In spring 2010, David Pinder, then-principal of McKinley Tech High School, was contemplating a move to Chicago. He found work, and he went to tell then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. But that’s when everything changed.
Some 150 freshmen and sophomores from nearby Shaw Middle School, which was in the process of growing into a high school, showed up on his doorstep. When their principal, Brian Betts, died earlier that spring, it killed the school’s expansion efforts, leaving those students to find a new high school.
“I thought, my God, I can’t turn (these) kids down,” said Pinder, who was speaking at YEP-DC’s inaugural policy-to-practice conference in March. But by doing so, Pinder welcomed a much larger challenge: Most of these kids were in poverty and below basic in math and reading. “I realized that if we were going to move (academics) substantially … we were going to have to actually figure out how to do education differently,” he said.
Some 150 freshmen and sophomores from nearby Shaw Middle School, which was in the process of growing into a high school, showed up on his doorstep. When their principal, Brian Betts, died earlier that spring, it killed the school’s expansion efforts, leaving those students to find a new high school.
“I thought, my God, I can’t turn (these) kids down,” said Pinder, who was speaking at YEP-DC’s inaugural policy-to-practice conference in March. But by doing so, Pinder welcomed a much larger challenge: Most of these kids were in poverty and below basic in math and reading. “I realized that if we were going to move (academics) substantially … we were going to have to actually figure out how to do education differently,” he said.
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