Education for Upward Mobility by Petrilli Michael J.;

Author:Petrilli, Michael J.; [Petrilli, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Downtown College Prep: To and Through

Berenice Cervantes’s parents—Dad has a third-grade education, Mom made it to fifth grade—left their small town in Mexico when their daughter was a baby. The town had an elementary school, but no middle school or high school. They wanted better opportunities for their kids.

They picked crops in California’s Central Valley and then they found work in San Jose, California. Her father was a driver, her mother a janitor. “I saw their sacrifice, how hard they worked,” recalls Cervantes. “I had to excel to pay them back. My grades were my paychecks to them.” A Mount Holyoke graduate, Cervantes is college access and success coordinator for Summer Search, a nonprofit that provides mentoring, summer enrichment experiences, and counseling to disadvantaged students from tenth grade through college.

McKinley “Mac” Dickerson spent several years in a homeless shelter when he was in elementary school. In middle school, his emotional issues led to a special-education diagnosis. As an agent and trainer for Transamerica, Dickerson helps families plan their finances, including how to save money for college. He earned an economics degree from University of California at Santa Cruz. His goal is to be “DCP’s first millionaire alumni,” he says.

Both are 2005 graduates of DCP, a scrappy charter school in San Jose. The city’s first charter, it opened its doors—the doors of an old church and a former YWCA blocks apart—in 2000. Two young teachers, Greg Lippman and Jennifer Andaluz, targeted underachievers from Mexican immigrant families, kids who were “failing but not in jail,” as Lippman put it. With a longer school day and a relentless focus on college prep, they believed their charter could put C, D, and F students on the college track.

In the early years, 85 percent of its students were Latino, and nearly all were from low-income and working-class families. Some came with special-ed labels: learning disabled, developmentally delayed, emotionally and behaviorally disordered. Others weren’t fluent in English. Psychologist Carol Dweck hadn’t yet popularized the importance of the “growth mindset,” the belief that hard work will lead to success. The Knowledge Is Power Program hadn’t yet concluded that disadvantaged students need “grit” to make it through college.

Downtown College Prep was all about grit, known as ganas, before it was fashionable. “We’re not good now but we can get better” was the unofficial motto, as I wrote in my book, Our School, about DCP’s early years:

At DCP, low achievers aren’t told they’re doing well; they’re told they can do better, if they work hard. The school doesn’t boost self-esteem with empty praise. Instead Lippman and his teachers encourage what’s known as “efficacious thinking,” the belief that what a person does has an effect. If you study, you’ll do better on the test than if you goof off. Work hard in school, and you can get to college. You have control over your future. So, stop making excuses and start getting your act together.23

At one assembly, teachers acted out the fable of the tortoise and the hare. A math

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