Born to Rise

A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential

Deborah Kenny

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780062106209
• eBook ISBN: 9780062106223
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

“Parents and principals trying to understand what makes successful schools work ought to read Born to Rise.”  — New York Times

Born to Rise is the inspiring account of Deborah Kenny’s pursuit of social justice for our nation’s most vulnerable children. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is a hopeful and practical exposition of what it takes to transform schools and create organizations where the staff lights up with entrepreneurial drive. 

Students enter Harlem Village Academies, the network of charter schools Kenny founded, several years behind grade level, but in just a few years they are transformed, ranking among the highest in the nation. How did they do it? For the first time, Kenny reveals the secret to creating a powerful workplace culture that attracts the most talented people and brings out their passion and highest performance—a culture that produces stunning student achievement results and teachers who regularly use words like “magical” to describe the workplace environment. It is a must-read for anyone who cares about children and the future of this country and for leaders who want to inspire fierce dedication in their employees.

Chapter 1

Searching

“Okay, ready for your three clues?” he asked. “This country starts with a V and it’s in South America. The capital is Caracas and the people speak Spanish.”

It was another round of “Kenny family geography,” a game my husband, Joel, had invented to keep our three young kids busy during car rides.

“That’s four clues!” shouted Rachel, our youngest, then age six.

“The first letter of the country doesn’t count,” our eight-year-old, Chava, stated firmly. “We get that for free.”

“It’s Venzulia!” fired Avi, nine, and very much the oldest.

“Nice try, Av,” said Joel from behind the wheel. “You’re close.”

“Trust me, Dad, it’s Venzulia,” Avi repeated emphatically.

Suddenly we heard a lot of shrieking and giggling as our three children began another game they liked even better. They called it “boxing,” but they were actually just playfully hitting each other.

“Knock it off!” Joel said, grinning. “Avi, I told you that you’re close. Think about it.”

“Dad, I’m going to ask you one last time. Is it Venzulia?”

Joel and I burst out laughing.

It was a golden Sunday in June of 1998, and we were headed to a science museum in Connecticut. The kids had been looking forward to this trip for weeks. They’d been eager to see the exhibit about marine biology ever since we’d rented a video about whales the month before.

We zipped north along the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester, New York—just twenty more minutes, I told the kids—when Joel said he felt a bit dizzy. We figured it was the flu.

But the next morning Joel felt even fainter—strange for a guy who never complained and never got sick—so I drove him to a doctor, just to check.

The doctor ran a few blood tests and said he’d be back shortly with the results. A half hour went by. Then a full hour.

Finally, the doctor came back into the room. “I don’t want to alarm you,” he said softly, “but this could be serious. Joel, there is a chance you have a leukemic condition.”

He tried to keep us calm. “Nothing is definite yet. But you need to have a spinal tap.”

We drove back home and I started making calls to figure out what to do. As I arranged an appointment for the next day, Joel lay very still on the bed staring at the ceiling. Just looking at him, so silent and scared, devastated me. But I tried not to let that show. “The tests will come back negative,” I said, holding his hand. “All of this will be over tomorrow.”

That night, it was impossible to sleep. I spent the dark hours before sunrise praying silently, asking God to protect Joel.

The next morning we drove to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan for the spinal tap. It was an excruciating procedure, but it was the only way to figure out exactly what was wrong, and it had to be done immediately. I sat by his side as we breathed together the whole time, holding hands. When it was finally done, we expected to go home. Instead, the specialist sent us to the third floor.

Joel and I didn’t acknowledge the two words that accosted us when we stepped off the elevator: “Oncology Unit.” As we waited in an empty room, I was petrified but I buried that feeling. Instead, I tried to distract Joel with questions about his dissertation and he tried to distract me with jokes.

Suddenly, some ten doctors, nurses, and residents swarmed the room. I stopped breathing. The doctor looked straight into our eyes, and spoke immediately: “I’m sorry, Joel. You have leukemia.”

