Fullerton with her sixth-grade homeroom students. Photograph: Matt Mendelsohn

Inside Room 226, Gasson Hall is beating Alumni Stadium for the third time this year. The three sixth graders sitting at the “Gasson” table have earned points for raising their hands, making eye contact when they speak, helping their neighbors, and cleaning up after activities. A few more days at this rate, and Gasson will take the eagle, a plush version of BC’s Baldwin with a yellow bandanna around his neck. The students will keep the trophy for a week while their teacher, Casey Fullerton, a 2002 graduate of the Lynch School of Education, supervises the next round of competition.

Fullerton teaches sixth-grade reading at the KIPP DC: KEY Academy charter school in southeast Washington, D.C., an inner-city, open-enrollment public middle school where college prep is the agenda. KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) was founded in 1994 in Houston, Texas, by two former Teach for America volunteers to counter the growing achievement gap between rich and poor students. What began as a 50-student, one-classroom program is today a 45-school network serving over 9,000 students in 15 states and the District of Columbia. In KIPP schools, each homeroom is named for its teacher’s alma mater; over the course of a day at Fullerton’s school, the students in her BC homeroom will visit several other “colleges,” including Washington University and the University of Wisconsin, for instruction in various subjects.

Every week, Fullerton runs the same competition in her reading classes for best-behaved table, and each Friday, one of six tables—Conte, Bapst, Alumni, Robsham, Gasson, and McMullen—proudly claims the prize. The “scoreboard”—a dry-erase whiteboard with the Boston College logo—hangs beneath a framed photo of Gasson Hall on a support pole in the middle of the classroom; on this day, the Gasson table is in first with 15 points, Alumni is in second with 12, and Conte is holding third with a respectable nine.

There is scarcely a space in Fullerton’s classroom that doesn’t reference BC. Above the door, the words “Ever to Excel” appear in rainbow-colored block letters on white computer paper, each letter spanning an entire sheet. On the walls hang Fullerton’s BC diploma, clippings from BC brochures, AHANA bulletins, and photographs of the five other buildings for which the tables are named. A giant yellow foam finger from a BC football game rests on the floor by the window, pressed into service earlier this year when Fullerton needed a pointer at the whiteboard. There is a BC beach ball for use during question-and-answer sessions—in Fullerton’s room, when you hold the ball, you have the floor.

Learning about their homeroom teacher’s alma mater is the first step on KIPP students’ academic journey. According to Fullerton, many of her students “might not even know someone who made it past high school.” Yet, says Sarah Hayes, the school’s principal, “On the first day when they walk in here, they learn the year they will go to college. We are showing them this is an opportunity.” The outcome, they are told, will be shaped by how hard they work. School days start at seven, and students don’t leave until five p.m. There are Saturday classes every other week. Students are taught that if they have questions, they must ask for answers, and so they are given their teachers’ cell phone numbers, with permission to call until nine every night.

“I’ll often get calls asking for help with homework,” says Fullerton. “But sometimes, kids will call to tell me the BC game is on, or to console me if BC lost.”

On Fridays, the students attend Songfest, a celebratory pep rally at the end of the week, where they sing, dance, cheer, and compete in games and other activities. They may wear any college gear they have earned as prizes from their teachers; Fullerton’s homeroom students sport BC sweatbands, Superfan T-shirts, and oversized BC sweatshirts that hang down to their knees. “Songfest is where you can really see the sense of pride and ownership the kids have for their ‘colleges,’” she says.

According to a recent U.S. Department of Education study that tracked eighth graders through the end of high school (diploma or not), one in five low-income children makes it to college, in contrast with the national average of 62 percent. Last year, 80 percent of KIPP alumni earned college admission. And two years ago, the five-year-old KIPP school where Fullerton teaches became the District of Columbia’s highest-performing public middle school on the district-mandated Stanford 9 exam. By eighth grade, says Fullerton, the kids who fought so hard to catch up when they entered KIPP as fifth graders are applying to private prep schools and competitive public high schools. “What seems like little stuff isn’t,” says Fullerton. “To us, it’s just a few college posters and T-shirts. To them, it makes college, for the first time, seem real.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg