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Two Cities: Going Charter NEW ORLEANS AND DETROIT (Michigan Radio) - All this week we're looking at what Detroit Public Schools can learn from post-Katrina New Orleans schools. One of the biggest education reforms in New Orleans is its push toward charter schools, which are essentially public schools with more autonomy. More than two-thirds of the schools in New Orleans are charters.

Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra starts our story with a visit to Mays Prep, a charter school in the city's Lower Ninth Ward.

145 little kids dressed in blue slacks and button downs crowd into the gym for their weekly pep rally. The students sit in a giant rectangle on the floor, with their teachers behind them. The principal and founder of Mays Prep, Duke Bradley, calls out each classroom, not by grade, but by their teacher's alma mater.

"We talk to them from the very first day of school that they're college bound, and what does it take for them to get there," says Duke Bradley. "We know that college for many of our kids is an abstract notion, but so what? Our job is to make these things very real for them."

Bradley's got a lot of heavy lifting to do. When he opened Mays Prep last year, the first thing he did was test the students to just how far behind they were, and Bradley says "the results were horrifying, even worse than we actually anticipated." The students' scores were in the bottom 20th percent for math, science, English and social studies.

The majority of students at Mays Prep came from Carver Elementary, one of the worst performing schools in the Recovery School District; the RSD is trying to turnaround the worst schools in the city.

Bradley took over the Pre-K through second grades at Carver, and he will add on one new grade each year until Carver is eventually phased out. Because Mays Prep is a charter school, Bradley can set his own rules. He gets to hand pick his staff, decide how long the school day should be, in this case 7:30 a.m. - 5 p.m., and he can hold mandatory Saturday classes once a month.

No detail is left to chance. From the two sharpened pencils every student has to have at their desk, to the way they have to sit: Straight back, butts flat in the chair. Bradley calls it sweating the small stuff.

"We don't teach anything in the way of instruction for the first two-and-a-half weeks of school," explains Bradley. "We begin with culture. We talk about: How do we carry ourselves? How do we address one another? What are the expectations that we have with regard to how we treat one another, to how we talk, to how we walk in lines, to how we go into the cafeteria, to how we dress our tables before we eat?"

Bradley says he will eventually move to more critical thinking and hands-on learning once the kids are caught up, but until that happens Bradley says "this is what you need to know: Drill and kill."

"There are some excellent charters, but most of them are not really excellent," says Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. She used to be a huge proponent of charter schools. But now, she's singing a different tune.

"Most of them are no better than the regular public schools," says Ravitch. "So you're just taking vulnerable children and turning them over to people who in some cases are just fast-buck entrepreneurs."

Let's be clear here: Ravitch isn't talking about Duke Bradley in particular. As far as we know, she's never met Bradley. What she is talking about is the transparency factor with charter schools. There is no elected school board to make decisions about academics, no central office to handle finances. All curriculum and budget decisions lie with the charter founder.

And as far as academics go, a recent Stanford University study of charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia found that, on the whole, charter schools do not outperform traditional schools.

Now it's too early to say how Mays Prep is doing on the academic front, but the students seem really happy. Second graders Eric Latimer and DeShawn Smallwood were at the failing school, Carver, up until this year. They like Mays Prep a lot better, especially their teacher, Miss Walker.

"She's always gonna let us get our education, and she's gonna let us climb the ladder to college," says Smallwood.

"And she's always helps us on our work if you need help," adds Latimer.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Mays Prep has a sweet playground, "with three slides, swings, monkey bars, tunnels and a lot of more fun stuff," explains Smallwood.

In Detroit, you're going to start seeing more schools like Mays Prep very soon. One school that's coming online in Detroit this fall is University Yes Academy. Agnes Aleobua is the school's founder and principal.

She has to put on a white hardhat to take visitors into the school now. Construction crews are renovating an old Detroit Public Schools building that was closed a few years ago.

"This right here is gonna be the main entrance, it looks like a hole blown through the wall right now," explains Aleobua.

The school is enrolling sixth graders for the fall. It plans to add a grade each year after that through high school.

At an informational meeting, Aleobua spells out the school's mission to prospective parents. She starts by pointing to a pair of numbers projected onto a screen at the front of the room.

"I want to start with this number: 1 in 12," says Aleobua. "I want to ask the audience what you think this ratio refers to, if you had to take a guess."

A couple of people take a stab at it. One parent guesses that it refers to a student-teacher ratio. Another wonders if it's the number of students who go to college.

Aleobua tells them: nice try. But nope.

One in 12 actually refers to the number of children in Detroit that will graduate high school that are in the sixth grade right now. It's about eight percent.

Aleobua says the mission of University Yes Academy is not just to get students through high school. It's to boost the number of low-income Detroit students who graduate from four-year colleges. That means longer school days, mandatory summer school, and homework every night.

University Yes is part of a charter school network based in Houston Texas called YES Prep. Officials there were convinced to come to Detroit after a visit by Governor Granholm and long-time charter school advocate Doug Ross.

"Our pitch is that this is the new frontier. This is ground zero for urban education in America," says Ross.

Ross heads New Urban Learning, which manages a system of charter schools in Detroit. Recruiting YES Prep to come to the city is part of a bigger plan to create enough new charter schools for 25,000 Detroit students by 2019.

And the state-appointed manager of Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb, says he plans to pitch a plan next month that will mean more charters in the school district.

"We are going to present a whole new structure for Detroit Public Schools," says Bobb, which will "eliminate its deficit and create an environment where we allow for more charters, more authorizers to come into our schools system. That's the only way out."

But Bobb says he also recognizes Detroit's political realities, and the fierce opposition to charter schools in some quarters. So he says charters will likely play a smaller role in Detroit than they do in New Orleans.

And there's still a vigorous debate about whether charter schools, on the whole, are really any better than traditional public schools.

We'll take a closer look at that question tomorrow.

To hear other stories in the series "Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities" and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

To see Stanford's national study on charter school performance, click here.

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