Paul also sat down with Andrew Richman to discuss his experience as a first-year teacher at the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy. Andrew previously taught at the Edmund Burke School for four years.

Paul: Let’s get a couple of facts out of the way. You graduated from the University of Chicago Lab School in . . . of Chicago in--

Andrew: ’86.

Paul: Then you went to Harvard for four years, then back to Chicago—

Andrew: Not right away. I took a year and worked in a ski shop in New Mexico.

Paul: Not Taos?

Andrew: Yes, Taos. Then I went back to Chicago and was not interested in teaching. I had spent my summers in college working in the projects of Cambridge, with kids. I was interested in community involvement, poverty policy, and it was so hard. I would have eight kids—it wan an enrichment program, and the city was our classroom, and it was brutal. So I thought it was too hard. In Chicago I ended up working in a YMCA. I was supposed to be doing community outreach, but I ended up doing youth development.

Paul: Once you get a little experience, then you find out you’re in demand.

Andrew: We I also had the sense at the Y that we were on the periphery of the community, that it was a struggle to get kids involved. Where were the kids? They were in the schools. The school and the church were the two dominant institutions in the community. I had also worked with a guy from the community who had gone to college and come back who was an elementary school teacher, and every day he told me I was wasting my time, that I needed to be a teacher. That was a big influence on me. He believed I could do it.

Paul: Once nice thing about starting in a relatively tough situation is that everything else seems easy by comparison. Whenever I heard Burke teachers having trouble with discipline or the job itself, well, I had 160 students the year I was teaching in a public school, with one free period plus lunch.

Andrew: It was really funny, after three years teaching in the public schools. In ’96, I took a year to get certified in math education.

Paul: How useful did you find any of your grad school courses? For me it was the student teaching, getting out there and observing good teachers and actually doing some teaching.

Andrew: Absolutely. You learn a little bit here and there, but we wasted a lot of time sitting in class.

Paul: It is especially useful to observe really good teachers. I still remember observing a teacher in Baltimore County back in ’78. She was so good that the kids were so in tune and listening, and our supervisor on purpose brought us into another classroom where no one was paying attention or talking, so we could have the variety of the two situations. We were also filmed, and that was really helpful.

Andrew: But my school in Chicago was terrible, we were near last in test scores; it was the classical public school disaster.

Paul: There is no incentive to succeed. Your school will be there no matter how badly you do.

Andrew: There were a lot of bad teachers our principal couldn’t get rid of. It’s changing a little. The mayor wanted more control, along with the superintendent, Paul Vallas, who is now running for governor, although he had no political background at the time. Chicago was one of the first places to emphasize accountability. You have three years, then you can get probation. It never fully got implemented, but it changed the atmosphere. He gave principals control of their building; until then the maintenance guy would kick you out at 3:30 on Friday afternoon so he could go home.

Paul: You must have been wondering what is the country coming to, after working in Cambridge then Chicago, so you needed a little break when you came to Washington.

Andrew: I had planned to go back to Chicago public schools, but it was pure chance I ended up in DC. My girl friend at the time had matched with a clinical internship for psychology here. I still wasn’t sure if teaching was for me. I wanted to find a school that would get me what I needed, and see what I could do. Burke was a lot like the Lab School in terms of its size and informality and the personal nature of the place. I needed a good situation to teach, to see if I liked teaching.

Paul: I was at Burke for nine years, and one of things I liked most that I was completely in charge of what happened in the classroom; that feeling of independence was so different that in the public school, where they gave me a textbook and told me the kids had to do well on their Iowa tests. . . .

Paul: So give all the nuts and bolts information about your school.

Andrew: It’s the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy.

Paul: I was not aware of the public policy part.

Andrew: It’s a big part. There is a real public policy curriculum, emphasized in the history department, and one Thursday a month is devoted to public policy. The night ninth grade gets an overview of public policy, and the tenth grade learns what activism is all about: for half a year they learn how do you make change; the other half they go to political organization sand work on an issue. I advised a group that worked on gun issues, for example the loopholes with gun shows. . . .

We’re in our fourth year, so our first graduating class is this year. We’re located on Florida, between 13^th and 14^th, in a building that we share with the Meridian Public Charter School, which is an elementary school, and the Booker T Washington Charter School, which is more vocationally oriented. Our school was started by a woman, Irasema Salcido—

Paul: Wasn’t she from a family of migrant workers, and the first one in her family to get a college education, and she then got her Master’s in Education from Harvard--?

Andrew: You may know more than I do—

Paul: Well I heard her give a talk one time, and she’s also raising four kids.

Andrew: Five kids. She was profiled on “Oprah.” Our biggest grant was $100,000 from Oprah. She went out to Chicago, and it was exciting.

Paul: And your school is grades 9-12. Do you have to accept everyone who applies?

Andrew: We can’t choose. And we aren’t oversubscribed, and if we were, admission would have to be by lottery.

Paul: Do you have a lot of space?

Andrew: I think we were about ten students short this year. We started with 60 students, and each year we have added a class. This year will be our first graduating class.

Paul: Graduation will be exciting.

Andrew: Very exciting, although it’s a small class, less than 30.

Paul: Is the retention rate about half from grades 9 to 12?

Andrew: Half are graduating this year, maybe a few more next year. Besides creating kids who will make change in the community, we are a college prep school. The academic expectations are high, and it’s not uncommon for the kids to fail across the board during their first year. At that point, some decide that the school is not for them. Many, however, buckle down and do much better their second year..

Paul: And the parents are not used to having the kids have to do several hours of homework a night; many of the parents themselves may not have had much education.

Andrew: Many of our graduating class will be the first kids in the family to go to college, and a lot of our time is spent on teaching the kids about the world of college. When I was at Burke it was a given that everyone was going to college. The kids and the parents knew the world about college. Most of the kids say they’re going to college, but they really don’t know what that means.

Paul: Are the vast majority of the new students ninth graders?

Andrew: We accepted a substantial number of tenth graders this year, not so many next year. We have very few new eleventh graders.

Paul: So the retention rate for the ninth grade is better this year.

Andrew: Every year it gets better. We started from scratch three years ago, and in the middle of the third year we finally got the student support services and discipline in hand. Last year we hired a really good dean of students.

Paul: I can’t imagine the work involved in starting the school.

Andrew: She has said she is glad she didn’t know what it was going to take. She wouldn’t may not have done it; it was that daunting.

Paul: The buildings themselves tend to be abandoned office buildings no one else wants, like there’s one near the old EPA site, at the Waterside Mall—

Andrew: That’s where ours started, actually. They were down there for two years. . . . Where we are now has a light, industrial feel to it. Big rooms have been subdivided for the school. All of my classes are in rooms where you have to walk through other classrooms to get there, so if I let a kid go to the bathroom he disturbs all the other rooms. When you want to quietly plan, there is no place. It makes Burke look luxurious. Not having a desk where students aren’t seems like heaven. My desk is in a classroom where there are always classes.

Paul: Is there a communal room for teachers, a coffee room?

Andrew: No. We have a small atrium-like place where we can sit, or the computer room, or the coffee shop down the street.

Paul: Did you get a raise when you went from Burke to Chavez?

Andrew: I got a big [20-25%] raise, but we’re not part of the teacher’s union, so they don’t have to pay union scales, so I am not getting as much as what I would have in the DC school system, but you also don’t have to be certified to teach in a charter school.

Paul: So in some ways it does have the feel of a private school in that you don’t have a cookie cutter way of teaching. Is there a list of standards that you’re supposed to achieve in concrete black and white, or do they just give you a textbook and say, do the best you can?

