One school operates out of Tucson. The second school resides in a former church in Tempe. And the third school is located in a rural part of Arizona about as far north as you can get without being out of the state. The three charters couldn’t be more diverse geographically. But Academy of Math and Science (AMS), Tempe Preparatory Academy, and Masada Charter School all have one thing in common: They are among 320 schools nationwide named as 2008 No Child Left Behind federal Blue Ribbon Schools.

The announcement of the honor, made last month by U.S Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, elevates these schools to the status of “best of the best.” As important for Arizona’s charter school community to note is the fact that three of the four Arizona Blue Ribbon winners (Benjamin Franklin West Elementary School in the Mesa Public School District is the fourth) are charter schools.

As always, the most obvious question to ask is What makes a charter school a Blue Ribbon school? That’s what we sought to find out in interviews with Tatyana Chayka and Adriana Rodriguez (Academy of Math and Science); Julie Boles (Tempe Preparatory Academy); and LeAnne Timpson (Masada Charter School).

Taking Advantage of the Charter School Concept
If you ask the leadership of AMS, Tempe Prep, and Masada, they’ll tell you it’s no accident that three of the four Arizona Blue Ribbon schools are charters.

“Charter schools came as a good alternative to public schools,” Chayka pointed out. “All charter schools are unique in their mission. I think charter schools boosted the competition and as in any competitive world the best practices are going to survive and the best practices are going to continue.”

Tempe Prep’s Boles has a particularly unique perspective, having come from a traditional district school.

“What I have found interesting in being in a charter school environment is the level of flexibility you have to deliver the education the way you believe it should be delivered is so much greater and that is not a point to be underscored,” Boles said. “In traditional public school systems you are subject to the precedents and practices of all the schools in that school district, and so it is very difficult to do things that may be innovative or may be unique to that school – significant, profound ways of delivering curriculum. One is the curriculum itself and two is the delivery system and three, I would say is who you choose to hire has to be a far more prescribed approach.”

According to Boles, the charter school concept has allowed schools like Tempe Prep “to be able to fully develop a curriculum that is different, at a level of rigor that is not meant to be comprehensive, is not meant to be one-size-fits-all. It is not going to meet the needs of all students. It is going to meet the needs of those students who are willing to work at this level.”

Masada’s Timpson points out that the accountability aspect of charters ensures quality.

“Charter schools are highly accountable. We have been from the first day of inception, and so I think our approach to educating kids, while maintaining that high accountability, helps us because you have to create mechanisms and systems in your school for reaching every child. At least that’s what Masada’s all about. …Another thing about charter schools is that if your clientele isn’t happy you don’t thrive. So we’re all about trying to create an educational environment where people are happy and they want to come, they want to send their kids.”

The Key Component to Success
To that end, the three schools seek to develop a dedicated corps of teachers and then give them the tools and incentives they need to do their job. For Masada, this starts with the application process. Applicants must fill out what is called a “supplemental application,” which is a series of essay questions focused on the applicant’s philosophies, their most recent professional development, and their position on discipline and on positive classroom management environment, among others.

“We look at the answers and then we screen who we’re going to interview,” Timpson explained. “So first of all if they’re interested in applying to our school they have to go through quite a process before we even interview them and that right there screens out a lot of people. There have been years where that’s really pinched us because it’s been very hard to fill our positions because a lot of people don’t want to go through that effort to fill out that application. But what it has done is the people that we get are people who want the job and people who are interested in being in our school. So at that point even if we’re interviewing a candidate whose skills aren’t as good as we’d hope for, they might have the attitude we can work with.”

Likewise, Tempe Prep puts a premium on recruiting high-quality teachers who have worked in their field of expertise versus being solely certified in the field.

“What we look for are individuals who have such a passion about their content area whether it’s physics or chemistry or history or philosophy – whatever it may be – that we can impart in them and on them the whole pedagogy of teaching,” Boles said. “That’s a huge departure where in a traditional public school system we have, first do you have your teaching credentials because if you don’t have your teaching credentials we can’t even interview you.”

While recognizing the value of their teachers, Chayka emphasized the school’s belief in their students to succeed.

 “We do believe that all students are able to succeed with proper guidance and support,” Chayka said. “We do implement a variety of assessments to see where students stand so that we can properly tailor the program to meet individual students’ needs. Again, we set high expectations for all of our students. For example, we teach geometry in kindergarten and our students are very successful.”

Lead administrator Rodriguez elaborated: “What we have done in the last few years is each grade level does one level above in math and we’ve seen success with it. Our kindergartners work on first-grade level math, and they’re quite successful.”

Chayka continued, “At the higher level we do calculus. We offer advanced science classes and students get college credit. Again, it comes with the belief that every student can be successful in the right setting with the proper support.”

