From Village School to Global Brand by James Tooley

Author:James Tooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Licensed to ascend

New York meets Beirut

In one of the toughest districts of New York City, Brownsville in Brooklyn, young children at a charter school are getting the results of their state exams. I know it’s a tough district: when I first visited, my Ukrainian taxi driver initially refused to take me there from the more upmarket parts of town. Speaking in broken English, he shook his head: “They kill somebody every time. They stab each other. They even kill their brother.” The crime statistics would not allay his fears. In 2008, Brownsville gained the gruesome title of the “most murderous” neighborhood in New York City. Crimes of robbery and burglary were also up. One resident was reported as saying, “It’s like a war zone here. It’s like a little Iraq.”1

Steven F. Wilson goes through the results of the children’s state exams. He is the founder of Ascend Learning, which is managing this and two other charter schools serving some of the most disadvantaged children in America. He’s reasonably happy that the children in this tough inner-city environment are doing so well. Although barely a year old, his school has outperformed other, more established schools in the neighborhood. He feels he could be on the right track.

He’s not the only one perusing the children’s state results. Five thousand, six hundred and twenty-two miles away, in Adma, a small town perched on cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean north of Beirut, Lebanon, the SABIS team is also poring over the exam results. Again, they are happy enough with what they see, but realize there is room for improvement in the English examination. For instance, when asked to do an extended piece of writing, the New York children do not respond well. The team call in the head of the English Department in Adma to examine how this, and other areas, could be improved. For three months, fourteen people work nearly full-time in the Lebanon offices, preparing materials and electronic assessments that will be used to improve the performance of these poor children in New York. Eventually the new materials, electronic back-up, assessment systems, and training materials were sent back to New York. The next year, children were able to perform even better in the New York state exams.

Thus, a for-profit education company tucked away on the shores of the Mediterranean endeavors to make a difference for deprived children, irrespective of where they live in the world. Crucially in this case, SABIS does not own or even manage this school – it’s managed by Ascend Learning, a completely separate organization. Instead, both are piloting SABIS’s new system of licensing, one of the two major ways in which SABIS hopes to achieve its big, hairy, audacious goal of five million children served by 2020.

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