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Parents use charter threat to force reforms

January 12, 2012 By

California parents will pull the trigger today on a low-performing elementary school in Adelanto, a Mojave Desert town east of Los Angeles. Nearly 70 percent of parents at Desert Trails Elementary have signed a petition demanding the school district negotiate changes in the school or turn over control.

The Desert Trails Parents Union wants to work with district leaders to improve the school, but couldn’t get a response until the petition drive started. If negotiations fail, the petition seeks to convert Desert Trails to a charter run by parents and local teachers.

“There could be lawsuits for years,” Principal David Mobley told the LA Weekly.  But the law is on the parents’ side.

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Getting into a good grade school in LA

December 19, 2011 By

There are good public elementary schools in Los Angeles Unified, writes Leslee Komaiko. But for parents who can’t afford to buy or rent near a desirable school, getting your kid into a good grade school is a mind-bending game. The savvy parent looks for ways to amass points in the district’s assignment system.

What you’d be looking for is a house in an area with a crummy home school, a school that’s overcrowded, without enough books and desks. That gives you points. So does a PHBAO home school. No, that’s not one that serves PH-balanced pork-filled dumplings to its charges. It stands for “predominantly Hispanic, black, Asian or other.” (Never mind that every school is predominantly Hispanic, black, Asian or other. Hello, LAUSD — “other” means everyone else.)

Submit your application to your desired school the winter before your child can begin kindergarten. If you’re applying for next fall, you’ve just missed the Dec. 16 deadline.

Of course, parents should find out which race or ethnicity is underrepresented at the school of choice to figure out how to identify their mixed-race child.  (Or your child who’s 1/16 Cherokee. There are a lot of “Native Americans” in school districts with similar systems.)

A kindergarten rejection earns points for the following year.

And of course if the magnet (or program) of your dreams doesn’t start until first grade, what you want is a kindergarten rejection. So study the numbers carefully in the Choices guide, which has moved online this year and which should really be called the You Wish guide. It will reveal the schools that are most in demand, the ones that therefore have the stinkiest odds. That’s where you should apply to kindergarten, because remember, rejection and thus points are the goal here.

It’s good practice for college applications.

Los Angeles Unified will let groups led by teachers and administrators run low-performing and new schools with charter-like independence, but charter operators will be excluded from the choice program for three years. Few charter organizations have been granted control of schools under the existing program.

 

 

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Khan Academy goes to school

December 6, 2011 By

Salman Khan’s free math and science videos have moved from YouTube to classrooms, reports the New York Times, which looks at a San Jose charter school that’s using Khan’s lessons — and student-tracking software to teach ninth-grade math to students at very different levels.

(Teacher Jesse Roe) can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.

Each student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures.

The Khan-enabled classroom makes it possible to target instruction to each student’s level, while mapping each student’s math comprehension for the teacher. While some see Khan’s mini-lectures as too “sage on the stage,” the net effect is to turn the teacher into a “guide on the side.”

Diane Tavenner, chief of the Summit chain of four charter schools, turned to Khan to teach the fundamentals after small-group problem-solving proved  slow and unreliable.

Khan Academy remains free, thanks to foundation support.

 

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Children’s Aid Society plans charter school

September 14, 2011 By

New York City’s Children’s Aid Society will open a charter school offering health care and social services to low-income Bronx children, reports Gotham Schools.

Drema Brown, a former elementary principal in the Bronx, will lead the effort. She plans an outreach effort to persuade welfare parents to apply to the new school.

The 158-year-old charity works with city schools to provide social services and after-school programs. Children’s Aid also runs a clinic in the Bronx.

 

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Parent trigger: Empowerment or distraction?

August 15, 2011 By

California’s “parent trigger” law lets a majority of parents force changes at a chronically low-performing school,  including a new administration or conversion to a charter school.  Is the parent trigger a positive step or a distraction? Ben Boychuk, associate editor of City Journal, debates Julie Cavanagh, a special ed teacher in Brooklyn, on the Public Sector Inc. site. The discussion, which kicked off today, will go on for four days.

