This is StudyBuddy's new virtual nook where we pour out a cuppa and curl up with a good book. This one's called Crazy Like a Fox. It reads like a whodunit, but it's the true story of an Oakland public school that was a mess: truancy, dope, crime, alienation of the neighbors, etc. In eight years it became one of the best schools in the country.

It's a charter school, independent of the detailed rules of the district, but it's supported by tax dollars. Its charter can be revoked by the district at any time. Chavis calls his model AIM-Ed. The AIM acronym is borrowed from the local American Indian Movement in the 1960's. What he means by AIM-Ed has the following components: structure, accountability, family-involvement, and high expectations. The acronym and its components are displayed prominently at the school.

The school was founded in 1996 and was "doomed from the start" according to Chavis, because it was a white liberal idea of what to offer Native American kids: a friendship circle to start the day, no rules, lots of freedom, and classes in drumming and beadwork.

In 2000, in response to complaints from the neighbors, Oakland Unified School District was about to shut it down.

In March of that year, at his faculty office in the Department of Education at the University of Arizona, Chavis learned of this when a Native American friend at the Office of Indian Education of OUSF called: she said he should come see what he could do. He did decide to come and see, and he did.

It was a mess. He was willing to try to turn it around, if the Board would grant him carte blanche for 60 days. He told them by then he'd be able to tell them what would be needed to turn it into a high performing school. Because they didn't have a better choice, he got what he wanted.

He fired all but one of the staff. The one he kept ran a strong program in math and science. He hired another math and science teacher and an administrative assistant. He closed the high school to focus on the middle school and build a strong academic culture among the young ones. Each teacher would teach all subjects, with no rotations.

Then Chavis went door to door among the neighbors, hearing their concerns, promising relief o f the problems the kids had caused. He made the students enter and leave school from the front door only: it made it easier to cut down on noise and trash impacting the neighborhood. He announced that any kid who wanted to earn a dollar could come Saturday and help him pick up trash around the school. He hired a Navajo friend to patch and paint the walls of the school, and he repaired and cleaned the bathrooms himself.

He had one sympathetic voice on the school board, and he needed at least two. He issued an invitation to all school board members to come and see the school. One of them accepted the invitation, a young female African-American lawyer who arrived on a skateboard. She didn't comment on any of the improvements he showed her on a tour. Before she left, she promised only that she was not going to vote to shut him down.

When he met with the Board, he told them what he had done so far to start the process of turning the school around. Then he said that if they'd let him stay open for a year and he did not bring up attendance and test scores, he'd give back half his salary. So that's the deal he got.

On the first day of the 2000 – 2001 school year, thirty students showed up. For anything more to happen, he had to keep them coming to school. At the first all-student assembly, Chavis announced that any student with perfect attendance for the year would win a free trip to Disneyland. Then he spent some time each day with the dope dealers who hung out on the corner. As he got to know them, he offered a money-making deal: anybody who saw his school kids hanging out on the street could get a five-dollar bill just by bringing the kid to the school office. He even decided to bring some of them and introduce them at an all-school assembly: that way, the kids knew he even had eyes on the street.

Throughout the book, while he's telling the story of the school, Chavis tells us his own early history. He's from a poor family of Lummee Indians in North Carolina that knew both hard work and a lot of family closeness. He says he would never have gone to school every day as a kid, except for a third grade teacher who offered three dollars at the end of the year to any kid who'd had a year of perfect attendance. He had to raise the amount some, but he made the same offer to his student body in Oakland. At the end of the school year, overall attendance was at 95%.

That first year was all about surviving. He did prove attendance was up; now he had to prove test scores were getting better, and more kids were functioning at or above grade level. The first year, most students were Native American, Hispanic, or Black. The next year some Chinese came; and after that, some whites

Having the kids stay in one classroom all day really helped with this. Their teacher got to know them really well, and no time was wasted moving between classes. The day ran from 8:30 to 3:00, with lunch hour in the middle. Each grade had 90 minutes of English and 90 minutes of math every day. Kids brought lunch, or did without.

The model is being replicated in the high school re-established in 2006 and in two other middle schools; and that's the best test for success of any model for change. In the 2007-2008 school year, it outranked Lowell.*

*San Jose Mercury News September 5, 2008