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South Texas education revolution: Column

Charter schools in Texas can make college graduates out of the poorest of America's poor.

Richard Whitmire
A first grade class during story time, April 24, 2015.

LAS MILPAS, RIO GRANDE VALLEY, TEXAS — Some describe this slice of impoverished South Texas as a DMZ, which is harsh but understandable. After all, U.S. Customs and Border Protection doesn't bother setting up a true screening until 73 miles north in Falfurrias, which leaves this piece of Texas as, well, a bit of a DMZ.

All that makes the Rio Grande Valley an unlikely birthplace for an education revolution. Nevertheless, it's happening here, and there are national implications that can't be avoided.

Here's the big question: Is it possible to take thousands of low-income Latino kids, send 99% to four-year colleges and then see two thirds of them end up with degrees?

That seems improbable, but the early results from this large scale experiment by IDEA charter schools — serving 15,000 students in the Valley alone — look promising. For eight years in a row, close to 100% of their graduates have been accepted into four-year colleges.

The usual catch with schools such as IDEA is that they're great at getting their kids accepted into college but lousy at making sure they graduate, a struggle shared by all high performing charter schools serving poor kids.

Low-income minority kids, especially those growing up in isolated locations such as the Rio Grande Valley, are fragile college goers. All too often, one failed class, one unpaid bill, and they drop out. That explains why blacks and Hispanic students each account for only about 9% of bachelor's degrees granted.

Among the IDEA students entering college, however, 62% graduate in six years. That's good, but IDEA has some doable-sounding plans to boost that to 85%.

The big event when I visited was "college signing day," a cross between graduation and pep rally. On this ear-splitting afternoon held in a minor league basketball arena, graduates walk to a center stage microphone to announce where they will attend college.

A mini-Jumbo Tron flashes the student's name, the college, and an asterisk reveals whether that student is a first-generation college goer. I never saw the asterisk disappear.

That announcement is witnessed by friends and family — but most importantly, younger classmates who get the unmistakable message: One day, this will be me.

Among the 554 graduates, 19 were headed to the Ivy Leagues. There were three students headed to Harvard, including a "Dreamer," born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. She was one of 41 Dreamers who crossed the stage during signing ceremonies. The mother of graduate Gilberto Gutierrez, who is headed to MIT, works in an IDEA school cafeteria.

Usually, we think of the kids in places such as Newark and Detroit as facing the toughest challenges. Maybe not. What's astonishing is just how poor these students are: Cities in the Rio Grande Valley routinely top out the Census Bureau's poorest-in-the-nation list. The average per capita income in these counties barely exceeds $14,000.

At the IDEA Pharr school I visited, which is in the shadow of the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, the principal, Ernesto Cantu, grew up in the "colonias" that surround the school. His family didn't get a sewer connect until he was 14, and even then they had to dig it themselves.

When IDEA Pharr first opened, a principal from a nearby traditional school welcomed the opening: That meant he wouldn't have to deal with so many impoverished students from Las Milpas, he told Cantu.

Today, Pharr is one of IDEA's most successful schools.

It's not that IDEA runs the top charter group in the country. I've seen other charters that produce bigger academic gains. What IDEA does is take some of the poorest kids in the world and make college-goers out of every nearly all. Most striking: They have figured out how to do it at scale. They are on track to run 60 schools by 2017, serving 40,000 students.

IDEA's goal is to become the biggest pipeline of low-income college graduates in the state of Texas. It's not at all far fetched.

If this kind of success can play out in places such as Las Milpas, where describing a student as an English Language Learner seems redundant, what does that say for cities across the country where the education challenges are tough but not this tough, and yet by comparison the education outcomes are awful?

It's says we're doing something wrong; it says we need to dramatically change the way we educate students in those cities. It says we have to completely change our expectations of what's possible.

If these kinds of quality schools had been available in Baltimore for the last decade, would we see entire communities walled off from opportunity?

"We hear that the reason you have poor kids and unmotivated parents is because the schools are crummy," says IDEA co-founder Tom Torkelson. "Those who say that we have crummy schools because kids are unmotivated and parents don't care have it exactly backward. The reason that kids don't care and parents are unmotivated is because they're trapped in crummy schools."

The important experiment playing out here also says that parents crave these kinds of results. IDEA recently got 24,000 applications for its 4,000 open seats. The wait list for open spots just topped 20,000.

So if parents want these high quality schools, and these schools can be successful at large scale, what's stopping us? The IDEA experiment here won't be easy to replicate elsewhere, but clearly it's possible.

Richard Whitmire is an Emerson Collective fellow and the author of several education books.

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