This is an excerpt from the new Richard Whitmire book The Founders: Inside the Revolution to Invent (and Reinvent) America’s Best Charter Schools. See more excerpts at ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ; watch all the videos, download the book and explore the Founders Oral History at .

Klein took over the New York system in August 2002, and for the first year he remained silent on charters while he carried out big organizational changes. But in his second year, all that changed as he arranged meetings with the heads of top charter management organizations: Dave Levin from KIPP, Norman Atkins from Uncommon, Dacia Toll from Achievement First and Geoffrey Canada from the Harlem Children’s Zone. Klein set out to do something any other schools chief would consider insane: disrupt his own schools with built-in competitors. And Klein didn’t want mere tinkering; he wanted big change, so at first he focused only on the major operators who could open multiple schools that would be high performers from the first day. What about the mom-and-pops, the one-off charter startups that might grow into KIPPs and Uncommons? Didn’t they deserve support? Fuhgeddaboutit. This was New York; only the biggest and the best. And right away!

“I know with Dacia, she was skeptical at first,” said Klein. “People didn’t know how aggressive the city would be. But I pushed hard on this notion that I didn’t want this to be a boutique business, that they would be in this for the long haul with multiple growth opportunities … I wanted to make New York the Silicon Valley for charter schools.”

Toll recalls her first meeting with Klein, who asked that she expand her Connecticut operations to the city. The discussion seemed to go well, so she asked Klein: “OK, who [in the department] do I start the conversation with about Achievement First coming to the city?” Klein answered immediately: We just had the conversation, and you just agreed to open three schools. “It was like, boom!”

Toll checked quickly with Dave Levin and Norman Atkins, the KIPP and Uncommon leaders in New York, to see if they would object to the added competition. “They said they were more than OK. Their attitude was, ‘This is going to be fun. Come to New York!’ ”

On July 14, 2003, the first day of school for KIPP S.T.A.R. in Harlem, the new strategy kicked off as Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg held a at the school, which was housed in a former district office building. It was a clear shot across the bow: We will find space for top charters.

Said Bloomberg: “We said we would put children first when it comes to education — and by creating a new school where offices once stood, we are doing just that. We applaud KIPP for their academic achievements and for their continuing commitment to New York City’s schoolchildren.” Added Klein: “In just two weeks we have taken district office space that used to house bureaucracy and transformed it into a charter school in a community that needs innovative and excellent new schools … We continue to work with charter schools throughout the city to share best practices for teaching and learning across all types of schools.”

Most charter operators gravitate to cities where there’s little hostility from unions and charter critics, meaning anywhere but New York. But Klein had a very large carrot to bend that maxim: $1-per-year rental fees inside existing school buildings. “We took the view, and it was controversial, that the schools belonged to the children,” said Klein.

Uncommon’s Brett Peiser, who would return to New York City to lead Uncommon’s expansion there, was stunned by the freedom offered by Klein. The all-consuming need to find buildings in the most expensive city in the country suddenly ended. “It was a huge part of our growth,” said Peiser. “I had just spent three years where all I did was work on the building [availability] issue.” The idea that buildings were going to be taken care of meant Peiser and others could focus just on instruction. That was huge. “That’s what moves people’s hearts and is why people are excited about this work — not school construction bonds.”

To support rapid charter growth (which would soon grow to about 20 school openings a year), Klein pulled together a collaboration of philanthropists who formed the NYC Center for Charter School Excellence, now called the NYC Charter Center. All this was to create schools to compete against his own traditional schools — unthinkable in any other city. “Most people running a school system are not eager to give up market share to the charter sector,” said Klein. “But our overall view was that serving lives, particularly in high-poverty neighborhoods, you want to create as many options for good schools as you can.” But creating more good schools was only part of the plan. To be fundamentally disruptive, those schools had to become permanent, not something future union-friendlier mayors could dismantle. The theory: “If you change the status quo for families, the schools become bulletproof,” said Klein. That’s why he ushered in only the top charters; they had to be good from opening day.

