Mike Piscal | View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter School | Brian Taylor | Inner City Education Foundation

Honor Roll
Armed with nothing more than a small wallet and a giant vision, one teacher defied the odds and created three educational crown jewels in L.A.

On a sun-drenched day in Los Angeles's Crenshaw District neighborhood, Mike Piscal steps onto a tidy playground where a group of boisterous kindergartners from View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter School line up to change classrooms. Piscal's sudden appearance turns heads among the students of this charter school. Upon seeing Piscal, the founder and head of the school, the young students respond with smiles and, remarkably - these are kindergartners, after all - virtually in unison, with, "Good morning, Mr. Piscal."

It's a scene that is repeated often during a daylong visit to View Park Prep's elementary, middle, and high schools. Indeed, Piscal, a stocky, garrulous 39-year-old ex-rugby player originally from New Jersey, is a magnet for attention. And not just from the 900-plus students. Whether strolling on the sidewalk or driving the streets between View Park Prep's three campuses, Piscal is continuously recognized in the community, eliciting a stream of friendly honks and waves.

There's good reason for the warm reception. Over the past 12 years, Piscal has built from literally nothing what are now far and away the best-performing schools in all of south Los Angeles. In fact, in 2004, all three View Park Prep schools - which, as charter schools, are public and free but largely independent of the mammoth L.A. Unified School District - all ranked eighth in their grade divisions in the entire state of California, based on student performance on standardized tests. The schools have become so popular that they have more than 4,000 people on a waiting list.

What makes this achievement so compelling is that it has occurred in an area that, to say the least, is not known for its academic prowess. The Crenshaw District and much of the rest of south L.A. are plagued by many of the problems endemic to inner-city America, like gang violence - there were 454 ­­gang-related homicides in the area between 1999 and 2004. Failing schools, too, are the norm: An estimated 7 percent of incoming high school freshmen in south L.A. ultimately end up obtaining a college degree, with 60 percent dropping out without a high school diploma. View Park Prep and its students aren't immune to these troubles, either. A methamphetamine lab once caught on fire across the street from the elementary school, and Piscal has worked with gang leaders to convince them to leave his students alone.

Those problems seem distant, though, as Piscal drops in unannounced on a series of classrooms. At the kindergarten, children reach their arms high over their heads when asked who wants to show how well he or she can read. At the newly opened permanent campuses for the middle school and high school, students lead discussions about why kids join gangs. In each room, students appear focused and engaged. "This is like an oasis," says Rev. Timm Cyrus, pastor of the Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church and a longtime supporter of Piscal's efforts at View Park Prep. "It's a quiet, comfortable, tucked-away place amid a sprawling, concrete, asphalt jungle."

A BIG DREAM

The impulse that led to the founding of View Park Prep occurred not far geographically from where Piscal now spends his days but a literal world away in most other ways. In the early 1990s, after graduating from Wake Forest University, Piscal was teaching English at one of L.A.'s most prestigious prep schools, Harvard-Westlake. He was well liked and spent his first few years soaking up all he could about effective teaching techniques and how a good school is run.

Exceedingly proud of his school, Piscal invited some friends of his who were teaching in the inner city to come see a student play. Not just any play, either, but a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed on Rollerblades and counting Tori Spelling, who was then a student, among the cast. The audience was studded with celebrities, including Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, and Meryl Streep. After the play, Piscal smilingly approached his friends to bask in their compliments. "They said, 'Mike, we're about to throw up,' " he recalls. Rather than being impressed, his friends were stunned, even appalled, by the obvious expense that had gone into the production - it cost $150,000 - particularly when they compared it with the struggle their school endured to provide basic supplies and materials.

Their reaction prompted Piscal to question what he was doing with his life. Then, after the L.A. riots in 1992, he had an epiphany. "I've learned so much, and it's been a blast here, but I don't think Meryl Streep's kids need me anymore. I think Spielberg's kids will get by without Mike Piscal in their lives," he decided. He resolved to make a dramatic change. "I'm going to open a ­Harvard-Westlake­ in the hood," he proclaimed.

