The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

YES Prep’s Next School Director and his “billion dollar” school

February 08, 2010 by Matt Neal

Early in my teaching career – before I’d been exposed to the exhilarating and exhausting world of high-performing urban charter schools – a student of mine asked me what I would do with a billion dollars.  Since I’m not a connoisseur of “bling,” I had to think for a moment, but the answer eventually arrived: “I’d build the best school in the world.”  Little did I know…

Okay, so I don’t have a billion dollars (yet), but I do now have an opportunity – due to the generous trust of YES Prep’s leadership – to build a superlative school.  I still don’t know the neighborhood or the mascot or the names of the 140 sixth-graders who will cross its threshold in August of 2011, but I do know that the 9^th YES Prep school will be a forum for the pursuit of ideas and dreams, a site of investigation and inspiration, a cornerstone of its community, and a nexus of purpose and principle.  I know this because I know such an opportunity is worth more than any pile of cash, and I will honor its value by making the most of it.

My life as a professional educator began at my alma mater, a large public high school in Arizona, where I saw a strong correlation between those teachers whom students respected and those admired by their colleagues.  Eventually hungry for a job further outside my comfort zone, I moved to Massachusetts and took up residence at an ultra-elite boarding academy.  It was a cushy gig: 13 students in a class, free room and board, beautiful facilities, no administrative oversight.  I began to feel, though, that my students didn’t need me; my classroom was a pit-stop along their long-established path to success.  I wanted to work with students at the crossroads, not in the fast lane.

This ambition did not bear fruit immediately, but a series of circumstances brought me to my first just-right job: founding faculty member of KIPP’s first high school.  I am deeply proud of the work my colleagues and I did to lay the groundwork for that special place, and I’m even prouder of the almost 200 KHHS graduates now in college around the country.

After a year overseas helping to build the foundation for a KIPP-inspired school system in the Middle East, I came back to Houston and landed at YES Prep, my current just-right job.  My two years here have convinced me that we’re doing the right thing with the right people, and if we’re very careful and don’t lose sight of the mission, we can continue along that trajectory even as we grow.  I am profoundly honored to have been entrusted with guiding the next step of our journey toward transforming Houston.

It would be easy to say that I wish I’d joined YES Prep right out of college.  That way, I could have avoided the disillusionment of working at my old high school, the alienation attendant to being in but not of the private school world, the frustration of starting a project I wasn’t able to see all the way through.  On further reflection, though, I am quite sure that the readiness YES Prep’s leadership has seen in me is the result of all those prior experiences – especially the ones I wished at the time I could have done without.  Over the next year and a half, as I work with wise mentors inside and outside our organization to design and create the ninth YES Prep school, my efforts will be informed by every triumph and every disappointment I’ve experienced thus far.

When I told that student all those years ago that I’d like to build the best school in the world, I was admittedly being a bit flippant.  It seemed like the right thing to say.  Now, though, with exactly that challenge ahead of me, I am awed by the unique significance of this opportunity.  You can keep your billion dollars.  It can’t buy this.

Matt Neal is a 1998 graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Matt earned his Master’s degree in Teaching & Learning from Harvard’s GSE in 2003.

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