One crucial development during the Klein years was granting in-school space to Success Academies, a charter group that has grown faster than the others, attracted more philanthropy than most, registered higher test scores — and drawn exponentially more criticism. All that arises from the unique personality of its founder, Eva Moskowitz, possibly the most polarizing, successful and controversial charter leader in the country.

“She had a rapid growth plan, and one that we were happy to support,” said Klein. “Her whole modus operandi depended on us giving her space. It’s hard to grow at the level she wanted to unless she had co-located space.”

Everything about Moskowitz is different, including her launch. As a former City Council member and head of the council’s education committee, she held a now-legendary series of investigative hearings that skewered union work rules, leaving the unions furious and vowing revenge — a revenge they extracted in 2005 when Moskowitz launched an unsuccessful bid to be the Democratic nominee for Manhattan borough president.

It was during those hearings that Moskowitz began forming ideas for launching her own schools. “At the hearings, I was asking teachers and principals and coaches and custodians about every part of schooling, about what excellence looks like, about what needs to happen,” she said. “Once I decided to open Success Academy, I crisscrossed the country finding every great example I could.”

In addition to the New York City–area schools she visited — Uncommon, KIPP and Achievement First — she went west as well. From California’s High Tech High, she came away impressed by the focus on rigor. From a Colorado charter school, she borrowed lessons learned on running project-based learning. The visits were not limited to charter schools. Parochial, private and traditional district schools were on her must-visit list as well.

In Queens, at Ozone Park’s P.S. 65, she came across Paul Fucaloro, who was overseeing the lunchroom while peppering the students with math facts. She hired him to work at Success, where he ended up as director of pedagogy before he retired in 2014. At the prestigious Nightingale-Bamford private school in New York, she found a social studies program she admired. From the private, all-girls Brearley School in New York she found a science focus that helped shape the intense concentration on science.

In spring 2016, as Success Academy was celebrating its 10th anniversary, Moskowitz ran 34 schools that enrolled 11,000 students, nearly all of whom register striking academic gains. (It was hardly a surprise when the network was named one of three finalists for the 2016 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools.) In 2015, her minority-dominated schools, which operate in some of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, scored among the best in New York state: Five of the top 10 schools in New York in math were Success Academy schools.

For the next school year, 20,000 students applied for 3,228 spots. Moskowitz’s long-term goal: 100 Success Academy locations. Some of the controversy surrounding Moskowitz is of her own making; she’s still bashing the unions, essentially fighting the same fight from her City Council days. And comparing academic results from her schools with those from neighborhood schools, when her schools enjoy important differences such as not “backfilling” classes after fourth grade, is unfair.

But there’s no question that she has pioneered success at unprecedented scale by doing one thing different: offering incredibly rich academics to students who live in neighborhoods where that just doesn’t happen. Klein, who had his own clashes with Moskowitz, said the success at scale is the source of most of the attacks. “That’s threatening to a lot of people.”

Did Klein’s master plan work out? According to independent researchers, New York charters come close to being the best in the nation. But did they change the status quo for city families? That question got an early test when union-friendlier Bill de Blasio was elected mayor and immediately went after the co-located charters despised by the unions. The result: Thousands of minority parents and their children turned out for massive demonstrations in both New York and Albany. These were parents for whom the status quo had definitely changed. De Blasio famously backed down. Bulletproof.

The Bloomberg/Klein period of school reform in New York involved scores of initiatives, most of them highly controversial and all drawing fire from the teachers unions. Only with hindsight is it possible to see that the most radical change Klein pushed, and certainly the most successful, was persuading the nation’s top charter operators to make New York City a priority. He challenged them to disrupt his schools.

Klein’s revolutionary charter-building initiative in New York points to a second phenomenon: These charter pioneers, the designers of charter groups such as KIPP, Achievement First and Aspire, didn’t do this on their own. That success happened because a separate group of education entrepreneurs, district leaders such as Klein, philanthropy innovators such as Kim Smith of NewSchools and creative funders such as Reed Hastings all joined forces to make it possible.

