I met Rachel Bennett at a wedding a few weeks ago. We both know the groom, who is a board member of Phoenix Collegiate Academy.
It’s a non-profit, urban charter school, founded by Rachel last summer. It’s located within the Roosevelt School District in south Phoenix.
Rachel spent a couple of years teaching in that district on behalf of Teach for America after earning a degree from Georgetown University, and a masters in Curriculum and Instruction from Arizona State.
She stayed a few more years in the district after finishing her TFA obligation, trying to get on the principal track. She found that door of opportunity closed to her.
So she got to work. She decided to open her own school. She’s 28.

Rachel Bennett, PCA principal shows off a student's Toaster Project
She spent a year training with Building Excellent Schools, a program that immerses promising educators in how to effectively develop urban charter schools.
PCA is the first and only school in Arizona led by a BES alum.
Rachel found a site, hired teachers, and opened PCA last summer, enrolling around 70 sixth graders. She got the word out by knocking on doors in the neighborhood, apartments, trailer parks.
She did all this because she just couldn’t bear sending her students on to a world of mediocrity and low expectations after they’d made so much progress in her classes.
She glimpsed the future. She decided to change it.
At PCA, the talk is all about college. What it’s like, what you have to do to get there, what you have to learn, how hard you have to work, and…that you’re going. Rachel says that for many families, it’s the first time that concept has ever crossed their minds.
You enter PCA through a hallway lined with pennants from colleges all over the U.S.

College is everywhere at PCA
I got there just in time for the all-school morning meeting. The kids line up in the hallway to get ready for their day. They chant the multiplication tables, they sing the states and capitals.

PCA Morning Meeting
One teacher shares a 13 page paper he’s written for a class he’s taking, showing the kids the tiny print and the page where he’s sited sources. “Remember when you had to do that for your papers, too?” he asks the kids. They say yes.
He tells them that for college kids, now, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is like getting ready for the Super Bowl. Finals. He tells them how long it took them to write that paper, and how hard he worked on it.
The students at PCA have plenty of catching up to do. Rachel says that most of the kids, sixth-graders, were reading at a 2nd or 3rd grade level when they started at PCA last August, some were at first grade level. So they work hard, and in order to fit it all in, they have double periods of both English and Math.

PCA kids listening to field trip info
The kids are attentive. They follow the rules and guidelines posted on the walls. They were working quietly when I visited, as they started their day, following the gauge on this sign in the classroom.

PCA Noisemeter: When to talk, when to shhhh.....
The students can arrive as early as 6:30 a.m., and they stay until 4:30 pm. They have enrichment programs after school to balance out the heavy duty academics. My favorite was hearing about the volunteer industrial engineer who brought in some donated toasters and assigned the kids the task of taking them apart, then putting them back together until they operated as toasters once again.

Toaster project
They all did. Then the kids build their own toasters.

The Solar Toaster

Scary Toaster
There are very, very clear rules at this school. A detailed point system with numbers assigned to any infraction is posted in class. It’s a way to make every kid completely accountable for his/her actions. It lends the sense of predictibility and logical consequences that all kids need.

Infractions by the numbers
Students may question any demerit as long as they preface their request with these words:

Rachel received a grant to start PCA from the Walton Family Foundation (think Wal-Mart). She’ll add the seventh grade next year, and by 2015 hopes to be at full capacity, serving students from 6th to 12th grade.
When I met her at the wedding, she told me she just barely made the deadline for listing PCA in the 2010 edition of our Schools, Etc., guide, due out in January. I’m glad she found us!
Two recent studies may offer inconclusive information on just how well public charter schools are serving our children; one that claims they are no better or worse than regular public schools; the other that charter students outperform their peers.
Giving innovative educators like Rachel a shot at refreshing the concept of “school” only exists because of the charter school movement. Imagining a better future for underserved children, thinking outside of the box about learning, and having the courage, herself, to say “I respectfully disagree” are three of the reasons Rachel Bennett is changing lives.
Rachel says she did not take the word “no” very well when she began planning Phoenix Collegiate Academy. Now, she’s teaching her college-bound sixth graders to think only “yes” when they imagine a seamless path to college.