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Locke boosts graduation numbers

June 23, 2011 By

Locke High School’s last class of students from the pre-charter era will be graduated today in Los Angeles. The 484 graduates represent an 85 percent increase from 2008, the last year Locke was under district control, according to Green Dot. The number of graduates completing the A-G college-prep requirements has tripled.

When Green Dot took over the school, it placed 10th graders in Launch to College Academies (LCA). Of  340 LCA students, 306 will walk at the graduation ceremony. Also graduating are 41 students at Animo Locke 4, a school for over-age and credit-deficient students and those returning from juvenile detention.

I’ve been reading Alexander Russo’s Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors on Green Dot’s struggle to turn around Locke. There are no miracles. It’s a long, hard slog.

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14 states consider 'parent trigger' laws

June 20, 2011 By

Fourteen states are debating “parent trigger” laws that would let dissatisfied parents force changes in low-performing schools. Most, but not all, include the option of turning over control to a charter operator.

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Locking the parent trigger

June 10, 2011 By

California’s parent-trigger law lets a majority of parents at a chronically low-performing school petition for change in management, including conversion to a charter school. But parents are finding it hard to use the law, writes Ben Boychuk in Locking the Parent Trigger in City Journal.

A judge invalidated the petition by McKinley school parents in Compton on a technicality; there was no date box.

Parents had wanted Celerity, which operates several local charters,  to take over McKinley. Instead Celerity will open a new charter elementary in a church a few blocks away.  Los County Office of Education officials approved the new Celerity Sirius campus. The church building is big enough for 220 students; McKinley now enrolls 426. It will be fascinating to see how many children enroll in the new charter and how they do.

Celerity runs high-performing charter schools, according to Andrew Coulson’s analysis.  The three Celerity schools open long enough to generate test data all rank among the top 10 percent for schools with similar populations of low-income Hispanic and black students, notes the LA Times in a profile of Celerity founder Vielka McFarlane, a Panamanian immigrant.

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Small school changes lives

June 5, 2011 By

Downtown College Prep changes lives, writes Tom Vander Ark after a visit to the San Jose charter high school. Most students come from Mexican immigrant families and enter ninth grade with fifth-grade reading and math skills.  All graduates in the class of 2011 will go on to  college, including Mount Holyoke, University of California at Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara and San Jose State. The school’s counselor helps graduates cope with college challenges, including transferring from community college to a four-year university.

Read all about it in Our School.

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Turning Locke — and more

April 16, 2011 By

Green Dot had started successful charter schools in Los Angeles. But could Green Dot transform low-performing Locke High? Desperate teachers voted to try. In Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors, Alexander Russo reports on the struggle to turn Locke into a decent school.

“Locke’s transformation has been a long slog, not an unmitigated success,” writes Gerilyn Slicker on Gadfly.

Russo reports teachers with blood-shot eyes, exasperated with their efforts, puking before starting class in the mornings, or crying quietly in the bathroom after a long day with the students. He chronicles powerful stories—both positive and negative—that have helped to shape Locke over the past three years. Among them: The tale of Keron, a football player who was pepper-sprayed by a rogue security officer after being caught gambling at school and one of Miss K., who battled to keep David, a defiant upperclassman filled with potential, in the school through graduation. This honest on-the-ground portrayal reminds us: School turnarounds are a hard business, indeed.

Terry Moe has a new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, which Fordham’s Checker Finn calls “deeply informative, profoundly insightful, fundamentally depressing, and yet ultimately somewhat hopeful about an educational future that unions won’t be able to block—though they’ll try hard—due to the combined forces of technology and changing politics.”

On the other side of the political and educational spectrum, Alfie Kohn has published his “contrarian essays” as Feel-Bad Education.

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