We could not do the work of using education as a platform for liberation without the deep support of our parents. They are our most important and most knowledgeable partners in this work. And, we deeply value the two-way...
Tag - Mastery Charter-Shoemaker Campus
This is our school community’s thirteenth year serving students as a turnaround neighborhood charter school. Our turnaround school, used to be the second most dangerous school in the city, if not the state. I attended Shoemaker...
Mastery Charter School – Shoemaker Campus. The Class of 2018. Our 8th graduating class at our turnaround charter school. While Shoemaker used to be second most violent school in Philadelphia, and likely Pennsylvania, today...
Freedom fighting heroes come in all ages. At Mastery-Shoemaker, we have been blessed to have several students who lead and serve in their communities on a consistent basis—in small and huge ways. Recently, one of our students...
Below is an interview with Mastery’s African-American history teacher, Ms. Abigail Henry. In lieu of class one day, she took the freshmen class to see Marvel’s “Black Panther.” We discuss why she chose to include Black...
While students across the country are gearing up to conduct a 17-minute walkout to highlight the seventeen students who were murdered at Parkland High School, other students, including many of my own, are hesitant to demonstrate...
Everyone has a “why.” It informs their motivations, their purpose, their drive and commitments. When you work on behalf of children and in service of communities, your “why” is crucial. As in why did you...
This blog was originally written by Joshua Starr, CEO of PDK International, and published on Chalkbeat. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Sharif El-Mekki, the principal of a Mastery Charter School campus in...
I was recently honored to receive an award, the prestigious Escalante-Gradillas award, that represented an opportunity to celebrate the work of our entire school community. Here is an excerpt from Dan Edelen’s article where...
I write for my life Louis Armstrong wrote “my only sin is my skin.” My only sin is my pen. I wrote for my soul and for us all. -Dr. Sonia Sanchez We are only recently emerging from an age where schools cut the arts and...