With a Hefty Education Grant Come Equally Great Expectations

Although some kids show up academically prepared, most arrive at the high school two to six grades behind. Some struggle with basic arithmetic or with writing a paragraph. Chavez seeks to help them catch up.

Three years at Chavez changed the life of Moises Flores, 22, a Nicaraguan immigrant. "I finally realized that I could do something," he said. "I could learn, and I could excel." He graduated in May from American University and is headed for law school.

Salcido, 44, an elegant and dark-eyed woman, knows the obstacles Flores overcame only too well. She moved to the United States from Mexico at age 15 knowing almost no English. To get through high school, she memorized passages from textbooks. It took her more than a decade to get through college and graduate school.

With her life experience and vision, Salcido has proven adept at attracting students. Her flagship campus moved three times in eight years to accommodate growth, settling on Capitol Hill; a second campus with a combined middle school and high school opened east of the Anacostia River last fall. Enrollment is now more than 1,100.

However, test scores have been just slightly better than the mediocre citywide average; the latest test data show one-quarter of Chavez students were proficient in math and one-third in reading. Just as worrisome, many students leave the school after their freshman year.

Salcido reached out to the Gates Foundation in 2004 through an official she knew there, education program director Jim Shelton, who arranged for Melinda Gates to tour the school that year. (Like Buffett, Melinda Gates serves on the board of The Washington Post Co.)

Salcido said she begged the foundation for help. "This is the time to make the investment," Salcido told Shelton last year, "not later when we make mistakes."

The pitch worked. The foundation dispatched program officer Andrew Smiles to help Salcido put together a proposal.

After prowling around the Capitol Hill campus, Smiles liked much of what he saw. Girls in bracelet-size hoop earrings and boys in baggy jeans walked past hand-lettered posters listing the grade-point averages of top students. Like the tail of a kite, sheets of paper lined a hall with the names of graduating seniors and the colleges to which they had been accepted. Bates, Penn State, Howard, the University of Maryland -- every Chavez graduate has been accepted to college, according to the school.

Many teachers were former policy wonks with Ivy League degrees. Smiles also saw promise in the public policy-oriented focus that linked coursework to the world at large. The school fit with the Gates "three R's" approach: rigor, relevance and relationships.

But some classes weren't as rigorous as they could be, Smiles concluded, and inexperienced teachers didn't know how to push kids to do more than recite answers by rote.

In a few weeks, he and Chavez administrators hammered out a 30-page plan with 11 target actions, known as "deliverables," in exchange for foundation support to fix problems and add two campuses. Most of the Gates money would come toward the end of a five-year grant. The deliverables included strengthening the curriculum, training teachers, drawing up more detailed budgets and taking steps to reduce student attrition. Nearly a quarter of the freshman class, Smiles discovered, had disappeared by the time their sophomore year began.