Download the book, read more about Joel Klein . Below, a video interview with author Richard Whitmire, on what he learned while writing the book:

June 4th marked the 25th anniversary of the enactment of Minnesota’s charter school law, the nation’s first. In broad terms, the authors’ vision allowed for the creation of new schools that would be exempt from many of K-12’s overbearing regulations in return for these schools being held accountable for results.

As charter pioneer Ted Kolderie wrote, this horse trade would “…introduce the dynamics of choice, competition, and innovation into American’s public school system, while at the same time ensuring that new schools serve broad public purposes.” (T74 Flashcards: Charter schools, by the numbers)

The visionaries who developed the concept of chartering as a way to disrupt the century-old public education monopoly of geographically defined school districts held many different expectations for the kinds of schools that this would bring into being: schools for poor kids, for sure; but also teacher-led schools, STEM schools, classical schools, language-intensive schools, art and music schools, schools for children with disabilities, for children with special gifts, for mobile families, and so much more.

It was, in fact, meant to serve as a kind of engine of innovation and experimentation for the entire K-12 enterprise, and not just with regard to curriculum and pedagogy. Chartering also held — and holds — the capacity to develop new structures for delivering and governing public education.

It was an expansive vision and one that’s been partly fulfilled as chartering spread rapidly. California passed the second law in 1992 and 34 more states did so by 1998. Today, 43 states and the District of Columbia have such laws and some 6,800 charter schools educate almost 3 million children, about 6 percent of all U.S. public school pupils. Remarkably, the entire enrollment growth in American public education since 2006 has been accounted for by charter schools. (District schools actually lost students during this time.) The demand to attend them still exceeds the supply of charter seats in many places and the impulse to start and replicate them sometimes bumps up against limits that charter foes have written into state laws.

Much good has been accomplished by chartering over these 25 years, and the charter ranks today include a fair diversity of educational models. But this sector’s most significant accomplishment has been extricating disadvantaged children from bleak prospects in dire inner-city schools and placing them on the path to college and upward mobility. The so-called “no excuses” model—and sundry variations on that theme—have helped hundreds of thousands of children in poverty, many of them African American and Hispanic (and many English language learners) to gain a fresh lease on education and, thus, on life.

That laudable accomplishment has brought its own downside: a narrowing of the original vision of chartering. In the eyes of many educators, policymakers, and philanthropists — and probably in the eyes of the broader public — chartering has come to be viewed as principally a mechanism for liberating poor kids from bad schools and relocating them into better schools. Some state laws allow charters to operate only in disadvantaged or low-performing areas. The No Child Left Behind Act, and similar reforms at national, state and local levels, equated success with boosting reading and math test scores for low-achieving youngsters. Philanthropy, too, has contributed to this narrowing as it — for legitimate reasons — directed most of its K–12 dollars toward strategies and schools that promised to boost  achievement for the neediest kids.

What might the future hold?

First, we can’t imagine a future for chartering that spurns the no-excuses model and its variations — nor should it. Millions of poor and minority youngsters still need better school options, and this should remain a sturdy pillar of the charter sector. Making existing schools in this sector better — too many of them cannot yet claim to deliver a high-quality education—and replicating the best of them to serve more kids are important priorities. Infusing what they’ve demonstrated into district schools is important, too.

The question is whether American education would be better off if the charter sector had more pillars. We’re convinced that it would.

Second, restoring the broader vision of what chartering can do — without either forfeiting or complacently settling for its impressive accomplishments to date — requires resourcefulness on the part of policymakers, funders, and leaders of the charter movement itself. It’s a no-brainer to suppose that the future will simply extend the present, but it takes intelligence and a measure of courage — and considerable dollops of resources — to conjure a future that’s more than that.

It should include more (and better) specialized charters created in systematic ways: schools that focus on STEM, career and technical education, high-ability learners, special education, socioeconomic integration, and other realms within the K-12 universe that cry for better options than what’s there today.

