed,” Stewart says. So she pulled him out and enrolled him at a different school the next year. Her youngest son, on the other hand, loves the structure of KIPP. So he’s staying there.

Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise is the executive director of KIPP New Orleans. She says the goal is to eventually serve fifteen percent of the public school kids in the city, almost all of them low income students of color.

“By 2022, we’re predicting…that we’ll have 1,000 college grads in new Orleans that would not have, were it not for KIPP, been college graduates,” Kalifey-Aluise says. “So I think what that does for the city is pretty transformative.”

Detroit school leaders want to see that same kind of transformation.

KIPP is predominately a middle school model, and they’ve started to expand and open elementary schools around the country.

But charter advocates in Detroit say you can’t just fix elementary and middle schools. They say you’ve got to tackle the toughest problem: high schools.

Lou Glazer heads a new initiative called Michigan Future Schools. It’s hoping to open 35 new, college-prep high schools for Detroit kids by 2018. But Glazer says when he went to New Orleans to talk to folks there about starting up new schools, they gave him some advice:

“Their recommendation to us was don’t do high schools,” he says. “High schools are the hardest, I think everybody understands that.”

But Glazer says Detroit desperately needs better high schools. So that’s what his group is working on. Starting at Detroit Edison Public School Academy – or DEPSA, which will add ninth grade in the fall.

Eighth grader Ashley Franks says she plans to be part of DEPSA’s first class of high school graduates in 2014. This is her first year at DEPSA. She says it’s a huge improvement from the school she used to attend – Halley Magnet Middle School, in the Detroit Public School system.

“Well Halley, most kids were from the east side…they brought guns to school and bad habits. The school was unprepared, they wasn’t organized, they just let anyone get into the school and do unappropriate things,” she says.

And safety isn’t DEPSA’s only draw. Nancy Garvin handles outreach for the school. She’s pointing at a chart on the wall that shows the school’s year-by-year scores on Michigan’s standardized test – called the MEAP. In 2008, the school’s fifth and eighth graders outscored Detroit Public Schools kids in reading and math tests by an average of more than 30 percent.

Garvin says when the school opened its doors 13 years ago, the scores were very low.

“But each year we improve,” Garvin says. “We look at what the children score and where the gaps are and we’ve changed curriculum, we’ve brought in more professional development. Wherever we see that students need more, we bring it in and provide it.”

DEPSA is getting $850,000 to help it open its high school this fall. And Superintendent Ralph Bland says he plans to implement the same strategies that have worked for his elementary and middle schoolers in next year’s ninth grade class.

“And you’ll probably hear the word high school come out of our mouth very little,” Bland says. “It’ll be more college. College, college, college.”

Bland says his goal for the high school is for every graduate to be ready for college (without needing to take remedial classes when they get there), to graduate from college, and hopefully return to Detroit help improve it.

The non-profit Michigan Future Schools has $13 million it’s ready to hand out to schools like DEPSA, or KIPP: schools that can promise 85 percent of students will graduate and go to college, and that 85 percent of them get a college degree.

Lou Glazer – who runs Michigan Future Schools – says that’s enough money for seven high schools. But the goal is five times that many.

“So if we get to 35 high schools, and they’re all high quality, and we get to 14,000 kids, we’ll change the landscape,” Glazer says, “because it will take so many kids out of low-quality schools that they’ll go out of business whether policy makers are willing to close them or not.”

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

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Future teacher Jake Zunamon helps DPS student Patricia Curiel with her AP History homework. (photo by Mercedes Mejia)

For today’s story in our Rebuilding Detroit Schools series, we’ll focus on some of the most important people in a school: Teachers.

Some experts say more needs to be done to prepare teachers for urban classrooms, whether that’s through traditional teacher education programs or alternative routes like Teach For America.

Kari Detwiler teaches reading to 30 struggling students at a charter school in New Orleans, and she’s nothing if not optimistic.

“I love teaching,” says Detwiler. “I love being with kids, I’m a hard worker, and I’m ready to do what it takes. But I do feel like I’m missing certain areas of instructional expertise.”

This is Detwiler’s second year in the classroom. Like the more than 500 other Teach for America members in New Orleans, Detwiler got her alternative teaching certification through a five-week training program in Phoenix, Arizona.”

It was a very “harsh reality to go from the classroom in Phoenix to the classroom at one of the lowest performing elementary schools in New Orleans,” explains Detwiler. “Being a first year teacher is difficult anyway you look at it, but I definitely feel like I wish I had better preparation in terms of how to teach lower elementary.”

That said, she’s glad she went through Teach for America, and she thinks she’s doing her students a lot of good. Several of her students jumped from a Pre-K to a first grade reading level in half a year.

There are a lot of people who think Teach for America is doing great things for New Orleans schools. And they’re excited about the news that 100 TFA members are coming to Detroit this fall.

Keith Johnson, however, is not one of the people who’s thrilled with the news.

“We don’t need educational mercenaries, says Johnson, who’s head of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. “We don’t need people coming here to do a two-year stint to have a blip on their resume, to say oh look at me, I went and served in one of the most troubled school districts in the country on my way to my corporate office.”

And Johnson says it’s absurd to hire people fresh out of a five-week training course to teach in some of the nation’s toughest classrooms.

Teach for America officials say those kinds of criticisms are unfair. They say corps members have to apply for jobs just like any other teacher, and they say many of their alumni decide to stay in the profession after their two-year tour is up.

That’s what Agnes Aleobua did. After teaching with the corps in Miami, she was tapped to open a new charter school in Detroit this fall. Aleobua says she agrees that five weeks is not an ideal amount of time to train a teacher to hit the ground running in urban classrooms like Detroit’s.

“But,” Aleobua explains, “we’re in a state of emergency. If they get the results we need, where students are learning on a high level, students are going off to college, students are returning to places like Detroit if that’s happening, we have to take those routes less taken.”

Aleobua is in the midst of hiring teachers for her new school, and she says Teach for America corps members are among the first people she’d entrust with her students’ educations.

There are going to be 100 Teach for America members working in Detroit’s classrooms this fall: 80 will be in charters, like Aleobua’s school, and 20 will be in Detroit Public Schools classrooms.

Even though DPS is shrinking, there’s still expected to be a huge need for new teachers in the coming years because so many veteran teachers are getting close to retirement age.

And a lot of education experts say teacher training programs haven’t been doing that great a job of preparing new teachers for the really tough work that awaits them in the classroom.

But there are some innovative programs out there trying to fix what’s broken.

One of them is the Teacher Education Initiative at the University of Michigan. One of their training sites is Western International High School in Detroit.

This is first period in Tom Hoetger’s Advanced Placement History class, and he’s walking his students through some practice AP exam questions.

Sitting in the class with Hoetger’s students are four future teachers from the University of Michigan. It’s just their third time in this class. But they’re already working with students.

Hoetger calls it “radically different.” He says the kind of teacher preparation he got, and most people still get, falls far short of what novice teachers need to be ready for the demands of a real classroom.

This U of M program is a pilot project that has students on “rotations” similar to medical school training.

The future teachers in Tom Hoetger’s classroom are doing their student study rotation, where they can get a better feel for the classroom experience from the student’s point of view.

Jake Zunamon is one of the teachers-to-be. He says it’s one thing to take teacher education classes, and talk about how classrooms are supposed to function, and how kids learn, or struggle to learn, “but it doesn’t really make sense to you until you actually go in the classroom and see it first-hand, and then you can make sense of it.”

So in this class, each future teacher works closely with Hoetger’s students as they prepare for the AP exam. Zunamon is helping student Jessica Curiel.

And that kind of classroom experience is what will equip new teachers with skills that will actually help students learn, says Deborah Ball. She’s the dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan.

“As a parent,” says Ball, “I don’t think any of us wants our first grader to be in the classroom of someone who really doesn’t know what he or she is doing, and that first-grade year goes out the window and your child doesn’t learn to read, and that’s what we have right now.”

Ball says right now, aspiring teachers do spend a lot of time in schools. They’re just not learning how to do specific things with children.

“And if you think about it,” says Ball, “we don’t do that in any other field. We don’t have plumbers learn to fix drains by just sending them out to houses with broken disposals and say: You know, try it and come back and tell us how it worked. Reflect on it.”

The rotation program is one of the ways the university is looking to fix that. Students are doing more hands-on work. They’re doing it earlier in their teacher education program. And they’re also getting intensive direction and feedback on techniques teachers need. Things like how you get kids to pay attention, how you start and end a class, how you move 30 kids from one subject to the next.

Right now, only about 20 percent of students in U of M’s teacher education program are taking part in the rotation pilot project. Next fall the university will roll out a completely new program for elementary teacher candidates. A new secondary program will follow in 2011.

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.