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Novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote, "We class schools ... into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school, school." Waugh might easily have added another class: the visionary school that bravely sets out to fill a need other schools have not met. In the pages ahead, the Andover Bulletin visits three such innovative institutions. Two of them were built upon the dreams of Phillips Academy alumni, while the third was reshaped by the dreams of an alumnus just when its days seem numbered. Whether they are schools, good schools, first-rate schools or leading schools will be determined by time and by the experience of the youngsters whose lives they change.

VISION 1:
SHOOTING FOR THE STARS

Think Silicon Valley and chances are you're thinking about high technology, high real estate prices and high I.Q.s'—not to mention high expectations. If you're from Northern California, though, the words may also evoke images of the working poor squeezed out of a comfortable lifestyle by the skyrocketing cost of living in the area.

Among the valley's poorest residents are those in East Palo Alto, an area so economically beset that until a few months ago it had no supermarket and no bank. In 1992, it was dubbed the murder capital of the world. For over two decades this city of 25,000 people has had no public high school. A 1976 desegregation order closed the local school and forced the busing of kids to destinations as far as 20 miles away.

"When you have to get up at 5 a.m. to board a bus, and you can't do after-school sports or join clubs because you might miss the bus home, it's easy to get frustrated," says educator Chris Bischof ’89. "As a result, the dropout rate is about 65 percent."

It is on a corner in one of East Palo Alto's more downtrodden neighborhoods, Whiskey Gulch, that Bischof envisioned a school. In five short years, his vision has evolved into an exciting and ambitious educational enterprise where students who once had nowhere to go are seeing paths open for them.

EARLIEST INKLINGS
As a history major at Stanford University, Bischof first became deeply involved with a summer enrichment program for East Palo Alto middle schoolers. He stayed on to tutor and to coach basketball. Noticing how motivated the children were by their interest in the sport, Bischof decided that for his honors thesis in college he would write a proposal seeking funding to start an after-school academic enrichment program using basketball as a lure. He called it Shoot for the Stars.

The proposal was funded, and in 1991 Bischof began working with a core group of seven fourth-graders. Initially, Bischof was the sole volunteer, and the deal was that kids who submitted to his tutelage for 90 minutes daily could stay on for 90 minutes of basketball. Each year the program grew in enrollment and in quality—on both the academic and athletic sides.

After earning a master's degree and teaching credentials in the Stanford Teacher Education Program, Bischof taught in the local middle school and then at a high school in Woodside, one of the communities where East Palo Alto kids were bused. But he continued to work with Shoot for the Stars and to worry about East Palo Alto's distinction as a city with no high school.

It was in 1996, when his first group of star-shooters was ready to enter ninth grade, that Bischof took a leap of faith by starting the Eastside College Preparatory School. He was 26 years old.

AIMING HIGH, STARTING LOW
As its name implies, the school's purpose from its outset was to prepare kids for college. Still, Bischof makes it clear the school is not in any sense a "talent search" or a training ground for the academic elite. Youngsters in the program have ranked as low as the first percentile on standardized state tests, and most score only in the teens. Thus what he seeks in a potential student is not evidence of past achievement, but the elusive signs of willingness to work hard.

How hard? Students at Eastside report for classes at 8 a.m. daily, and their schedule carries them straight through to 5 p.m. Typically, though, they linger until 8, 9 or 10 o'clock each night working with teachers or with volunteer tutors from Stanford or the community. The unrelenting curriculum requires four years each of math, science, English, history and foreign language. Despite these demands, despite the distractions in the students  often turbulent home lives, even despite its grueling expectation of year-round learning, Eastside boasts a 98 percent attendance record. The school has no disciplinary problems, Bischof says, because students do not want to imperil their spots in the program.

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© Phillips Academy, 2001