Joel was the person in the world I most admired, one of those rare individuals born to a higher purpose. I was enchanted by him from the moment we met.

I was twenty-four years old and had just ended a relationship with a Harvard law student who was smart, ambitious, and good-looking. But I hadn’t connected with him on a deep level. I was hoping to meet someone with soul.

Within half an hour of our first date, Joel and I were discussing spirituality. As we walked around Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, I learned that he played guitar, loved nature, painted, and was a Dallas Cowboys fan. The four Kenny brothers, he explained, played football almost every day in their backyard as kids, and they never missed a Cowboys game.

Joel, quiet but confident, was not intimidated by me. His mother, Shirley, was a college president who had worked full-time as an English professor while raising five children in McLean, Virginia, with Joel’s father, a history professor.

In between our dates, he wrote me love letters with pink hearts hand-drawn in colored pencil on the envelopes. Before long we started talking about the future. He told me about his desire to teach, to write books, to have a big family, and to compose his own music. I was falling in love.

Like me, Joel had studied religion and philosophy in college. I’d never been with another person who thought debating the nature of Truth was an ideal way to spend a Saturday night.

For as far back as I can remember, I’d been this way. In high school, my parents worried that I was too serious. They encouraged me to try more activities, to lighten up, to “be well rounded.” My response was to write an editorial—“The Myth of the Well Rounded Child”—in the school newspaper, in which I argued that it was more valuable to pursue one thing intensely than to participate in a wide variety of school activities.

I didn’t fit into any clique, and I didn’t care much about being popular. I spent prom night with Sara, one of my best friends, talking in her kitchen and eating tuna melts.

The summer camp Sara and I attended was a welcome change from the superficiality of high school. While the kids loved to socialize and have fun, it was the kind of place where it was cool to be smart and everyone fit in. The camp was dedicated to Jewish values and social justice. The chorus of our camp song was “You and I will change the world”—and everyone actually believed it, including me. It was bliss.

It was at camp where I met the teacher who would change my life: Mel Reisfeld. He was an extraordinary and often irreverent educator, and for many decades the camp’s heart and soul. He was the coolest adult we kids had ever met. Mel could captivate hundreds of campers and counselors for hours with lectures about history, heritage, and social justice. My favorite stories were about his activism—how in 1963, he got in a car with a friend and two students and drove to D.C. for the March on Washington to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; how he led efforts to raise funds for Biafra when Africans were starving; how he had helped organize one of the very first walkathons for the March of Dimes; and how he joined in protests to support farm labor leader César Chávez. “We have to care about people,” he would always say. Mel also loved to provoke us. One night at dinner he gave eight of us the following challenge: “How many of you know how to say ‘fuck’ in another language?” We tried to impress him with our linguistic skills for the next hour.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his irreverence, Mel was a role model for the other counselors, many of whom had been activists in the 1960s. They were all, like Mel, independent thinkers who challenged societal norms. I related to their worldview: challenging the establishment made immediate sense to me.

One of my camp counselors introduced me to brown rice, juice fasting, and yoga. My mother was beside herself when at age fourteen I decided to become a vegetarian. “What about protein?” she worried. “The idea that protein is more important than other nutrients is a myth perpetuated by the meat and dairy industries,” I assured her. This was the late 1970s, when “health food” was considered bizarre. I didn’t care that everyone thought I was a bit nuts.

By junior year of high school, I felt even more disconnected from my peers. The pursuit of success seemed trivial to me. Instead, I was drawn to the discussions I’d had at camp about religion and social justice. I started keeping a journal and collecting quotes that inspired me. “A shallow mind is a sin, a person who does not struggle is a fool,” I copied down from Chaim Potok’s book In the Beginning.

And in my senior year I started writing down the questions that were on my mind: What is the meaning of life? Being happy is great, but is being happy a purpose in and of itself? What’s my plan for the future? I’ll pick a major to get a job to work my way up, to get a better job to be promoted to . . . then what? In twenty years I’ll be exactly where I am now, wondering what it was all for. What’s my ultimate purpose?