Third, we look to the next quarter-century of chartering to pilot new delivery systems,  structures, and governance arrangements (as have begun to emerge via networks like KIPP and Aspire and in cities like Washington, D.C., Denver, and New Orleans) and to continue innovating at the system level with respect to staffing, technology, governance, and curriculum.

Enabling this future demands new imagination and flexibility on many fronts, akin to the early visions of those who invented chartering in the first place. It calls for creativity and change on the statutory and regulatory front, as well as new sources of human capital and careful attention to sensitive issues of community engagement and race.

It’s a tall order but one that, properly filled, will benefit millions of American youngsters. As we observe the present anniversary, let us celebrate chartering’s past but not be confined by it.

The views expressed here are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect the views of their respective organizations. This essay is informed and inspired by their forthcoming book, “,” to be published this fall by Harvard Education Press. ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ is partially funded by the Walton Family Foundation.

DiBella is the third leader in the organization’s history, succeeding Jason Bernal and founder Chris Barbic, who left to work as superintendent of the Tennessee Achievement School District from . Barbic, was very public, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in Houston as a senior education fellow.

YES Prep was for the $250,000 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. The prize is given to the network that has best raised student outcomes, closed the achievement gap, and increased its graduation rate. Fellow contenders are Texas’ IDEA Public Schools and New York City’s Success Academy. The winner will be announced June 27 at the National Charter Schools conference in Nashville.

DiBella spoke with ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ about YES Prep’s recent achievements, lessons learned the hard way, and what to expect from the network in the next few years. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

ÉçÇøºÚÁÏ: You started as CEO in April after spending 15 years in various roles at YES Prep, including teacher, principal, superintendent and chief operating officer. What were the highlights of your pre-CEO tenure?

DiBella: Looking back at the 15 years I’ve been at YES now, for sure the highlight for me was the time I spent as the school director at our North Central campus, which I co-founded and became the principal of in 2005. We just had eighth grade at the time, and I said to my staff, ‘We’re going to build the best high school in the city of Houston and we’re going to be one of the (best) high schools in the nation.’ And at the time it was this crazy goal and four years later, when we graduated our first class, we were in , top 100 schools in the country and we’re listed by Newsweek as a “Top 10 Miracle School” for AP results.

What would you like to see happen at the network in the next three to five years?

That every child in Houston will have equitable access to a public education that delivers a high-quality college prep education. That vision is so important for a couple of reasons — one, it is all about Houston. We tried to expand to Memphis last year and decided to pull operations out of Memphis (in March 2015). And, now we are just doubling down our focus on Houston. The other part of our vision that I think is personally compelling and I think it’s compelling for our city — it’s that by definition we’re not able to accomplish it by ourselves. It requires collaboration, it requires partnership … partnership with other charter schools, with traditional public schools, with service providers for socio-emotional support for our kids, and everything in between. Basically, if an organization is committed to the limitless potential of children in Houston, we’re committed to them — that’s my vision for the foreseeable future in Houston.

Does that mean that we won’t see YES Prep grow outside of Houston?

There’s a waiting list of more than 32,000 students [the combined wait lists of YES Prep, KIPP and Harmony, Families Empowered] in Houston who all desire to come to a Houston charter school, and they will be the ones we prioritize for the foreseeable future.

Tell me about the co-location program you’re expanding next fall with Aldine Independent School District.

We opened a school within the Aldine middle school three years ago, and this fall, we will open a school within their connecting high school. Spring Branch Independent School District, KIPP Houston and YES Prep have collaborated in a similar fashion since 2011 in what we call the . We’re still hammering out (the exact details) in real time with Aldine, so I can speak about how it works in Spring Branch ISD and we’re hoping it will be similar in Aldine. When (our students) go into the (Aldine) high school, they will take core classes with us but flow in and out of electives with students who are in the traditional public high school. So it’s an opportunity for them to have a much broader elective experience than they would at YES. For example, we don’t have a football team at any of our schools. Both of these schools have football teams, so our kids will be able to participate in football. We don’t have band — we can’t afford band at any of our schools. These kids will participate in band. Those are just two examples of larger school elective choices that our kids don’t currently have access to that they will in these partnerships. Down the road, we’re interested in opening at other districts if they’re interested in having us.

