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Johnson, a Little Rock native, came to the Arkansas side of the Delta in 2003 with Teach For America. Like many corps members, she had no intention of staying; she planned to go on to law school. But in TFA summer training she met her future husband, who wanted to live in and help improve his home state of Mississippi. And she felt comfortable in the Delta in a way most of her TFA peers did not. Her father knew people in her district; she was close enough to her college in Memphis to drive back for church. Because she is African American, like most of the residents, “no one knew I was Teach For America,” she said. She liked the people and the culture and the history. “There’s a lot of greatness that’s here that I want to be a part of and help grow and support,” she said.
Johnson didn’t like what felt like apathy and inertia among some leaders in the Arkansas public district, or how higher-ups shut down her ideas. After TFA, she joined the KIPP charter network at KIPP Delta in Helena, Arkansas; when the network opened an elementary school, she became its leader. KIPP’s regimented ways aren’t for everyone, but Johnson fell in love with the organization’s college-prep focus and refusal to let poverty dictate outcomes. “They very much believe that kids should have options and all kids can achieve at high levels and that we should help kids do that,” she said.
As Johnson settled in Clarksdale in 2010, the reasons for her to do that work in her adopted hometown multiplied. Living 40 minutes away from the school she led, she felt less connected to the students. While some teachers don’t like running into families at Walmart, she said, “I love it and so wanted that again.” Johnson and her husband began thinking about where their older daughter, Lorelei, would go to kindergarten. Some of the local elementary schools fared well individually on state rankings, and Johnson had the know-how to identify the best teachers. However, she believed that high school failure rates showed that the lower schools weren’t getting it done. And she kept thinking about other kids, who didn’t have the benefit of parents who knew how to advocate for them. Her husband, Sanford Johnson, co-founded Mississippi First in 2008, advocating for better education, including pre-K, for a sexual health curriculum that went beyond abstinence — and charter schools. When Mississippi’s legislature voted in 2016 to let students cross district lines to attend charter schools, she was ready.
Clarksdale Collegiate would be “unapologetically college preparatory,” she wrote in her application. She incorporated elements that were familiar in charter-heavy places like Detroit and Memphis but new in Clarksdale, such as decking the hallways with college pennants, illustrations of the school’s core values and graphs of scholars’ academic progress, including the number of words each grade had read as tracked by Accelerated Reader, one of the school’s educational software programs.Johnson began working her connections, and her low-key magnetism worked wonders. First, she got a fellowship with Building Excellent Schools, a charter leadership incubator. Using the program’s resources, Johnson planned Clarksdale Collegiate down to the smallest detail as she tackled the Mississippi charter school application process.
Johnson planned an extended, highly structured day, more than eight hours, with 75-minute blocks of math — even for kindergarteners — and literacy rotations for two hours at a stretch. The year ran almost three weeks longer than that of the district. Clarksdale Collegiate would be lightning-focused on metrics and testing even though the official state tests on which its renewal would hang didn’t start until the third grade. Best internationsl Schools in Kumbakonam
Every child would have access to a laptop loaded with software for phonics and numeracy, because Johnson believed children needed a lot of practice in these areas. The computer time also let teachers spend more time working with small groups so they could see, precisely, which elements each student understood. They would have science and social studies, because you can’t read if you don’t know anything about the world, she said. Johnson wrapped all that hard work in co-curricular extras like recess, art, music and physical education, plus regular “field lessons” in which children — some of whom had never been past the Clarksdale Walmart — travelled as far as Memphis and Jackson. The uniforms would be purple and gold, connoting royalty (and avoiding duplicating the colors of city schools).
Halfway through the year, parents had embraced the intensity. At report card night in February, a kindergartener danced with a stuffed unicorn as her mother frowned at her data binder.Her desk would be in the hall. Johnson had no intention of giving up retying kindergarteners’ shoes and ducking into classrooms just because she also had to manage federal programs and IT. And everything would be done with urgency — a trait she observed at the charter schools she thought were most successful, places like Nashville Classical. There was no time to waste. “Kids don’t do well K through fourth and then start failing in fifth grade,” Johnson said. “What we’re doing now matters.”
“I think this is great,” kindergarten teacher Latasha Capers said.
“It’s great, but it can be exceptional,” the mom said.
Capers pressed, pointing to the girl’s pre-reading scores: “She’s already scored a 50, and for kindergarten we want a 10 to 12.”
The mom looked unconvinced.
“Everything we’ve done in here she’s mastered,” Capers persisted.
Finally, the mom let her pride in her daughter show. “She’ll get home and she’ll read a book,” she said.
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