She added, “We do have a very strong group of teachers. All of our teachers are properly trained in the programs which we implement.”

Using Data
The continued emphasis on using data to drive instruction takes a variety of forms at Arizona’s Blue Ribbon schools. At AMS, teachers and administrators use a variety of assessments to track student progress and address students at both ends of the spectrum – those who need help and those who need to be challenged.

“We do have looping [students stay with the same teacher for several years beginning with third grade] in the elementary levels, which I think gives the teachers an opportunity to really get to know the students’ needs and strengths,” Rodriguez said. “So that way the following school year teachers know exactly where the students who are returning are at academically and can just continue on with their progress.”

Chayka continued, “At the middle school and high school we do place students in groups at the beginning of the school year. Then we use a variety of assessments to monitor students to see which students at this point can be challenged or what additional intervention needs to be implemented. Then teachers work to identify students to remediate students in language arts and mathematics with additional instructional time each week and then if we need to challenge the students we don’t hesitate to move students to the next ability level.”

Tempe Prep’s Boles admits that while the school uses data to assess student progress, they need to go further.

“We have not been heavy data gatherers,” Boles confessed. “There have been some that have been useful to the school and that have certainly been used. We’ve actually put into place this year a professional team approach where you have six professional teams and one of those teams is researching data and this is very teacher driven. The teachers are driving that process and looking at our AIMS scores.”

Boles pointed out that for many schools, “it’s how many students can you move from falls far below to meets expectations or approaches expectations. For us, it’s about how many students can we move into exceeding expectations. They are lofty goals. I can’t in any kind of honest fashion say that we have been heavy users of data to drive our instruction. We are dedicating more time and more interest in how that data may take us to the next step.”

Perhaps Masada has evolved the most in terms of data use, so much so that it will be among 12-15 schools at the gathering of the nation’s Blue Ribbon schools in Washington, DC, to present their school’s action research model as a staff development model.

“We are a data-driven institution,” Timpson explained. “We’ve done a lot of training for our teachers around that. Every one of our teachers is involved in what is called an action-research project every year. They look at the data of their previous year and from that choose an area of focus. [In the case of a new teacher, they look at the data from the previous students of the previous year’s class.] From that data they choose an area of focus on which they do an action-research project that year. The action research is all around where they make a plan, set in motion an action they’re going to try; they have to gather data about their action to see how effective it was, analyze that, get feedback from their peers on it, and then do some reflection and then go around and start the cycle again.”

Ensuring Success over Time
Sustainability is key to long-term success in any endeavor. How do these schools ensure their Blue Ribbon status over time? For Masada, sustainability stems from the school’s focus on research.

“One thing about action research is it creates leadership,” according to Timpson. “It creates teacher leaders. Last year I actually had a personal crisis myself, and I was gone for a significant portion of that year, and life went on at the school. Our systems are in place, people know what to do, they know what the expectations are, and the system worked.”

At Tempe Prep, Boles has worked hard to identify systems for the school and put structures into place for longevity, so that “regardless of who is in this office, that there are certain ways we will do things as a school, ways we will communicate and so forth.” That system will be put to the test next year when Boles assumes a part-time leadership role at the school and a new headmaster is brought in.

“Whether it’s how we do tours or how we do orientations, or how we register students or how we hire teachers, it’s getting it away from being specific-person dependent and really creating systems that allow a greater variety of kinds of personalities to walk into this office,” she said.

A similar system is in place at AMS.

 “We do believe in growing our own leadership team,” Chayka said. “For example, Ms. Rodriguez started as a teacher five years ago, then progressed to lead elementary teacher, then a lead administrator in the second school [Math and Science Success Academy, another Tucson charter modeled after AMS].

The Significance of Being a Blue Ribbon School
Two representatives from each school will attend a two-day workshop and awards ceremony in Washington, DC, October 20-21. Although the schools appreciate the recognition, they keep it in perspective.

“I never even knew there was a blue ribbon schools award until last year when I saw the award winners in Arizona,” Timpson said. “We didn’t set out to do this. We didn’t set out to become a blue ribbon school. We have not set out to win awards. We have tried to figure out how to be effective at teaching and learning, and so we have put in place systems at our school where that is important. That is a priority. We mean business. When we start school at the first of the year, the first day or two, learning is happening. We’re kicking off the year. We teach up to the last day. We take this seriously.”

The No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon Schools Program honors public and private elementary, middle, and high schools that are either academically superior or that demonstrate dramatic gains in student achievement to high levels. The schools are selected based on one of two criteria:

• Schools with at least 40 percent of their students from disadvantaged backgrounds that dramatically improve student performance to high levels on state tests; and
• Schools whose students, regardless of background, achieve in the top 10 percent of their state on state tests or, in the case of private schools, in the top 10 percent of the nation on nationally normed tests