YES Prep won the in 2012, awarded to the public charter management organization that has demonstrated the best academic outcomes in recent years, particularly for low-income students and students of color. Now you’re a finalist for the 2016 prize. How has YES Prep been able to improve student outcomes, narrow the achievement gap and raise the graduation rate?

We have a three-pronged approach. First, we have a culture of high expectations because we believe in the limitless potential of every student. Our culture encourages students to reach for the stars and provides the support to help them reach them. Second, we have a rigorous curriculum that is aligned to College Board standards and Texas standards. So, in addition to the Texas state high school graduation requirements, we also expect that every student passes at least one AP level class. We backwards-map our curriculum so that starting in sixth grade and every year thereafter until the 12th grade, students are progressing academically to achieve those benchmarks. [YES Prep’s four-year graduation rate for the class of 2016 is 64 percent. By comparison, the Houston Independent School District’s four-year graduation rate was 78.6 percent in 2014, the latest on its website.]

Third, we focus on talent. On the quality, longevity, and diversity (of our staff). Our nationally recognized teacher development and certification program, Teaching Excellence, provides one-on-one coaching, professional learning, and certification and has been adopted by other charter and traditional school districts in Texas.

We know that if a teacher stays in the classroom year after year, with the right supports in place, their results improve year after year. The same holds true for principals. A school’s overall performance improves year after year with the same principal. One flaw of the charter school system is massive teacher and principal turnover and at YES Prep, we’re trying to limit the amount of turnover at our schools. We have an incentive program to encourage teachers and school directors in particular to stick with us for at least five years.

Finally, we embrace diversity and recognize how important it is for students to see leaders who reflect their cultural identity in their classrooms and throughout their school. Our hypothesis is that if a teacher, student support counselor, or dean is reflective of our students’ cultural identity, that student will be more invested and will perform better. So we work hard to recruit, develop, and retain diverse talent.

What was your role in the network’s decision to expand into Memphis, Tennessee?

My role changed during our time engaging with Memphis. Originally, I was our chief operating and growth officer in our central office, so I was in charge of the process that helped select Memphis as a city that we would expand to. Later, once we decided to go to Memphis, I became the Houston superintendent and became very focused on Houston. When we actually decided to pull out, my connection to Memphis was fairly limited at that point.

Why was Memphis considered a viable partnership?

I think that it was based largely on the belief that to be a national player or have national impact you needed to be a multi-regional organization … Specifically why Memphis? We were looking at a place that had a community of like-minded educators backed by like-minded philanthropists, and large enough demand for us to grow and students who were most in need of educational choice. So we had a very detailed screening process that ultimately led us to five cities that we did a deep dive on, and Memphis came out on top through that screening process.

It turned out that there was tremendous community resistance to your expansion plan, and YES Prep decided to abandon that endeavor very late in the game. What happened? Was there something that you missed?

I think (community resistance) was something that we expected but we missed how important (community support) was. It was something that was on our list but we didn’t understand how big of a factor it should have been.

In YES in Houston, we have been largely welcomed into new communities and I think that’s in large part because our reputation precedes us in Houston. But there’s one, no reputation to precede us in Memphis, and two, the way that schools were being taken over, reassigned, “turned around,” I think led to an already charged political environment in Memphis; we didn’t fully understand the depth to which that process was charged.

How does the unsuccessful Memphis experience weigh into your growth strategy going forward? You said you’re looking to prioritize Houston now, but would you consider expanding beyond state lines again?

Crossing state lines with charter schools is incredibly difficult and in retrospect, we were not even close to mature enough from an infrastructure standpoint to be able to expand across state lines. I don’t see that fundamental challenge changing in the near future to make it, in my mind, prudent for us to choose to expand outside of Texas.

