Political Headwinds
Those establishing charter schools must often garner political backing. Agassi and Rogers had to lobby the Nevada legislature to change its charter law so that Agassi Prep could extend the school day. This year, Curry helped launch a political action committee, Democrats for Education Reform, to press for an increase in New York’s limit of 100 charter schools. "What I think eventually strikes any funders of new schools is that they may need to get involved in the political system in a way they maybe hadn’t envisioned initially, because the public school system is where the money and the kids are," he says.

"What I think eventually strikes any funders of new schools is that they may need to get involved in the political system in a way they maybe hadn’t envisioned ..."   — Boykin Curry

Funders also soon discover the need for ample community support. Agassi and Rogers benefited from having already established their philanthropic credentials in Las Vegas. Agassi’s fame generated publicity and helped attract students. Rogers attended numerous town hall meetings to talk face-to-face with parents and residents. "I know a lot of people who would give the money," Agassi says. "It’s a question of how to bring a community together to support the program."

Community opposition to Ross’ recent charter project in Manhattan caused setbacks, although her first project, a fully private school on Long Island, is successful, and her teaching method has been adopted by other schools. She opened the Ross School in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1991 to educate her daughter and one other student. Ross subsequently invested roughly $100 million into that project and a variety of related educational initiatives. She donated 152 acres to create a Ross School campus, complete with an organic garden and a café where students and teachers can dine together. She is training 63 educators this fall at her teaching academy in the Hamptons.

Swedish teachers discovered her methods when a friend of Ross’ ex-husband, Swedish businessman Anders Holst, toured her school. Over the past three years, the city of Stockholm and the Stockholm Education Association have partnered with Ross to implement her methods at Stockholm’s Tensta Gymnasium, where more than 80 percent of the students are immigrants and many are refugees. For Ross, founding a successful private school creates a moral obligation to expand its strategies to public school students. "I wanted to build something that was transformative," she explains, speaking in her Manhattan apartment while attended by her miniature schnauzers, aptly named Apollo and Plato. "Our school is a combination of research and application—more of a think tank."

But Ross’ recent attempts to implement her ideas in New York have gone less smoothly. She wanted to bring a two-year effort to fruition this fall by opening Ross Global Academy, a public charter school, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, sharing a building already occupied by an existing public school, New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math, or NEST. But protests from NEST parents, students and lawmakers, including State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, prompted the New York Department of Education to renege on its space-sharing offer and expel Ross’ school. As Worth went to press in late June, Ross expected the Department of Education to offer the school another space in Lower Manhattan, according to her spokesman, Stuart Fischer. "People say you have so much money you could buy your own building," Ross said before learning of the department’s about-face. "[But] we want to take this to public education and prove it can be done through the system."

The New York City Department of Education, not Ross, originally decided to locate Ross Global Academy in the building with NEST. Start-up charter schools often share facilities with existing schools that are thought to have excess capacity; Curry’s school shares a building with other public schools. Thanks to the pro-charter stance of New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, Ross and Curry are each paying only $1 a year to lease their facilities.