CALIFORNIA CHARTER SCHOOL SUCCESSS STORY

I love charter schools and I love The Wall Street Journal, so I'm posting this older article:

They Found Their Way in San Jose
A California charter school success story.

BY HENRY I. MILLER
Thursday, November 17, 2005

Life really can imitate art. The art I have in mind is the kind of tear-jerker movie in which, say, a beleaguered small-town basketball team beats the odds and makes it to the state finals. Or in which someone--imagine Sally Field in a faded gingham dress--struggles to bring in the harvest and save a farm.

Joanne Jacobs's "Our School," a vivid account of the creation and first years of a charter high school in San Jose, Calif., has that kind of drama. It reads like a novel whose characters are both stereotypical and improbable. The founders of Downtown College Prep--as the school is called--are a Jewish guy from an affluent family educated at Princeton and Stanford and a woman who had been raised by a working-class single mother and had sleepwalked through her own high-school experience until a year in Spain as an exchange student persuaded her to become a teacher. (full article)