I'm excited to share the launch of Every Neighborhood, a Substack focused on accelerating academic outcomes in Arizona—highlighting the state of education, schools getting real results, the people driving that work, and the research behind it.
The first issue is below: my path from teaching in the South Bronx to founding Vista College Prep, and why that experience led me to start Arizona Leads.
I’ve spent most of my adult life in public education - working to learn, understand, and improve an incredibly complex system.
In 2013, I founded Vista College Prep, a tuition-free public charter school at 7th Avenue and Buckeye. We opened with 60 kindergarteners and first graders. We started with a simple, core belief: demographics do not determine destiny and every child, regardless of background, deserves access to an exceptional education.
We studied the best schools in the country and borrowed shamelessly from what worked. We invested deeply in our teachers, their training, their coaching, their growth. And we held ourselves relentlessly accountable to results.
We grew from one school to five K-8 campuses across Phoenix. In fact, our flagship campus was named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education; that year, we were one of just five schools in Arizona and one of only 300 nationwide, out of more than 10,000 eligible schools. Before the pandemic, our students—over 90% of whom qualified for Free or Reduced Lunch and over 90% were students of color—ranked among the top in the state, regardless of demographics. Two years ago, all five Vista schools scored in the top 15% of the state for growth on our state assessment. Today, one of Vista’s founding students will start Cornell University on a full QuestBridge scholarship.
We attribute these results to three actions: we built a consistent, coherent school day; we held staff and students to high expectations with support and coaching; and we used data to determine whether what we were doing was working.
These are the same handful of practices researchers find again and again in high-performing schools. While seemingly simple, they’re hard to do in practice and even harder to scale.
Statistics demonstrate the point: Today, only 36% of Arizona’s third graders are proficient readers on our state assessment, and on the national NAEP exam, just 26% of fourth graders were proficient in reading, the lowest proficiency since 2011.
That’s why Arizona Leads was created, and it’s why we’re launching Every Neighborhood.
Our core belief is simple, logical, and incredibly ambitious:
Every child, in every neighborhood, deserves access to a high-quality school.
Our mission is to connect school leaders with proven practitioners, resources, and funders. We support new schools getting off the ground and existing schools working to improve.
Real schools, serving real students, proving what’s possible in the real world.
The flywheel works like this: proof points of excellence, especially in our highest-need communities, put more pressure on the system, resulting in higher performance. We’ve seen this play out in cities across the country: a handful of schools prove what’s possible, and that proof becomes impossible for the broader system to ignore.
Making the flywheel turn means expanding our collective knowledge of what’s working. Too often, the people doing it—the principals turning around a struggling school, the district leaders making bold structural changes, the funders quietly backing successful efforts—don’t get heard outside their own circles. That silence stalls progress.
Arizona Leads and our Every Neighborhood newsletter exist to change that. Here’s what you can expect:
Stories from Arizona schools that are getting results: what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what other schools can learn.
Honest conversations with the educators, district leaders, policymakers, and funders working to improve public education in our state.
The work behind the work—the research, the methodologies, and the partnerships that make an outsized difference in results.
I’ll write from where I sit: as a former teacher and principal who founded a school and served on the State Board of Education, and someone who has had success moving the needle on what’s possible for students in our state. This isn’t a one-way broadcast. I also want to hear from you—what you’re seeing in your school, your district, your community.
A note about our approach
While we recognize the important role of strong policy, Arizona Leads is intentionally non-partisan. We partner with people from across the political spectrum. What unites us is a shared conviction that every Arizona child, regardless of where they live or what their family can afford, should be able to walk into a school that prepares them for a life of opportunity.
That shared vision is the fastest pathway to progress.
Subscribe and stay close
If you care about Arizona’s children, our schools, or the future of public education in this state, I’d love to have you here. Subscribe to get Every Neighborhood in your inbox, share it with someone in your network, and reach out anytime. It’d be great to hear from you.
Best,
Julia
Wonderful to read and follow your continued work