Andrew: It’s in the middle. In the Chicago elementary school the bureaucracy was worse. At Burke we you did what everyone you wanted, but at Chavez we have accountability. A big part of our funding is how well our kids do on their standardized tests. Our students have to take the Stanford 9 every year. We have to make sure we’re teaching material that is on the test, and we also have to prepare kids to take the test. Some of these kids are not good test-takers..

Paul: Is it ninth graders who take the Stanford 9?

Andrew: Ninth, tenth, and eleventh. . . . We have to prepare documentation on what we are teaching. We are not beholden to any particular standard, we can choose out own standard, but we have to show the standards we’re teaching and document what we’re doing.

Paul: So you can sort of design what you’re teaching, but you have to be accountable—on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and how often is it inspected?

Andrew: We are still trying to figure out how to present our curriculum to the charter school board. I submit my weekly assignment sheets to show what we’re doing. I have to do plans every unit. I don’t have to document every lesson, just the objectives and how I am assessing them.

Paul: When you have to change your assignment sometimes, is that a problem? You can be flexible with your daily assignments?

Andrew: Very much so, and as a math department, we have the flexibility to decide what the four-year math curriculum is going to be.

Paul: You’re not using some DC public school warehoused 10-year old book.

Andrew: We’re using Houghton Mifflin’s three-year integrated math series. The pre-calculus teacher uses lessons from three books: McDougall, Littell Integrated Mathematics 3; COMAP’s Mathematics: Modeling Our World; and Everyday Learning Corporation’s Contemporary Precalculus Through Applications [More info is at www.cesarchavezhs.org]

Paul: Which combines algebra and geometry. How many of the ninth graders are ready to do algebra? They all have to take it, don’t they?

Andrew: No, they don’t. We have a pre-algebra class, which is growing. [Laughter.] We have one class this year, and we’re going to have three classes next year. . . . Sometimes the kids will shock me in their inability to read a word problem and not know whether to add or subtract. The kids that get to my tenth grade class can do the computation, but some of them don’t know what computation means. Their elementary school math was rote, and they don’t know when to subtract.

Paul: That’s something you can really work on. Most of the kids should have some language ability and can learn the vocabulary of math, although there’s always the kid who has trouble processing technical language much more slowly than contextual language.

Andrew: When I get a kid like that, it’s hard to help them in class, and most of them don’t have a lot of motivation to come outside of class for help.

Paul: Really?

Andrew: That’s a big difference between Burke and here. At Burke if I wanted a free period I had to leave the building, which was great.

Paul: That’s too bad. Do they have much free time?

Andrew: It’s our schedule. The only time they can come is before school, lunch, or after school.

Paul: Are you supposed to be there after school?

Andrew: We’re required to be there an hour before and an hour after, which I would do anyway. But they don’t come. Some of them I understand. They have to go work. I have one kid—it was heartbreaking. He will keep asking questions until he gets it right away. This quarter he has had so much work in all his classes. But he has a job, and he may fail the class because he just doesn’t have the time.

Paul: It’s really tough for families to survive if there isn’t a real wage earner between one of the parents in the house, and the housing crunch is just so incredible. You know yourself; I hear stories about group houses going for $3000. . . . Kwame Brown, the player the Wizards drafted, grew up in a family of seven kids. They were in such poverty that most of his siblings dealt drugs and are or have been in jail.

Andrew: When I worked in Chicago, kids would ask me, “Andrew, this guy is offering me $300 just to take this bag down the street. How can I say no?”

Paul: If these kids don’t have a relative who has been involved in drug dealing then they know someone who knows someone. I am painting a bleak picture, but you’re two degrees removed at most. We had a student at Burke who lived on Sherman Avenue whose uncle was shot in a drug-related killing.

Andrew: It’s very hard to generalize. We have an incredibly diverse group of kids, from kids who are surrounded by a lot of stuff to solid upper-middle class kids who come in very-well prepared. We have one kid going to Brown this year.

Paul: There are more kids with behavior issues to make a difference in classroom management than what you had at Burke.

Andrew: Also it is my first year at the school. Next year I will—

Paul: Not smile until November—

Andrew: It took me a while to get my bearings as to how to get things done. Next year will go a lot better.