YES Prep has successful working relationships with Houston-area school districts. But you haven't been immune to the criticisms levied often at charter schools — namely, that the “no excuses” disciplinary approach contributes toward the removal of the most difficult-to-teach students and the lowest-performing. Thus, charters get the advantage over traditional districts when it comes to hitting benchmarks for test scores and graduation rates. Are these fair criticisms? How are you responding when it’s directed at YES Prep?

It’s absolutely a fair criticism. In my mind, the “no excuses” charter schools — that way of thinking — is becoming a thing of the past and I say that having been … a child of the “no excuses” charter movement. But when I go back to my experience in North Central and I talked about what a great school it was, we started with 105 sixth-graders and we graduated 36 seniors, and that was a result of no excuses. That was a result of us basically weeding kids out who weren’t performing along the way. And we don’t do that anymore. … We now say, “This is a school of choice — you choose us, we never unchoose you.”

There are things that we expel for but we don’t ever unchoose a student for not doing their work or for not being motivated enough or for excessive absences; these are things that the districts have to deal with and we have, I think, increasingly held ourselves to similar standards. It’s a place where I’m proud of the work we have done and I also know we have a lot more work to do.

To that end, we are in the process of launching a joint alternative charter school with KIPP Houston to serve students with profound behavioral challenges from both networks (and additional charter operators, who we hope to attract to Houston, in the long-term). The earliest it would open is in the middle of the 2017-18 school year. We are aggressively pursuing how to make that a reality, which is really, really exciting because it would be a way that we wouldn’t have to expel kids back into the district; we would be able to send them to the alternative school where they could get the individualized support that they need and then they could return to our schools. Most traditional districts have their own alternative settings, and it allows them to not necessarily expel at the rate that we expel.

[In 2014-15, the network reported 1,628 in-school and out-of-school suspensions combined and 34 expulsions for 9,158 students; it did not provide additional data on partial suspensions. By comparison, in 2014-15 Houston ISD recorded 66,198 in-school or out-of-school suspensions; 2,720 removals to a disciplinary alternative education program; and 69 expulsions, out of 215,225 total students, according to provided by the district.]

As far as serving gifted students, we are looking to leverage technology rather than hiring more and more specialized teachers. At each of our high schools, we have 400 to 500 kids. We could think about having a couple master AP calculus teachers (teach virtually) on multiple campuses rather than have them drive around the city to teach at multiple places … It’s the right idea but it’s inefficient because it doesn’t leverage technology.

The same idea would hold true for kids with special needs — but instead of technology, we can consider centralized services where we can pool kids from multiple campuses and have them go to one campus to get the support that they need. Currently several campuses have life-skills classes but they’re not open to kids who attend other schools, and we need to open those classes up.

Boston, Massachusetts

A year later I returned, still looking to answer that question. I arrived a few days after the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Brooke a high school so students from its current three schools can transition into a high school run with the same philosophy and results.

Said state Commissioner Mitchell Chester: “It would be hard to overstate the track record of educational performance (at Brooke).” Keep in mind, this green light to expand happened in Massachusetts, a state in the throes of the nation’s most bitter fight over charters.

This time I sat down with Steadman’s husband, and co-director, Jon Clark, who founded Brooke. Even an hour into the interview I was worried once again: Am I going to walk away and still not understand Brooke’s secret sauce (a horrible cliché, but it gets to the heart of it) that makes them the best charter school in Massachusetts, a state that boasts the nation’s top-performing charters?

Among charter founders, Clark is unique. Quiet, studious, not given to bragging, not out to conquer the world by sprinkling charters in every state or even outside Boston. He’s prone to crediting his wife more than himself and offers only general clues to watch for as I start my classroom observations. It’s all about the teaching, he advised me.

What school leader doesn’t say that?

At the moment, the advice didn’t seem particularly helpful. At the end of the day am I going to climb into a cab to head back to Boston’s Logan Airport still puzzling over how Brooke takes in a student population that’s almost entirely low income and entirely minority, and turns them into scholars with students enjoying the privilege of growing up white in a wealthy Boston suburb?

