Starting your own school isn’t easy. Beyond having a good idea, you need ingenuity, nimbleness, patience, tolerance for risk-taking, flexibility, and courage. Oh, and a bit of chutzpah helps, too.

A look at a few Ed School graduates who have tried to start their own.

A year into planning for the school he wanted to establish, David Silver, Ed.M.’01, was despondent. Two teachers he’d lined up had quit. He still didn’t have a building, and he had discovered, to his dismay, how much he needed to learn about managing people.

Quite frankly, Silver wanted to give up. He was ready to call it quits on creating an elementary school in an impoverished Oakland, Calif., neighborhood called Fruitvale, where 70 percent of the students were English language learners and more than 90 percent came from lowincome families.

But Silver, then 29, persevered, determined to create an elementary school with strong family involvement and collaboration between teachers and community, all united around the vision that every student would one day go to college. The Think College Now Elementary School opened to great acclaim in the fall of 2003, yet by the end of its first year, just 8 percent of his students were proficient in English language arts, 23 percent in math. Achievement was slow to rise, despite Silver’s best intentions. Then he engineered a major shift in the school’s approach, and by 2008, proficiency had risen to 54 percent in English, and more than 63 percent in math. Silver is expecting increased achievement in 2009.

“When I started the school, I thought that the kids would do well if everybody was working together and passionate with a common vision,” recalls Silver, now 36 and the school’s principal. “But we realized we needed to get our assessments aligned with California standards and use data from those tests to inform our instruction. We were focused on process and details instead of people and outcomes. Now we are getting results.”

For Silver, those results validate his decision in the late 1990s to look beyond the strictures of traditional American classrooms and dream boldly about what could be done to reach low-income minority children struggling to make the grade. He quickly realized that starting a new school took much more than a good idea. He also needed ingenuity, nimbleness, patience, tolerance for risk-taking, flexibility, courage, and a healthy dollop of stubbornness. Those qualities — and more — were needed to develop curriculum, find a building, drum up community support, and convince policymakers that his vision deserved support.

Silver opened his school at a time in the history of American education when innovators could get traction for their dreams, with support from private foundations, state governments, local boards of education, and graduate programs like those at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Many of these new schools are focused on solving one of our society’s most intractable problems: how to close the achievement gap between low-income minority students in our nation’s inner cities and their white middle- and upper-class contemporaries in the suburbs.