Harvard and the Charters

(Part II and Part III of this story appeared on May 9 and May 11, 2012.)

Two Harvard alumni guide seventh grade students in Classroom 205, home to humanities and Spanish, at the Community Charter School of Cambridge.

A picture of Jeremy Lin ’10, the Harvard athlete turned professional basketball star who rocketed to international fame this spring, hangs on the back wall of the room.

In the front of room, Henry J. Seton ’06 leads students through a lesson on “The Odyssey,” reading from a graphic novel adaptation of Homer’s classic.

“So what is his tragic flaw?” Seton asks with dramatic flair. Many of his seventh graders raise their hands eagerly, hoping that their answers will earn a congratulatory ringing of his small bell.

Seton, who concentrated in Social Studies with a focus on education, is one of the many Harvard graduates—24 of them, according to statistics collected by the city’s three charter schools—who are at the vanguard of the charter school movement in Cambridge.

His students are among the lucky 1,822 who have won lotteried seats at Cambridge’s three charter schools—independent schools that are funded by public money but not bound by many of the state codes that regulate traditional public schools. Driven by a mission of educational excellence, these schools see more students apply each year than they can take in their classrooms.

In their efforts to offer top-knotch public education in Cambridge, these schools—CCSC, Prospect Hill Academy, and Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School—have tapped into Harvard’s resources during their fledgling years. These schools have taken advantage of the University’s academic rigor, student population, and innovative faculty, a relationship that has benefited both the charter schools and members of the Harvard community.

“A PIPELINE”

The Harvard Graduate School of Education, ranked the second-best graduate school of education in the country by U.S. News & World Report, has served local teachers as a convenient way to further their education and better serve their schools.

Caleb Hurst-Hiller, who was appointed CCSC’s head of school in March, is one of the many Harvard affiliates working on the front lines of the Cambridge charter school movement.

After graduating from Brown, Hurst-Hiller wanted to immediately explore teaching instead of enrolling in a masters program, he says. He joined the CCSC faculty in 2005 as a founding member. After two years, he decided to pursue a one-year specialized master’s degree at the Ed School. While continuing to serve as a teacher, mentor, and basketball coach at CCSC, Hurst-Hiller studied instructional improvement, education policy, and small schools. After completing his studies at the Ed School, Hurst-Hiller worked as a humanities teacher and was then promoted to principal of CCSC’s upper school in 2009.

Hurst-Hiller says the training he received at the Ed School has benefited CCSC in two ways. First, his academic experience there enabled him to bring new insight to curriculum planning and reform—crucial aspects of the charter school’s mission.

Hurst-Hiller’s time at the Ed School has also allowed him to bring personal connections to CCSC. “I did a master’s program at the Ed School to help network...and I still stay connected,” Hurst-Hiller says. He has helped secure CCSC’s relationship with Harvard—what many Cambridge educators call a “pipeline” between the charter schools and Harvard.

From their inception, Cambridge-based charter schools have been shaped by Harvard alumni. When Prospect Hill opened in Cambridge in 2002, the school had three teachers who had earned master’s degrees from the Ed School, according to Michele M. Meagher, human resources manager at Prospect Hill. These three now comprise the core of the school’s administration, Meagher says.

Jed F. Lippard, now head of school at Prospect Hill, was among those three. “There are a lot of personal relationships that people [at Prospect Hill] have developed with HGSE. Many of us are on the Ed School listserv and attend the Askwith Forums,” Lippard says.

Cambridge Public School Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young, who received a doctoral degree in administration, planning, and social policy from the Ed School in 1988, praises the presence of Harvard alumni teaching in the district.

“We always feel that Harvard graduates who come to work here bring to us a good mix of the two core values: academic excellence and social justice,” Young says.

While currently no faculty members at Benjamin Banneker hold Harvard degrees, Deputy Director Sherley Bretous-Carre says that the school takes advantage of Harvard by drawing upon faculty research and knowledge.

Benjamin Banneker, a kindergarten through sixth grade charter school focused on science and technology, has looked to Harvard to help improve its curriculum and teaching methods.

“We continue to be ahead of the curve. We’re always looking to studies and programs that we can participate in. We love to do longitudinal studies on where students have gone, what path they’ve taken,” Bretous-Carre says, adding that Banneker hopes to use Harvard resources for development and marketing as the school looks at updating its technology labs.

LEARNING TO TEACH

Every weekday last semester, Seth A. Pearce ’12 woke up at 6:40 a.m. and took the 7 a.m. shuttle into Kendall Square to student teach in the classroom of William D. Connell, an Ed School graduate who now teaches humanities at CCSC.

When not writing his thesis on liberal political philosophy and education, Pearce worked as a full-time student teacher. Now, in his final semester at Harvard, Pearce has continued to work for CCSC as a substitute teacher and will join the CCSC staff full-time after graduation to teach eighth grade humanities.

“My impression was that it is a really effective school. I’ve been in a lot of different educational environments, and I wanted to be in a place like [CCSC],” Pearce says.

Pearce is enrolled in the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program at Harvard, through which he has studied at the Ed School and assisted teachers at Quincy Upper School in Boston and CCSC. Participants in the program take the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure so that they graduate as certified public school teachers.

Orin Gutlerner—the former director of UTEP who left Harvard in 2008 to help found Match Teacher Residency, a program that trains teachers and places many of them in charter schools—said that Harvard’s student teachers have increasingly been placed at Cambridge-based charter schools rather than traditional public schools run by the city since he took over the program in 2003.

This year, Pearce and one other UTEP student have taught at Cambridge charter schools, and one UTEP student taught at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the city’s flagship public high school.

Gutlerner found charter schools to be beneficial for student teachers. “CCSC believed in [a college preparatory education] for low-income students, and that’s why Harvard students have gotten into teaching in the first place. They want students to see the kind of opportunity that they have had,” he says.

When Seton arrived at Harvard, he was hesitant about charter schools. He completed his student teaching hours at public high schools in Boston and Quincy.

It was not until Gutlerner convinced Seton to visit CCSC when he was applying to teaching jobs that Seton began to open up to the idea of working at a charter school.

“[CCSC] is led by people who are committed to social justice,” Seton says. “All of those things like the dress code and detention and being all about professionalism and college prep discourage people, but I see that here we make sure we can run an effective and efficient classroom.”

Though CCSC and Banneker have enjoyed working closely with the University and its faculty and students, Prospect Hill has shied away from placing Harvard students as teacher’s assistants.

Lippard says that Prospect Hill used to have a stronger connection to UTEP and TEP, the parallel program at the Ed School, but the school has broken off that relationship for two reasons.

“[Student teachers] are not there for as long as we would want them,” Lippard says of the one-semester full-time teaching commitment that UTEP students make. Second, he says he believes that his teaching staff, comprised of many novices, does not have the requisite experience to be effective mentors to student teachers.

Though Prospect Hill has ended its placements from UTEP and TEP, it does employ 12 teachers and staff members who hold degrees from the Ed School or the College, according to Meagher.

Lippard says that there are many personal relationships between the school and the University, and he hopes to increasingly tap into other Harvard resources.

“We’ve not even begun to scratch the surface of the relationships,” he says.

—Staff writer Kerry M. Flynn can be reached at kflynn@college.harvard.edu.