Brooke founder and co-director Jon Clark (Photo by Richard Whitmire)

Some top charters talk about closing achievement gaps; Brooke actually does it.

Here’s the challenge about Brooke: It’s a group of K-8 schools, essentially a mom-and-pop charter, a creation of Clark and Steadman. Aren’t the nation’s best charters supposed to emerge from prestigious charter management organizations such as KIPP and Achievement First?

There’s more to the challenge. Unlike many top charters, especially Rocketship charters out of California, a blended learning pioneer (creating personalized learning by leaning on computer-based instruction) that I followed for more than a year while writing a book, “,” Brooke mostly eschews computer learning. No blended learning to be seen anywhere.

Why? Clark has yet to find a software learning program that impresses him. Brooke’s entire emphasis is on teacher quality. Why would you subtract from teacher time by sending students off for laptop instruction?

The challenge goes on. Unlike many “no excuses” charter groups which adopt a highly scripted instructional style that could be set to a metronome, Brooke is pretty laid back. There’s no heavy “culture” pressure here.

At Brooke, elementary students have carpeted squares they sit on for up-close-and-personal sessions with the teacher, but if a student happens to spill over into the next square there’s no command-and-control correction coming from the teacher, as I have seen in many “no excuses” charters. Yes, they file quietly through the hallways when changing classes, but nobody has to hold their hands behind their back or cupped in front of them.

In fact, if you suddenly forgot that every single student there comes from a non-privileged background, you could easily imagine you were in a private school where the students are somehow just naturally curious and well behaved, interested in every comment made by a fellow students.

Sounds intriguing, right? I’m mid-way through my day-long stay here, and I still don’t have a real clue. Clark doesn’t make me feel any better when he advises me to watch classrooms for evidence of Brooke’s twin pillar philosophy in action: “challenged” and “known.” Challenged I get. But “known?”

The first insight into my unanswered question came as I tagged along with teacher Heidi Deck after she walked her fourth-graders across the street in very blustery conditions to physical education. One unique thing about being a Brooke teacher, she said, is that the instruction always starts with an unfamiliar problem, something the students haven’t seen before.

Deck went on to describe flipped instruction. In most math classrooms, teachers present a problem, demonstrate the solution and then have the students practice. It’s dubbed the “I do-we do-you do” method of instruction. Rinse and repeat.

Not at Brooke. Here, teachers start by presenting a new problem and then invite the students to solve it on their own, armed only with the tools from previous lessons. “We really push kids to be engaged with the struggle,” explained Deck.

Next, the teacher invites students to collaborate with one another in trying to solve the problem, which is followed by more individual attempts to solve it. Then there’s a classroom discussion about different ways students tried to solve it, with teachers doing their best to draw out solutions from the students. Ideally, they carry the weight of the instruction, learning from one another.

“The kids have to do the logical work of figuring something out rather than repeating what the teacher does,” said Steadman, who acts as the chief academic officer.

That posits math instruction more in the real world. Aren’t we always coming up against unfamiliar challenges, from calculating the wisest purchase to computing taxes?

And there’s another advantage: There’s no panic when Brooke students come across a math problem on the state exam they’ve never seen before. Instead they ask: What are the tools I already have to solve this?

Brooke eighth graders role play a presidential debate (Photo by Richard Whitmire)

Here’s another intriguing feature about Brooke: The reading scores here are as high as the math scores. That may not sound unusual, but it is. At almost any other top charter I visit that serves high-poverty students the math scores tend to soar while the reading scores are barely any better than neighborhood schools.

Why? The explanation always offered is that math gets taught in classrooms; literacy is more rooted in home life. Plus, in charters that rely on using computerized blended learning, the math software is great; the literacy software usually mediocre or worse.

The reason the math and reading scores align at Brooke comes down to a simple-but-radical approach to literacy: Reading is taught not as something mechanical (you will never see a reading worksheet at Brooke) but as something to be loved. In a traditional school, including charters, a child struggling with reading gets special help in breaking down the process into small pieces, with teachers searching for deficits that need correcting.

Brooke emphasizes phonics as much as any school, but on a broader level. A struggling reader at Brooke first gets asked: Why don’t you love reading? To the Brooke teachers, finding a way to unlock that love is as important, or more important, than isolating mechanical deficiencies.

“The goal is to get kids to love text so they become lifelong readers,” said Steadman. “Our kids do well on tests because they love reading.”

Yet another observation about Brooke. Visit any school in the country, charter or traditional, and the classroom walls will be full of colorful posters, student work and the daily academic goals. It wasn’t until about the third classroom I dropped in on that I noticed something different: At Brooke, the walls have that regular art but slathered over that are huge, jumbled tear sheets revealing classroom discussions about math, religion, history, a novel, pretty much anything.

These posters are chock-full of teacher scribbles of student comments, kind of like those Hollywood movies about math savants who fill blackboards with calculations. It all feels rich and creamy.

Take Deck’s fourth-grade classroom: The back wall is covered with tear sheets revealing elaborate graphs created with orange, blue, purple and green markers. There’s one labeled: Comparing decimals. Another: Divisibility rules. Another: What do I do with a remainder? On a side wall, two charts that break down a novel’s inner workings are partially covered by a tear sheet spelling out the players in the underground railway.

The complex wall arts points to one thing: Some serious and enthusiastic scholarship took place here. Here’s something else you notice about Brooke: There are a lot fewer students walking through the hallways. Actually, this is a pretty big difference (I may have saved the best for last.)

Brooke does something with its middle school grades that few others do. They structure them on an elementary school model, keeping students mostly in self-contained classrooms with the same teachers throughout the day. All those in-school shuffles between math, reading and science, prompted by soul-deafening buzzers. Not happening here.

Interesting story how that happened, and it’s all about Steadman. Or, to put it more precisely, it’s all about her husband, Clark,  listening closely to Steadman, who arrived at Brooke in 2004 as a seventh-grade math teacher. Her prior experience had been as a fifth- grade math teacher. But really, she asked herself, how different could it be teaching seventh grade? As it turned out, a lot.

At that time Brooke’s older grades operated like a traditional middle school, where students changed classes to see teachers who specialized in math, reading or science. So Steadman taught nothing but math, class after class — and didn’t like it.

Aside from not getting to know the students that well, she missed the teacher collaboration she enjoyed in elementary schools where all the teachers who taught, say fourth grade, got together to plan what all fourth-grade classes should be studying that week. Wondered Steadman: Why should middle school be different?

After Steadman launched the elementary program, Brooke undertook an internal teacher survey that revealed something interesting: Elementary grade teachers reported more satisfaction than the middle school grade teachers. Why? Because of the teacher-to-teacher collaboration.

“It’s one of my big beliefs about how people work,” she said. “They like having thought partners, people they can talk to about the work they do. Being verbal about your work makes it more purposeful.”

So why not shift the middle school grades to the elementary school schedule? After a one-year successful pilot with fifth grade, Brooke flipped all its older grades  to the self-contained model. Thus, teachers instruct all subjects, drawing on heavy collaboration with same-grade teachers. That guarantees a deeper relationship with the teacher, and also cuts down on the time students spend shuffling from class to class.

But the biggest benefit may be teacher satisfaction. Said Clark: “If you ask any teacher at Brooke to name the biggest thing that pushes you to get better, I think they would answer it’s having a smart colleague to co-plan with and look at data with.”

That self-contained model also helps explain the “known” part of the Brooke twin pillars philosophy: All students should feel well known by Brooke teachers, something more likely to happen in the nurturing self-contained classrooms.

All the above factors, woven together, account for the high performance at Brooke. Which raises this question: If the nation’s top charter school is headed in a direction different from other high-performing charters, is that a problem?

My answer: Only if you think all charter schools are supposed to look alike.