Kudos to Commissioner Deborah Gist, who listened to parents and supporters of Highlander Charter, and granted it a three-year extension. While Highlander has areas in which growth is needed, the school has been outperforming Providence schools, and deserves to remain open as a positive choice for city students.
Gregory Kane, columnist for the Washington Examiner, ends his most recent column this way:
When will critics of charter schools just be honest and admit that they just don’t want them to work?
Exactly. No one expects every charter to work. Some will fail, while many, like Chicago’s Urban Prep, will be wildly successful. The failure of many, but not all, of our urban public schools suggests we need to find alternative ways to educate children. Charter schools provide those alternatives.
Most who oppose charters do so not out of any concern for the children, but for the employees. For the most part, they are union supporters. Otherwise, charter opponents would be just as critical of the failing public schools.
The implication is that because charter schools don’t work, then we shouldn’t have them. What the charter school bashers don’t realize is that if this logic applies to charter schools, then it applies to failing public schools that aren’t charter schools as well. They clearly aren’t working; that’s why proponents of charter schools support charter schools in the first place.
Protecting the status quo means hoping charters will fail.
The Growing Readers Initiative is an excellent example of the positive impact charters can have on public schools. This program is a collaborative effort between The Learning Community and Central Falls Public Schools.
The Growing Readers Initiative is a professional development partnership between an urban school district and a charter school – one of the few examples nationally of such collaboration. The Learning Community, a K–8 charter school founded in 2004, has developed a coordinated program to build strong readers in the early grades. Through the Growing Readers Initiative, teachers, coaches, specialists, and administrators from the charter school are working alongside their colleagues in the neighboring Central Falls School District to share best practices teacher-to-teacher, share systems of support and data analysis, and encourage a team approach to student achievement.
The collaborative approach, and its initial results, are shared in the current issue of Voices in Urban Education, published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown.
“It’s like someone opened a door, and behind that door is a future.”
These words were spoken by Milan Birdwell, a student at Urban Prep charter, an all-boys school in Chicago. Made up entirely of young African-American men from some of the cities most difficult neighborhoods, the school announced this week that all 107, ALL 107, of its first graduating class has been accepted to four-year colleges in September.
This is an incredible accomplishment. But in a city where only 40 percent of African-American boys even graduate, the results at Urban Prep are amazing.
Some elements are easy to quantify: an extended school day that means students have an additional 72,000 minutes in school each year, a double period of English, and required extracurriculars and public service.
But many more elements seem embedded into a culture based on four R’s, as the school’s founder and chief executive officer, Tim King, describes it: ritual, respect, responsibility, and relationships.
“I say we give [the students] shields and swords,” Mr. King said. “The swords are hopefully this great education. They know how to read and write and add. … Equally important, and perhaps more important, are these shields: resiliency, self-confidence, self-awareness. … Hopefully, we have instilled these things, really woven them throughout the curriculum.”
This amazing story should perk the ears of all urban educators and administrators. Instead of complaining about the population of students in their schools, teachers need to learn new ways to reach them.
Dr. Gallo should share this article with each of the Central Falls High School teachers reapplying for his or her job and ask, “How committed are you to making sure our kids succeed?”
The failure of the Stanford New Schools‘ charter is significant to the school reform debate. Expected to establish a model for educating low-income minorities, the East Palo Alto Academy instead ranked in the bottom five percent of schools in the state. The school board denied a charter renewal, and the elementary school will close at the end of this school year. The high school must find a sponsor other than Stanford if it hopes to remain open.
The most well-known name associated with the school is Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor and one of the most progressive of reformers. Darling-Hammond had been considered a short-list choice for Secretary of Education before President Obama named Arne Duncan.
Joanne Jacobs, in her Pajamas Media column, outlines the school’s focus on social, rather than academic, development. Stanford’s original partner, Aspire, now runs its own school, East Palo Alto Charter. This school serves kids from the same community and with the same demographics, yet has been successful and ranks above the state average. The difference? Aspire claims to focus on academics above all else.
The need to address students’ social concerns should not be dismissed outright because of this one school’s failure. But the differences between the results of these two schools is revealing, and deserves further study.
One thing appears to be true. Theories promoted by the smartest thinkers at the most important universities don’t always translate into best practice. Even if it’s Stanford.
We should be thankful that money has been secured to restore most of the athletic programs previously cut in Cranston. According to the ProJo blog, the New England Laborers’/Cranston Public Schools Construction Career Academy has “agreed to contribute $88,241″ to save the programs. “The money is being drawn from the charter school’s surplus fund.”
Good. But I’m left wondering how Cranston can be in such financial turmoil that it cannot fund sports programs, while this public charter has a significant surplus. Is Cranston providing too much money, are private donations a factor, or is money just being better managed?
Regardless, the charter school leaders put the kids of Cranston first, and that’s the right thing.
At the Fordham’s Flypaper blog, Andy Smarick is suggesting a far-less mentioned cause for the Superintendent’s firing of every teacher at the high school. Competition.
Many have explained the Central Falls shake-up as a result of the Obama administration’s focus on meaningful interventions for failing schools and/or the state’s desire to show gumption leading up to the Race to the Top competition. But perhaps this new schools push is also relevant. Not only do new entrants provide a bit of competition, more importantly, high-performing new schools show what’s possible, raising the expectations of everyone involved. In other words, meek interventions for failing schools become untenable options.
According to the blog post, there are five charters servicing ten percent of Central Falls’ student population. That number is expected to double in the next couple of years. Parents are already making the case that change is needed at the high school by choosing to send their kids elsewhere.
Central Falls might look to Los Angeles, where the Green Dot charter school system is working to overhaul several consistently failing schools in tough, urban areas. Green Dot took over Locke High School in Watts in 2007, and its director Steve Barr outlines the school’s new approach in a short film that can be viewed here.
You can also learn more about the Locke Transformation Model at the Green Dot website.
Jay Mathews’ Class Struggle column this week focuses on the training of new teachers. The RI Department of Education will bring the Teach for America program to our state. While unions and university teacher preparation programs have been critical of the on-the-job “training”, Teach for America has been successful.
Mathews identifies a new training methodology practiced at the high achieving MATCH Charter Public High School in Boston. 2009 Brown graduate Elizabeth Pace, a MATCH Corps participant, provides the details of a typical day.
On a morning when I do not have breakfast duty, I wake up at 7am and am at my computer by 7:30 checking email and prepping for tutorials. The first bell rings at 7:45 and students can enter the building for breakfast and homework turn-in. When first period begins at 8:30, I head downstairs to tutor a repeating freshman in a one-on-one tutorial in Algebra I. From 9:30-10:30am, I tutor three sophomores in English. After that, I have a prep period to grade papers and gather materials for my next periods.
After a 30-minute lunch, I have a Readers Workshop group from 12-1pm where I lead 5 freshmen in an hour of independent reading and reading skill-development. From 1-2pm I have another hour to grade and work on my Administrative Assistant job. Corps members have a “secondary duties” of being either Teaching Assistants (TAs) or Administrative Assistants (AAs) and I am the AA for School Logistics. I am in charge of planning the student, room, teacher and tutor distributions for any classes and events that differ from the normal schedule.
From 2-3pm I work with my sophomore girls again – this time in Geometry and Algebra II. From 3-4pm, I am back with my freshman student to study Fiction and Non-Fiction. At 4pm, I have my last prep period of the day, where I often work with my sophomores again in study hall or plan/distribute logistics information.
From 5:15-7:15, I tutor another freshman student one-on-one in the Student Intervention Program (SIP). Students in SIP are failing one or more classes and are required to stay after school for extra help. At 7:15pm, I mosey on upstairs for food, a run with one of my fellow Corps members (we go cold, rain or snow!), parent phone calls, grading and organizing. Then at around 11:30pm or whenever my brain shuts off – whichever comes first – it’s lights out!
A long day? MATCH Corps is actually a residency program, and rooms are provided for those who join the corps.
While it’s certainly not a program for everyone, MATCH Corps is undoubtedly training some amazing teachers by first showing them the needs of students and how to build relationships with kids. This is precisely what is lacking in the traditional training of most public school teachers.
It’s not surprising that such innovative teacher training is happening at a charter school. Charters are often the laboratories where best practice originates. Be sure to explore more of the MATCH Charter website, which outlines the program of one of the best high schools in Massachusetts.
Two very different people had similar words to share today. The first is from Rick Hess’s new EdWeek blog Straight Up. Hess is an education policy wonk and is with the American Enterprise Institute.
[Harvard's Dick] Elmore bracingly terms “We’re in it for the kids” a “monument to self-deception.” He argues, “Public schools, and the institutions that surround them, surely rank among the most self-interested institutions in American society”–with school boards “training beds” for would-be politicians, superintendents sketching grandiose visions and then fleeing for cushier positions, and unions sacrificing student interests in the name of teacher job security.
The second is from Amanda Perreira, a Classical High School student and part of the group Young Voices.
I am speaking because students are the most important and central part of this issue. I am asking that for once, money, power and ambitions are put aside and that we remember the students and place their needs at the forefront of these decisions.
Amanda was part of a group of students who today rallied on behalf of superintendent Fran Gallo and her decision to fire the teachers at Central Falls High School.
Both Hess and Perreira, in their own words, share what I believe. Public schools have lost sight of the mission. Debate is no longer about what our children need, but rather what roles the adults should play. The arguments tend to be about money and time and responsibility. When the debate turns to students, it’s usually about pointing fingers. Educators blame the students, their parents, socioeconomics, and video games. Perhaps they all deserve some blame. But that doesn’t solve the problem, or move our schools forward.
Last summer I read Work Hard, Be Nice by Jay Mathews. The book chronicles the history of KIPP charter schools. The first KIPP classroom was in Houston, Texas, and a second followed in New York. Today there are KIPP schools in some of the poorest communities in the nation. The closest is in Lynn, Massachusetts. More than 85% of KIPP students go to college. Those who started the KIPP schools, and those who run them now, saw the need to change the way we educate children in poor, urban areas. Rather than lay blame, these educators work to fill the gaps in the lives of their students. They provide structured environments and put all their efforts into ensuring these kids succeed.
Should we expect anything less?
Today I’ve listened to a lot of teachers, most writing on the Internet. And despite my respect for so many of them, I’m disgusted by their words. They are supporting the teachers without reservation, demonizing Dr. Gallo, and promoting the low expectations that define the problem in Central Falls.
Many are complaining that we shouldn’t judge students or teachers using a single, standardized test. I agree. But when we learn that less than half of the students at Central Falls High School graduate, or that more than half are failing all of their classes, the testing argument becomes another excuse.
If public schools are to succeed, we as teachers must be less worried about our own interests, and instead, as Amanda Perreira said, “remember the students and place their needs at the forefront of [our] decisions.”
