Charter School CEO Means Business

It is fitting that, as the head of Mastery Charter Schools in Pennsylvania, Scott Gordon’s title is chief executive officer: His background in business served as the blueprint for his nontraditional education model.
 
Because of Gordon's successful approach, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan used Mastery Charter School's Shoemaker campus in West Philadelphia as the launching point for his national school tour with the Rev. Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Duncan said that Mastery, with its rigorous college-prep methods and evaluation systems, could become a national model for public schools.

From the beginning, Gordon said, he knew that he wanted to steer away from a school-as-usual approach.

“Traditional education orthodoxies around how high school should function didn’t work for us,” Gordon said. “We wanted something much more organic, similar to the way elementary schools approach curriculum. We became more successful as we became clearer on what needs to be learned, by when and how.”

At Mastery, the goal is simple: Prepare students for college. To reach that goal, Gordon has established a strong curriculum, high standards and a strict behavior code that encourages personal responsibility. Students attend school on Saturdays, learn social skills and sign contracts, pledging to work hard and behave well. Mastery also has a longer school day — 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. — and a longer school year, a move that the Obama administration said it believes will give U.S. students more leverage in the global economy.

"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP last month. "I want to just level the playing field."

To qualify for a piece of the $5 billion in school-improvement and innovation grants from the federal stimulus package, cash-strapped schools across the country have been making changes, such as opening charter schools and implementing teacher pay based on student performance. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, recently signed a bill linking student test scores to teacher evaluations, allowing California to run in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition.

The fact that Gordon stepped into the education arena from the business world gave him a unique perspective. Gordon received an MBA from Yale University, and in the early 1990s, he founded Home Care Associates, a worker-owned home health care company modeled after a program in the Bronx. He said his experience working with adults, mostly high school dropouts, sparked his interest in education reform.