Educators That Rock!:Josie Carbone
Josie Carbone, founding principal of Girls Prep Bronx.
Josie Carbone, the founding principal of Girls Prep Bronx, an all-girls charter school for pre-K through first-grade students in the Bronx, New York, got involved in teaching while volunteering to teach Spanish at a local elementary school during high school. After graduating from college in 1997, she worked with Teach For America in New York. Carbone taught for six more years before becoming involved with the New York charter school movement in 2003.
fE: Why did you choose teaching?
JC: The main reason I chose teaching was because I felt that there is a real disparity in this country between who has access [to good schools] and who doesn’t.
My parents are immigrants. My mother had an elementary school education. My father was unable to go to college, because he had to make some decisions to help support the family. But all through my childhood, no matter where we moved, he always sought out areas where the public schools were strong. And so the message that education is important is something that has been instilled in me since I was very young.
fE: What was the process of opening a charter school like?
JC: I spent months and months interviewing teachers and having them do demonstration lessons. And we had to find the space, figure out what kind of furniture we needed and what materials teachers needed. And do all of that ordering and negotiating.
August 10 was when my staff all reported. We did a three-week intensive summer institute with them. The first two weeks were really just [focused on] professional development and team building. We wanted to make sure that we had consistent school-wide routines and procedures.
In the third week, teachers started doing home visits, because that’s part of the [Girls Prep] model. We really believe that families are a key factor in students’ success and parents are a child’s first teachers. So before we ask parents to come in and sit down in our school building, we ask them if we can come and meet with them in their space and learn from them about helping their daughters be successful.
fE: Because your school is a charter school you have more freedom with the classes you teach. How are your classes different from traditional public schools and what else do you do differently?
JC: Our day is longer. Our girls go from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Monday through Thursday, and on Friday we dismiss them at 1:40 p.m.
Everyday the girls either have dance, music, visual arts, yoga or physical education. And our mornings are broken up so that every girl receives small group reading instruction for 45 minutes. And the way that we do that is we take half of each kindergarten class and they go off to phys-ed, and the other half remains in the room and gets split up into two groups between the lead teacher and the assistant teacher.
Our results at the Lower East Side [Girls’ Prep] show that students are making great gains, even looking at the first round of assessments that we did when they first started in September, because every single day they’re getting small group attention.
fE: There’s a lot of conflicting research that says boys and girls learn in different ways. With that in mind, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being in an all-girls school?
JC: What we really are committed to is figuring out how each individual student best succeeds. So you’ll walk into a classroom and you’ll see that everybody’s sitting on the rug, but one girl has a special seat that she can go to and sit in when she’s feeling restless. We’re much more focused on who each kid is and what each kid needs.
I’ve read research that says that there are chemical and biological reasons why boys excel at math and science and girls don’t. I actually believe it’s much more about how we’re teaching them. It could be that the way that math and science is traditionally taught meets more boys’ needs than girls’ needs.
Our hope is that by the time our girls get to fourth and fifth grade they don’t have that block about not seeing themselves as mathematicians and scientists.
fE: What plans do you have for next school year?
JC: Next year we’ll have second grade. Each year we’re going to be adding a grade. And like our school on the Lower East Side, which is the school that we’re modeled after, once the girls hit third grade, they’ll start studying a second language.
fE: What advice would you have for any principal starting a charter school?
JC: Be really clear on your criteria for hiring and what you’re looking for in a teaching staff, because the best thing you can do is hire your staff very well, so that they’re aligned with the mission and the vision. I fully believe that teacher quality is the number one factor in student achievement, and so spending the time on hiring is well worth it.