Paul: What opportunities do your kids have for extra-curricular activities?

Andrew: It’s our biggest drawback. We have a chess team and a soccer team. The chair of our department really connects with the kids who come in every day after school, and all they do is play chess. They got second in the Metro area.

Paul: If someone were comparing schools, and their neighborhood school is OK, what would be drawing cards at your school? The classes are small?

Andrew: My biggest class is 17, and my smallest is 10.

Paul: Unless you’re kid is a superjock you don’t really need a lot of facilities. You could take the same kids, who would be lost in a large public DC high school, and you’re getting a higher and higher retention rate. Soon you’ll get a 75-80% rate of kids entering and graduating in four years, and when they graduate from your school it really means something. They’re going to have more than basic skills; they’re going to be ready for a college education.

Andrew: Our school is as good as any, in terms of the academic experience. The kids do get a lot of attention. The teachers know them. The dean of students knows every kid by name, and a lot of the family members.

Paul: So you have a three-year integrated program that is essentially two years of algebra and one of geometry. So if a kid has to take pre-algebra in the ninth grade, they’ll take that three-year program by the end of twelfth grade?. Is that a minimum requirement?

Andrew: We’re still trying to figure that out! It’s a three-year curriculum, but it takes four years for a lot of the kids. We’re trying to create a parallel track, an alternative to college prep math, more practical, and we don’t know how that’s going to work.

Paul: Well if you can develop a coherent two-year practical program you’ll win an international prize. That’s been the ultimate goal of math educators for years. They realize that manipulating symbols is not necessarily that useful. . . . So the best math student in your school—can that kid get through the three-year program by the end of tenth grade—are the courses called math 1, math 2, and math 3?

Andrew: We still call it algebra I, geometry, algebra II, just because we were concerned how it would look in the transcript. We do have a sophomore who is in the last year of the three-year program, so he will ready for calculus senior year. We will have kids who will take the calculus AP next year.

Paul: Is it necessary or desirable for someone to teach in a school like yours or in a school when most of the kids are from the inner city to be someone who grew up in the inner city, to have sort of a hardscrabble background, to use a hackneyed term. How easy it is for someone who comes from privilege like you or I to go into a school like this to be successful, to be someone who is looked up to. When you first said they are not coming after school to see you, I thought they perhaps didn’t identify with you as much as they might identify culturally with someone else.

Andrew: It’s a complicated question. It is certainly easier for someone who comes form a similar background, but we have a diverse group—

Paul: You keep reminding me of that—

Andrew: Part of it is also about personality. The most important thing is the teacher care about the kids. Kids know when you care, and kids know when you don’t. Another aspect is being secure. The more relaxed and comfortable you are in your own skin relating to other people, and the more comfortable you are asserting yourself, the better the teacher you are. Some people are better at doing that than others—that’s one aspect of teaching, the classroom management. It’s as much your personality as it is where you come from, that really determines your success. Then there’s the intellectual side. Can you figure out how to take these ideas and how to make them understandable to kids? You get a measure of respect for that, more so than how you dress, or whether you’re cool, or speaking their language, as long as you’re not talking like—

Paul: --Like George Will—

Andrew: And you can break your language down into simpler words. The last important part is that it’s vital they come into contact with a variety of people; it’s crucial that the kids have teachers with similar backgrounds, but they also need to have teachers with different backgrounds. In Chicago I was in a school that was not diverse. All the kids were in poverty, and the teachers were the only white people the kids ever saw, although the faculty was diverse.

P Some of the charter school,ls are attracting kida are attracting kids who have had a checkered past academically

A It’s interesting. There is an incredibly wide range of students.

P So at the high end you have ninth graders who have had algebra –then how to they get placed?

A Placing is kids is hard.

P My high school, Andover, was similar. I learned logarithms twice! I was really good at the mantissa and the characteristic. You probably never learned thi