Dr. Freda Deskin Lewis, Founder and CEOThat work filled 15 award-winning years in PreK-12 classrooms, and it led her to NASA. She applied to the Teacher-in-Space program and reached the finalist round, and that experience led to the aerospace camps she built afterward. She ran those camps each summer while she served on the faculty at the University of Oklahoma and later while she was a dean at Oklahoma City University. A generation of campers still describes them as the most meaningful education of their lives.
Students at the Oklahoma Aerospace Academy worked through missions where advanced math hid inside a flight plan, a launch sequence, or a systems check. Only at the end of the week did they realize how far they had traveled academically.
Her classrooms also revealed a truth she could not ignore: the students who responded fastest were often those with the least access to opportunity. They were also the ones the system was most likely to lose. She saw the pattern again while running a residential program for adjudicated youth, where many of those children and their siblings had already been written off. They were the students who needed her approach most and rarely reached a classroom where it existed.
So she acted. When Oklahoma passed its charter school law in 1999, Dr. Freda Deskin, a member of the Oklahoma Educators’ Hall of Fame, left her deanship, committed her retirement and savings, and launched the state’s first public start-up charter school. She secured space in an old mall, but the rooms stood empty, with no library, no furniture and no reserves to fill them.
If a teacher spends ten minutes off task during a 50-minute class, we don’t label the performance. I ask how the teacher feels about the data, then share what research says about highly effective instruction. The teacher sets the improvement goal.
She furnished it the only way she could, by asking.
“I would hear of a company going out of business, and I would call them,” she recalls. “I would express my condolences and then ask whether they had anything to give to a school in exchange for a tax-exempt letter.”
One company gave enough office supplies to last for years. Banks donated office desks and chairs as they replaced their own and kept donating for years after. When ASTEC opened its doors in 2000 as the state’s first startup charter school, every furnishing was donated, and it stayed that way for 25 years.
Twenty-six years on, ASTEC Charter Schools serves more than 1,700 students from Pre-K through 12th grade in Oklahoma City. It is a tuition-free public school, open to all, rooted in S.T.E.A.M. and the liberal arts and built on a foundation of character education and family support, operating on the defining principle that children rise when a school treats them as capable, safe, known, and accountable.
Building Identity Before Achievement
ASTEC’s model is anchored in four Cs— character, content, competency and community —a schoolwide philosophy that shapes how scholars learn, conduct themselves, prepare for opportunity and contribute to others.
Character: Who a Scholar Becomes Here
At ASTEC, no one is called a student. They are called scholars, and the word carries an expectation that extends far past the school day.
A local store owner once watched two ASTEC high schoolers walk in one afternoon after class, in uniform. One reminded the other to tuck in his shirt. When the second said they were off school grounds, the first answered that it made no difference; they were still ASTEC scholars. The owner was impressed enough to call Dr. Deskin.
“That moment captures the essence of what we build,” says Dr. Freda Deskin. “Character isn’t a poster or a single assembly. It’s a living part of our culture.”
Every new scholar begins with a nine-week course in character education, manners and etiquette, reinforced daily. Scholars learn the BMW rule for table setting, which places bread on the left, the meal in the middle, and water (liquids) on the right, and how to introduce their parents to a teacher. High schoolers practice a firm handshake and steady eye contact. Small lessons, but they prepare a scholar to walk into rooms where confidence matters as much as knowledge.
Content: What Scholars Learn Here
ASTEC is fully state-accredited and operates under the sponsorship of Oklahoma City Community College. The curriculum blends S.T.E.A.M. with a strong liberal arts foundation, echoing Dr. Freda Deskin’s early integrated approach.
A scholar working on a project draws on math, design, and writing at once, often without stopping to label which is which. That is the point; the advanced work lives inside the mission.
Every scholar has a computer. That carried the school through distance learning and now anchors daily instruction. A FabLab makerspace puts 3D printers and design tools in scholars’ hands. Computer science is a core subject, not an elective tucked into a spare period.
Competency: How Scholars Grow Here
ASTEC teaches executive function, responsibility, and a growth mindset so scholars learn how to organize their work, manage commitments, and build confidence. These skills matter in school, at work and in life.
The school's goal is to have every scholar fully prepared for college and career. Many earn scholarships. Others pursue technical pathways through Metro CareerTech, where ASTEC is one of the largest feeder schools. One scholar who dreamed of becoming an aerospace engineer studied aircraft mechanics through Career Tech, won an award, earned a set of aircraft mechanics’ tools, and later used those skills to work his way through college.
Competency shows up in public, too. At a Rotary Club lunch for the top students of area schools, when a visiting student from another school hesitated over the table setting, ASTEC scholars knew exactly what to do and the visitors followed their lead.
