B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 19 , 2019
the mother of a rising seventh-
grader at Digital Pioneers, arrived
at the church to pick up her daugh-
ter’s uniforms and learned that
school probably won’t start in the
new building.
“But you have to get your build-
ing done,” she said. “Stuff hap-
pens.”
Ashton said she was informed
that damage could exceed
$250,000. She has insurance but is
unsure of what it will cover. Doz-
ens of workers are pulling long
shifts, cleaning soot off walls,
draining water, and rebuilding the
damaged classroom and roof.
“Our kids deserve to have an
awesome place that they’ll be ex-
cited to come to,” she said.
The routine stresses of the first
day of school have been com-
pounded by the fire, but Ashton
said she is drawing from the les-
sons she instills in her students
about overcoming challenges.
Community members have show-
ered the school with notes of sup-
port and offers of help.
Her staff is doing everything it
can to ensure that students have a
memorable first day of school.
And she said she appreciates the
maintenance and construction
workers’ tireless toiling to ensure
the building is safe and ready for
students.
“Whenever there’s a challenge
or problem, we tell our scholars to
think about our values,” Ashton
said. “One of our values is growth,
which is that failure and difficulty
is just feedback. And this is defi-
nitely difficulty — an opportunity
to grow.”
[email protected]ministrator. “Whenever we have a
chance to invest in education in
the community, we try to do that.”
The school has communicated
with families about the fire and
challenges it faces ahead of next
Monday, seeking to assure fami-
lies that school will go on.
On Friday, Karen Washington,first days of school. Then, there
will be a second first day of school
on the new campus after Labor
Day.
The church said Digital Pio-
neers can stay as long as needed.
“We can act as a home here,”
said LeGrande Baldwin, a church
leader and former D.C. school ad-tions and furniture that had been
moved to the new building. And
the school is expected to double in
size — it will now have sixth- and
seventh-graders — and there is not
enough room at the church for all
the students to sit at desks.
Ashton said she will plan team
building and other exercises thefirst day of classes. She suspects
the school will have to remain for
the first few days at its old location
in the Sunday school classrooms
at East Washington Heights Bap-
tist Church.
But that brings challenges of its
own, because the church class-
rooms are bereft of the decora-Finding a building for a school
isn’t easy in the District, and
Mashea Ashton, Digital Pioneers’
founder, scoured the city looking
for a permanent home that could
fit the growing school, which is
expected to top 220 students in the
upcoming academic year. She set-
tled on a vacated building near
Capitol Hill that had housed an-
other charter school.
Her team spent the summer
renovating the building, changing
the old wood floors to tiles that
matched Digital Pioneers’ signa-
ture gold color.
And on Aug. 8, teachers excited-
ly moved desks, decorations and
classroom materials into the
building.
But on a stormy evening five
days later, a fire broke out on the
top story, incinerating a class-
room. No one was in the building,
and city fire officials do not sus-
pect arson.
Initially, Ashton said she
thought most of the damage
would be confined to the one class-
room and school would start on
time. But water and smoke dam-
age proved more extensive, mak-
ing it difficult for Digital Pioneers
students to mark the first day of
school in their new building.
“It’s a lot,” said Ashton, who has
received a crash course in repair-
ing fire damage. “I thought, ‘It was
one classroom. We can get this
fixed, mop up and keep going.’ But
there’s water damage and smoke
damage.”
Ashton and her staff are scram-
bling to figure out logistics for the
SCHOOL FROM B
belongings, and stormed out. She
never came back.”
Parents were asked when they
applied if Success Academy was
right for them. The school day
started early. The spring break
did not align with that of
traditional public schools.
Parents had to read with their
child every night. They had to
leave work whenever there was a
problem. Parents heard only 1 in 6
applicants had a chance at
admission. Pondiscio found it was
closer to 50 percent, because so
many families who had won a
seat in the charter school lottery
decided not to come.
In the end, despite many
doubts, he decided the parents
who thought it worth the trouble
were right. He asked “why low-
income families of color should
not have the ability to send their
children to a school with the
children of other parents who are
equally engaged, committed, or
ambitious.”
My wife and I, with our nice
degrees and good jobs, had that
chance. We can’t think of any
good reason that less privileged
parents shouldn’t also. Neither
can Pondiscio.
