Never underestimate the power of a good dose of outrage. About 12 years ago Chris Barbic got angry–really angry. In 1992 Barbic had graduated from Vanderbilt and signed on through Teach for America as a sixth-grade math teacher in the Houston inner-city schools. Finding the experience rewarding, he decided to teach for a few more years before starting law school.
He’d stayed in the system long enough to realize that many low-income minority children who excelled in the sixth grade were flunking out and dropping out once they reached middle school. The downward spiral continued for those who made it to high school.
All that well-intentioned educational energy was going down the drain once these students became adolescents.
“Part of the problem was the size of the school,” he says. “They were leaving an elementary school that had a total of 400 kids and going into a middle school of 1,500 students. With that many kids that age together, a culture gets created. And it’s tough to tip the scales into a positive culture once a negative one has been established–especially in low-income neighborhoods.”
As they moved into middle school, students were hitting a wall built of low expectations, family issues, and mediocre, burned-out teachers. Many of their parents could not speak English and, convinced that a failing school was not the vehicle to raise their families out of poverty, they believed their children were better off working a minimum-wage job.
Incensed, Barbic and another Teach for America colleague drew up a plan for teaching high-poverty youth, lined up a carpool convoy of 300 concerned inner-city parents, and drove to a meeting of the Houston Independent School Board.
“Basically, we told the school board that we weren’t leaving until they approved our program,” Barbic says, “which they did.”
The government agreed to pay the usual per-child educational expenses, but Barbic would have to raise all facility costs for his program from private funds. So the young man borrowed a million dollars, purchased 11 modular classrooms, set them up in an empty parking lot in one of Houston’s urban neighborhoods and, in 1998, established YES Prep, a seventh- through 12th-grade charter public school. Within two years Newsweek ranked YES Prep as one of the 100 best public schools in America.
YES (which stands for “Youth Engaged in Service”) is based on the premise that students will buy into learning if they believe they are contributing to something greater than themselves and are part of a community where adults care about them. The YES schools (there are now five campuses in disadvantaged Houston neighborhoods) tend to be small–about the size of most elite private academies–with around 100 students per grade. Classes meet from 7:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., plus one weekend per month when students participate in community service projects in their neighborhoods.
Many YES teachers are pulled from the young, energetic flock of Teach for America enlistees. The faculty sets high standards for academic achievement, and the school provides a support system to make those goals attainable. Parents are required to participate in school programs.
To get a high school diploma, every student must be accepted into college. Each student must apply to at least three post-secondary schools: an out-of-state-school, an in-state Texas school, and a Houston-based college. Of the seven classes that have graduated, 88 percent of YES students went on to post-secondary schools, equally distributed among those three options.
By buying into the YES model, children are availed of possibilities most would never experience in a typical public school. “We’re giving them opportunities to travel, to visit college campuses, to meet people they would never meet. We even take them to a restaurant to teach them etiquette,” says Barbic.
“We give families hope. Families who come to YES in sixth grade know that their kids will go to college. If you give kids in low-income neighborhoods access to the same resources and opportunities that kids in great private schools and suburban public schools have, they’ll achieve at the same level and the outcomes will be exactly the same.”
His goal is to have 10,000 children in Houston’s neediest areas enrolled on 13 campuses, with each school serving no more than 750 students.
He and his faculty recently launched an even more ambitious goal: to design a system of reinforcements so that students don’t merely go to college, but they graduate. “If you look at the national average, only about 15 percent of low-income minority kids who start college graduate with a degree. Our goal is for 90 percent of those who go to college to graduate with a degree,” Barbic says. “The kids who don’t complete college usually do so not because they couldn’t cut it academically, but for two reasons: finances, or tremendous family pressure to come back. In many cases these kids are the glue holding fragile families together.”
His staff is working with universities to create mentorships and support networks to catch first-generation college students before they drop out.
Because charter schools like YES Prep are essentially “competing” with Houston public schools, they raise the bar for academics across the city, Barbic says. They alone cannot remedy the nation’s poverty, crime, housing or immigration woes, but he believes they may address the underbelly, the genesis of most of those issues.
“You actually can solve a lot of these problems,” he insists, “if you get the education piece right.”