Community: Who Surrounds and Supports a Scholar Here
ASTEC teaches scholars to care for themselves and give back, whether to family, school, or the wider community. High schoolers earn service points toward graduation and volunteer at organizations such as the Jesus House and the regional food bank.
Partnerships widen that circle. Scholars train on the water with River Sport at Riversport OKC, the venue chosen to host canoe slalom for the 2028 Olympic Games. First Tee offers golf instruction while reinforcing character. Fields and Futures helped build a regulation soccer field with futsal and volleyball courts. Quail Creek Bank supports financial literacy classes, and the Wes Welker Foundation contributes to athletics. Each opens doors to experiences and networks a scholar might not otherwise reach.
Discipline follows the same belief. Through the Teaching with Love and Logic model, scholars meet accountability through natural consequences, making amends and formal apologies following incidents. The purpose is not punishment but growth. A scholar analyzes what happened and learns how to respond and make better behavioral choices.
How Good Teaching Is Made
Strong academics do not happen by chance, and Dr. Freda Deskin treats teaching quality as the thing she controls most deliberately. Teachers do not sit back, assign busywork, or disengage. Cell phones stay out of classrooms. The school hires professional educators and sets clear expectations.
Deans of instruction are experienced teachers with master’s degrees. They meet individually with faculty members weekly, so the entire faculty stays aligned. A dean of STEM supports math and science, and a dean of humanities supports English, social studies, and the arts. At the elementary level, separate deans guide the upper and lower grades.
A research-based lesson template ensures every class carries what strong instruction needs. Each lesson builds in hands-on learning, subject integration and clear student activity. The template matters because many teachers now enter the profession without education training, never having studied what suits a given age or how to manage a classroom, and the structure gives them a proven framework to follow.
The sharpest tool is clinical observation, built on a template created by Dr. Freda Deskin around quantifiable best practices. A pre-conference meeting with the teacher reviews the process and expectations; a videographer records the lesson bell-to-bell; a dean uses the template to collect the data from the video, and a post-conference meeting has the teacher review the collected data with the dean. The key is objectivity. Coaches collect data; they don’t make judgments. They provide guidance.
“If a teacher spends ten minutes off task during a 50-minute class, we don’t label the performance,” explains Dr. Freda Deskin. “I ask how the teacher feels about the data, then share what research says about highly effective instruction. The teacher sets the improvement goal.”
Pay follows the same logic. Teachers help set their own performance measures, and those who reach the top tiers, Mastery and Impact, earn a raise and a bonus the following year. A teacher who stays at the lowest tier past two years moves on. The reward Dr. Freda Deskin names most often is watching an uncertain teacher grow into the one who now coaches everyone else.
Innovation Without Losing the Family Feel
Dr. Deskin never wanted a mega-school or a sprawling network. ASTEC’s enrollment cap of 2,200 scholars is deliberate. Leaders want to know children by name and never let scale turn them into numbers. For 26 years, ASTEC operated inside a former shopping mall. In 2020, after years of fundraising, grants, a lowinterest loan and community support, it opened a dedicated elementary campus. Its new state-of-the-art secondary school will house the middle and high schools in dedicated spaces on the board-named Dr. Freda Deskin Campus on General Pershing Boulevard in Oklahoma City. The new site opens in the fall of 2026.
Innovation at ASTEC follows a clear pattern—research first, implement with purpose, train everyone, and hold the line.
That discipline helped ASTEC respond quickly to exceptional circumstances. Years earlier, Dr. Freda Deskin had heard a medical research leader warn that a pandemic was a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if.’ She asked administrators to plan for a fire, tornado, or pandemic. When COVID-19 arrived, teacher training proceeded quickly, devices were sent home, and scholars kept learning. ASTEC found that all but two lacked internet access, so staff took precautions by delivering and collecting their work each day.
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ASTEC’s model is anchored in character, content, competency and community, a schoolwide philosophy that shapes how scholars learn, conduct themselves, prepare for opportunity and contribute to others.
The same readiness guides her approach to AI. After hearing business leaders discuss it long before it reached classrooms, Dr. Freda Deskin studied it herself. She now teaches AI classes and trains staff to use it responsibly across lesson planning, finance, and operations. She builds avatarbased training videos for tasks from maintenance to purchase orders, reviewing every output rather than accepting it at face value.
She moved early on cell phones, too. After studying their effect on sleep, attention span, and classroom focus, she educated employees, parents, and scholars before installing classroom lockboxes. Phones are stored in homeroom and returned at the end of the day.
ASTEC stands out as Charter School of the Year 2026 because of who it serves and how effectively it serves them. Its family poverty rate runs between 95 and 97 percent each year, and almost none of its parents have finished high school. A school could treat those numbers as a ceiling. Dr. Freda Deskin treats them as the reason the doors opened. The result is a closeknit school community built to hold at-risk children steady.
