In an Ivy League town, a charter school makes strides in
academics, with a touch of chess.


By Maria Newman
Stephan Gerzadowicz, master chess player, likes to lace his lessons with
maxims that sound like advice about life in general -- for instance, ''The
easiest way you defend a pawn is with another pawn, and then you can get on
with your life.''

Mr. G., as students call him, holds forth daily at the Princeton Charter
School, where he began teaching chess this year. So quickly have students
taken to the game that the school is sending five to the National Elementary
Chess Competition in Phoenix from May 14 to 16. But championships are not why
the school requires chess. The goal is for children to learn to think
logically and sequentially, skills that can help in other subjects.

''This is potentially one of the best communities in the country for chess,''
Mr. Gerzadowicz said. ''If you take a bunch of kids in a community with a
gene pool like this and give them a chess set and make them stay quiet for an
hour a day, they're going to get better at the game. And this is going to
help them in math and reading.''

In Princeton, home to the Ivy League university and several research
institutions, as well as numerous scholars and scientists, how to educate
children is a constant topic of debate.

The Princeton school, founded by a group of parents two years ago, is among
39 charter schools that have opened since the Charter School Act was passed
in 1996, allowing the creation of public schools that operate independently
of local districts. But Princeton is hardly typical.

While most charter schools have been created as oases in New Jersey's
troubled urban districts, the Princeton school was founded in a town that has
among the best public schools in the state, with S.A.T. scores near the top
every year. To some parents, they were not good enough.

''The program at my son's school was very mixed in terms of what was going on
in the classroom,'' said Ruth Boulet, who was on the board of the Princeton
Regional School District when the charter school was opened and now has two
children in that school. ''The curriculum was rather vague. Some of the
teachers were not so great. There was no specific program for academic
excellence.''

And while most charter schools can afford only to lease their building,
Princeton was able to buy its own because 30 parents signed a note
guaranteeing the loan for the building and land, a leafy five-acre site
surrounded by tidy houses and a high-end shopping center. The dean of the
Princeton University School of Architecture, a parent, drew up the designs to
convert the office building into a school.

The new school, which will eventually grow to include kindergarten through
the eighth grade, now has 119 students in the third to seventh grades, with
about 50 children on waiting lists for each grade.

''It would have been difficult to do in another community,'' Ms. Boulet said
of the start-up. ''These were people who believed in educational choice.''

Charles Marsee, the school's director, also points to the vast academic
skills he can draw on. ''I can pick up the phone and find a scientist or a
historian who can come in and volunteer,'' he said.

The focus here is clearly academics. Teachers for the fifth through seventh
grade must have degrees in the subjects they teach, instead of just the
general education degree required by other schools. Foreign language
instruction is one hour a day, as opposed to 15 minutes in the public school
system.

And as a sign of how much say-so the parents want in determining not only
what is taught, but also how, the charter school has a curriculum committee
for each subject, made up of faculty members, parents and experts in the
area.

Michael Goldstein, a software entrepreneur, said he was disillusioned with
the approach to teaching at the public school that his son attended last
year. The homework assignments, he said, strayed from the point of the
lesson. One activity had the children making bows and arrows and writing
something on each arrow with a colored pen to represent a different point in
the story that they had read in class.

''He and I spent four or five hours on this, and it was excruciating,'' Mr.
Goldstein said. ''It just seemed to me such a waste of his time and my time.
And what was worse is that my son had convinced himself that he was not a
good student and not good in math.''

He said his son, a fifth grader, has blossomed into an A student. ''The
teachers here are more focused on less silly stuff and think, 'We're here to
teach, and teach the subject,' '' Mr. Goldstein said.

Results of a standardized test given nationally to independent schools showed
that sixth and seventh graders at the Princeton Charter School made
three-school-year gains in writing and mathematics last fall, compared with
the preceding year, Mr. Marsee said.

But while parents seem pleased with the academics, many said in a poll
conducted by the school that their children were complaining about the lack
of nonacademic diversions. So this year, the school added ice skating and
martial arts classes, a basketball team, a yearbook and a school newspaper.

As one fifth grader, Rose Hallett, said: ''There is less free time here, but
you learn more. I think this school is harder than my other school, but not
so hard that I don't like it.''

Received From Jim Eade via e-mail on May 29, 1999