Jim McLaughlin, via a kind reader’s email:

Patricia Hoben, a former Washington, D.C., science adviser, experimented with a different kind of school model when she founded Carmen High School of Science and Technology on Milwaukee’s densely Latino south side.
The school has heightened grading policies, gives quarterly assessments on ACT standards, mandates college application boot camp over the summer, holds a January term to salvage credits or enrich high achievers, and requires four years of math, laboratory science, history and English.
Her five-year test yielded one of the best public schools in the city that don’t require an entrance exam.
Like any good scientist, Hoben is hoping to replicate her results in a new school, this time on the mostly African-American northwest side.
Leaders of the south side’s successful Carmen High School submitted a proposal to the Milwaukee School Board last month to open a new grades six to 12 charter school on the northwest side in fall 2013. The proposal for Carmen Northwest Secondary School, as it will temporarily be referred to, earned a rare perfect rating from the charter review panel, which called the proposal “exemplary” for its longer school year and mandatory summer school programs – features that mimic the south-side campus.