By his own admission, Piscal was clueless when he first founded the Inner City Education Foundation, the nonprofit organization that runs the View Park Prep schools. Not surprisingly, he floundered the first two years, between 1994 and 1996, as he tried to raise money, find facilities, recruit board members, write a business plan, and do all the necessary legal work. Money was always tight. Approaching foundations and potential financiers always yielded the same answer, recalls Stephen C. Smith, the chairman of the Inner City Education Foundation. "It's like when a company starts out and nobody wants to give them money because they're not successful yet," says Smith, who is a cofounder of the Seaport Group, an investment company. "As soon as you're successful, everyone wants to give you money."

Instead, Piscal had to rely on friends, family, and his credit cards to finance his dream. In order to get higher credit limits, he would fill out credit card applications saying he was a writer and a director of movies and was earning a projected $500,000 a year. He racked up more than $40,000 in credit card debt, was evicted from several apartments for failing to pay rent, and later landed in the hospital with serious heart troubles, the result of enormous stress and endless 16-hour workdays. Finally, in 1996, he was set to launch a summer camp and after-school program in the Crenshaw District. With the last $2,000 he could scrounge up, Piscal took out an ad in a local newspaper announcing his grand venture, what he saw as the first step to opening a school. The result: Seven kids showed up on the first day. "All this - two years - for seven kids," he recalls.

Still, Piscal did what came naturally: He persisted. Word soon spread that his summer program was good, and more kids ­started showing up. A natural storyteller and a persuasive salesman, Piscal - who, in the early days did everything from transporting the kids in his Ford Probe to cooking (and usually burning) their lunches - ultimately convinced many in the community that they could, in fact, have a private-school-quality institution in their neighborhood. "Mike is very charismatic. He's a person that is big: He dreams big, he thinks big, and he wants things to be big," says Carolyn Bain, who worked closely with Piscal early on and remains an assistant at View Park Prep. "We all caught on to that."

With growing community support and popularity, Piscal applied for and received the necessary charter to open up View Park Prep Elementary school in 1999; the middle school followed in 2001, and the high school in 2003. Next year, View Park Prep will graduate its first senior high school class. Besides receiving funding from the school district for each pupil, the Inner City Education Foundation, flush with its academic successes, now has backing from a wide range of philanthropies, including Michael and Susan Dell's family foundation, the New Schools Venture Fund, and numerous other foundations.

A BRIGHT FUTURE

It was never Piscal’s dream to simply open a school; this was a place, he vowed early on, that would offer the most disadvantaged kids a route to college and a bright future. There are reminders of that mission everywhere you go at View Park Prep. Pennants from Ivy League and other top schools adorn a wall on the second floor of the high school. And, in case there is any doubt, posters spell out what is expected: “All students will attend and compete academically at the top 100 colleges and universities in the nation.”

These are not empty words, insists Brian Taylor, the principal of the middle school. “I think that is where it begins, knowing we have high expectations,” says Taylor, a former pro basketball player whom Piscal lured to View Park Prep from Harvard-Westlake in 2002. “We also have a belief that our kids are gifted, and it’s for us to bring those gifts out.” Students at all levels are pushed hard, with teachers tasked with gearing lessons to the skills of the top-performing kids. Students who fall behind are given an abundance of extra help but are still expected to bear down and keep up.

It’s a philosophy that can be jarring for new students. “They never tried, they never believed, nobody ever pushed them,” says Piscal. “Nobody ever believed in them. We just kept pushing and pushing.”

Piscal, too, is pushing forward. Not just satisfied with the three View Park Prep campuses, he has plans to open up many more schools, all with the purpose of providing a good education to kids who have been ignored in the past. Whatever the odds, Taylor suggests that it’s unwise to bet against Piscal. “It would be different if he talked a lot and didn’t do anything. But he’s a doer,” says Taylor. “He talks, but he also acts.”