A Charter for Achievement

Campus Report ^ | October 20, 2009 | Allie Winegar Duzett

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A Charter for Achievement

Allie Winegar Duzett, October 20, 2009

While bureaucrats everywhere puzzle over how to make public school test scores look good, one charter school principal has figured out how to make them go up without score keeping gimmicks.

Ben Chavis is a unique man with an uncommon background: he grew up as a sharecropper on a Native American reservation in North Carolina, and today he leads and operates an impressive charter school—for fun. Every year, Chavis donates his salary back to the school, and uses the money to take the oldest class of children to visit Washington, D.C.

Ben Chavis, author of Crazy Like a Fox and principal of the American Indian Public Charter School, was a key speaker at “The Nation’s Best Charter Schools,” a CATO Institute event held on October 2, 2009. Chavis’s methods are unique, and admittedly controversial. But perhaps this is why, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, students at his charter school “consistently outrank other Oakland middle schools on standardized tests and score among the highest in California.”

Chavis explained his views on the unique challenges facing minority students today; in college, Chavis wrote his dissertation on the results of integration in schools. “The Indian school was run by Indians, and we all had a job—and now we’re integrated and none of the Indians have a job! Believe it or not, the graduation rate is lower now for Indians than it was before we had integration, when I grew up. The number of kids going to college is lower, the kids going to jail has increased,” Chavis said, adding, “I never really thought about [having an Indian school] as discrimination.”....