The Little Inner City School That Could

Marshall Elementary School on 15th street is a small Spanish immersion school, predominantly populated by Latino immigrant kids from low-income families.  You would not expect this school population to score well on the standardized tests, but it’s slowly been improving).  But when Marshall went to the East Bay to compete in the Odyssey of the Mind tournament against the wealthy privileged suburbs, not much was expected.  Not only did the kids do well, they won 1st Prize! These kids should be leading the march.

Related content: Few Options after Elementary School in the Mission

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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