[email protected]told the young staff that their
focus on uniforms set the right
mood. Kids showed up in black
socks when the parents knew the
proper color was navy. “They
don’t expect you to actually
check,” the supervisor said.
Families received “parent
investment cards” grading them
on compliance with school
policies. Pondiscio noticed many
parents were “married, employed,
deeply religious or spiritual,
many recent immigrants.” They
praised what Success Academy
critics most condemned, the
school’s strictness. “That’s how I
raise my child at home,” they told
the writer.
Pondiscio explained that while
more than 90 percent of
American teachers used materials
they made or found themselves,
Success Academy teachers had a
set curriculum. It was usually
taught by “a hastily assembled
staff of relative strangers — nearly
all of them young, many of them
with their first jobs after college,”
he said, but it gave them more
time to work on their teaching.
It was hard. In October, one
young teacher “freaked out,” he
said. She “went back to her
classroom, grabbed herenough to make many readers
cringe.
Clothing was important. On
the first day of school, Pondiscio
described “a mom with a neck
tattoo of Mickey Mouse, which
matches the one on her red T-
shirt,” who was “incredulous that
her child has been turned away
for wearing the wrong-colored
socks.” An administrator laterengaged and invested low-income
families of color to self-select into
schools where their attitudes,
values, and ambitions for their
children make them culture
keepers and drivers, not outliers.”
Pondiscio spent the 2016-
school year at Success Academy
Bronx 1 Elementary School. He
did not attend every meeting or
sit in every class. But he sawbe copied.
The problem is not too much
pressure on the network’s mostly
disadvantaged kids. They
blossom in a vigorous and
unusually cohesive education
culture. What will prevent anyone
else from achieving Success
Academy’s results is that few
other schools — not even the
other famous charters — would
dare make such relentless
demands on parents.
Pondiscio praises Success
Academy, as do I, for letting him
see exactly how it rose so high.
Moskowitz, once a tough New
York City Council member, does
things her way and doesn’t care
who knows it. The book, “How
The Other Half Learns: Equality,
Excellence, and the Battle Over
School Choice,” has many painful
moments that will make Success
Academy critics hoot in derisive
glee, but they don’t matter.
“The thousands of families
who are buying what Success
Academy is selling are served very
well,” Pondiscio writes in the
book. “What Eva Moskowitz
appears to have created is
something unprecedented in
contemporary education: a
mechanism for a critical mass ofSuccess Academy
Charter Schools
are both the
highest-
performing and
most criticized
educational
institutions in
New York — and
probably the country. They have
suffered some media hits, such as
a video of one of their teachers
ripping up a student’s math paper
because of a conceptual error.
So I was startled to learn
Success Academy, including its
pugnacious founder, Eva
Moskowitz, let one of the
country’s most knowledgeable
education writers — a former
teacher — spend a year in one of
its schools, peering into every
intriguing corner.
The writer is Robert Pondiscio,
senior fellow at the Thomas B.
Fordham Foundation. I don’t
know how he did it with such an
explosive topic, but his resulting
book is a work of genius. It is
revealing, moving and fair. The
book explains why Success
Academy’s 45 schools, with 17,
students, should be praised for
their achievement gains, and why
its methods will probably never
education
A revealing look at America’s most controversial charter school system
Jay
Mathews
The draft of a
new ethnic
studies
curriculum for
California public
school students
is being
slammed by critics. They accuse
it of espousing bias against
Israel and Jews, defining
capitalism as a “form of power
and oppression,” and promoting
a far-left-wing political agenda.
The pushback has been so
strong that California education
officials say the curriculum
“needs to be substantially
redesigned.”
A law signed in 2016 by then-
Gov. Jerry Brown (D) mandated
that California create an ethnic
studies course. An advisory
committee composed mostly of
K-12th-grade teachers and
professors was appointed in
2018 by the State Board of
Education to draft a curriculum
that could be used by school
systems to create their own
courses.
Linda Darling-Hammond,
who was appointed president of
the State Board of Education by
Brown’s successor, Gov. Gavin
Newsom (D), said in an
interview that the draft would
undergo major changes. The
board has not officially been
given the draft from the state’s
Instructional Quality
Commission, which received it a
few months ago, made some
changes and posted it on the
state Education Department’s
website for public comment
through Aug. 15.
Darling-Hammond issued a
statement with Ilene Straus,
board vice president, and board
member Feliza I. Ortiz-Licon,
saying, “A model curriculum
should be accurate, free of bias,
appropriate for all learners in
our diverse state, and align with
Governor Newsom’s vision of a
California for all. The current
draft model curriculum falls
short and needs to be
substantially redesigned.”
Drafters of the proposed
curriculum and their supporters
say it is important for students
to view the world in a way not
promoted by the powerful.
The CalMatters website
quoted R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, amember of the advisory
committee that worked on the
draft, as saying, “Sometimes
people want to approach ethnic
studies as just a superficial
diversity class and that’s it.
Ethnic studies is an academic
field of over 50 years that has its
own frameworks, its own
academic language, its own
understandings of how it
approaches subjects and our
world.”
Jewish lawmakers and groups
wrote to education officials,
expressing deep concerns with
some language in the Ethnic
Studies Model Curriculum
(ESMC) draft and saying that
Jews are virtually ignored. For
example, while there is
expansive attention give to Arab
Americans and the stereotypes
they face, there is no such
attention given to Jewish
Americans. And there is
language encouraging teachers
to promote a campaign to
boycott, divest from and place
sanctions on Israel for its
treatment of Palestinians.
The California Legislative
Jewish Caucus said in a letter tothe Instructional Quality
Commission that “despite the
significant contributions of Jews
to California’s history, politics,
culture, and government — and
our community’s long-standing
struggle against hatred and
discrimination — the ESMC
effectively erases the American
Jewish experience. Indeed,
notwithstanding widespread
agreement that Judaism is a
form of identity that is broader
than religion, and the inclusion
of religion in sample courses for
African American, Native
American, Latin American, and
Arab American Studies, Jews are
essentially excluded from the
ESMC.
“While the ESMC specifies the
importance of studying hate
crimes, white supremacy, bias,
prejudice, and discrimination,
and specifically discusses bias
against other communities, it
omits any meaningful discussion
of antisemitism,” the letter said.
The draft curriculum says
ethnic studies courses created
by districts from the proposed
curriculum will:
Cultivate empathy,community actualization,
cultural perpetuity, self-worth,
self-determination and the
holistic well-being of all
participants, especially Native
people/s and people of color;
Critique empire and its
relationship to white supremacy,
racism, patriarchy,
cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism,
ableism, anthropocentrism, and
other forms of power and
oppression at the intersections
of our society.
Many of the comments on the
department’s website are
critical, such as this one posted
by Malka Weitman, a Berkeley
resident: “My objections go far
beyond specific pages or
citations. This entire curriculum
reads as an extreme political
agenda being presented under
cover of an ethnic studies
program. At a time when many
of us are concerned about the
divisive right-wing bigotry we
hear from Donald Trump, this
curriculum exposes our children
to the equally divisive bigotry of
the extreme left.”
She and other critics said if
the curriculum were to beadopted, many people would
take their children out of
California’s public schools.
Some Californians wrote in
support, including Natalia Deeb-
Sossa, an associate professor in
Chicana and Chicano studies
department of the University of
California at Davis. In a letter
posted on the website, she said
ethnic studies are important to
“cultivate critical thinking and
problem solving, civic and
cultural awareness,
collaboration, adaptability, and
resilience through a curriculum
that is centered on the
perspectives of historically
marginalized groups.”
She also attacked the Anti-
Defamation League, one of the
Jewish groups that protested the
draft curriculum, accusing it of
supporting oppressive Israeli
government actions.
“Given their actions and
principles, I call for members of
the California Department of
Education and State Board of
Education to accept the Model
Curriculum as is or with minor
changes,” Deeb-Sossa wrote.
[email protected]Critics slam draft of Calif. ethnic studies curriculum as anti-Jewish propaganda
At Digital Pioneers Academy, students may get two 1st days of school in 1 year
BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST
At Digital Pioneers Academy’s new building, the stench of smoke and cleaning chemicals lingers in the halls after a fire broke out Tuesday.
Founder Mashea Ashton suspects that the first few days of classes will take place at its former location, a church in Southeast Washington.Answer
Sheet
VALERIE
STRAUSS
MIKE GROLL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Success Academy Charter Schools founder Eva Moskowitz at a 2015
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