My mom threw a big party for my high school graduation. In our living room with a house full of family and friends she recited a poem that she had written in my honor. “If a woman does not keep pace with her companions,” it started, “perhaps it is because she hears a different drummer.” I felt lucky to have such supportive parents.

At the University of Pennsylvania, I spent a lot of time at coffee shops, stacks of books piled before me, talking late into the night with friends about the meaning of life. Early freshman year, I had discovered Rainer Maria Rilke. I must have read Letters to a Young Poet a hundred times. “Nobody can counsel and help you—no one. There is only one single way,” Rilke wrote. “Go into yourself. Search . . . Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out true, if you meet this solemn question with a strong and simple, ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity. Your whole life, even into its slightest and most indifferent hour, must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.” What would my life be a testimony to, I wondered.

My advisor allowed me to craft an independent major that enabled me to explore comparative religion, literature, and philosophy—and I was thrilled. My father wasn’t. He’d been pushing the doctor/lawyer track since I was in grade school. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Open a philosophy store?”

I had no idea what I’d do with it, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to find answers to my questions.

My favorite course was American Intellectual History. It was listed as a senior seminar, limited to twelve students. I was a sophomore when I walked into the room, and it was overflowing with almost fifty students, standing in every corner, some huddled near the door.

“I’m so sorry,” the professor said, “but we are oversubscribed. Will everyone who is a junior please raise your hand.” Some twenty students raised their hands, and the professor apologetically asked them to come back the next year. He then asked any of the remaining seniors who were not fully committed to consider leaving, and another dozen walked out of the room. Fifteen students remained, including me.

“The course structure will be the same each week,” he said. “You will read a book and write a paper grappling with the author’s ideas. When you arrive to class, be prepared to defend your understanding of the text. You will be called on.”

I knew that it would not be long before the professor looked at his roster and discovered that I was a sophomore. But I was dying to study the works of great American thinkers like Thoreau, Emerson, and the other Transcendentalists. I admired their rebellion against the intellectual establishment of their time and I was fascinated by their idealistic spiritual quest. Emerson had written about the “endless inquiry of the intellect”—I had to be in this class!

So I spent fifteen hours writing a paper that week, and made an appointment to meet with the professor.

“I asked to see you because I want to let you know that I am a sophomore,” I admitted in his office. “Even though you didn’t require a paper this first week, I wrote one to show you how committed I am, how much I want to take this course.” He told me I could stay that day, and he would make a final decision the following week.

When I arrived the next week, the professor handed me back my unrequired paper. On the front was a red C-. “You can stay,” he said. “But do better next time.” I was in heaven.

I spent many evenings in the library. One Sunday as I was walking along the brick path from my dorm to the library I stopped right in the middle of campus and wondered: if I were able to read every book in the library, would I then understand Truth?

On weekends I’d end up in long conversations in dorm rooms with other students, but I spent much more time with adults: my Shakespeare professor, the campus rabbi, my dorm advisor Dr. Martin Seligman. And with a grad student I’d met at the only health food store on campus who told me that Ram Dass, the counterculture icon and author of Be Here Now, was coming to Philadelphia.

Ram Dass, originally named Richard Alpert, had been a prominent Harvard professor when he experimented with LSD in the early 1960s with Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. Though he justified it as research into the nature of human consciousness, Harvard kicked him out—and countless ki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Searching
• Chapter 2: What Life Expects
• Chapter 3: People, Not Product
• Chapter 4: Providence
• Chapter 5: A School for My Children
• Chapter 6: Down to the Wire
• Chapter 7: Startup
• Chapter 8: Rock Stars
• Chapter 9: The Path to Justice
• Chapter 10: Drowning
• Chapter 11: My Child Is a Child Again
• Chapter 12: I Used to Throw My Books Away
• Chapter 13: People and Culture
• Chapter 14: Scenes from a Revolution
• Chapter 15: Be the Culture
• Chapter 16: Born to Rise
• Epilogue: The Education Manifesto
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher