You are here: Home / Archives for charter

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.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

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.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

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.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

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.

Filed Under: "Our School", College, Education Tagged With: , ,

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.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Ohio governor proposes parent trigger

April 5, 2011 By

Ohio parents should have the power to force change on their children’s failing schools, says Gov. John Kasich.  His budget plan proposes a “parent trigger,” reports the Columbus Dispatch.

The “parent trigger” would apply to schools that rank in the state’s bottom 5 percent in academics for three consecutive school years. If a majority of a school’s parents sign a petition demanding change, the school would be forced to accept the reform the parents propose:

• Converting into a charter school.

• Replacing at least 70 percent of the staff.

• Contracting with another school district, an effective nonprofit group or a for-profit group to operate the school.

• Turning the school’s operation over to the Ohio Department of Education.

• Making “fundamental reforms” to the school’s staffing or governance.

The proposal is based on California’s law. A Los Angeles-area school board is fighting to retain control of a low-performing elementary school.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , ,

British want kids to read 50 books a year

March 28, 2011 By

British students should read 50 books a year, says Education Secretary Michael Gove, after touring a KIPP charter in Harlem with a book-a-week goal.

In talking to students preparing for school exams, “something like 80 or 90 per cent were just reading one or two novels and overwhelmingly it was the case that it included Of Mice and Men.”

“We should be saying that our children should be reading 50 books a year, not just one or two for GCSE.”

I wonder why Of Mice and Men is ubiquitous in Britain. Well, it’s short.

For adults, The Telegraph suggests 50 books you must not read before you die.

In sixth grade, we filled out an index card for every book we read independently.  The minimum was one book a month. I read 183 books during the school year.  The teacher saved my stack of index cards to terrify future students.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Making integration work

March 24, 2011 By

Is economic integration a feasible goal? By creating high-achieving schools in high-poverty areas, charter networks such as KIPP and Achievement First, derailed the debate on school segregation, writes Dana Goldstein. But Rhode Island is creating charter schools that mix urban and suburban students.

The Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA) model, authorized by state law in 2008, lets mayors of neighboring towns and cities create regional charter schools.

RIMA’s first school, Blackstone Valley Prep, is located in affluent Cumberland, but draws elementary and middle students from low-income Pawtucket and Central Falls as well as Lincoln, another well-off town. Fifty-five percent of the students are black and Latino, 65 percent are poor, and 43 percent are English Language Learners.

In its pedagogical methods, BVP is a traditional “no excuses ” charter, with uniforms, an extended learning day, and privately-funded extras, including free breakfast and a gorgeous, newly renovated building. Administrators and teachers greet students each morning with a handshake and eye contact, the kids are expected to line up and walk through the hallways in silence, and there are songs and chants to help the students memorize their multiplication tables and phonics principles. Standardized test gains and scores are impressive.

2011-03-17_08-10-12_68
BVP kindergartners and first-graders “get their wiggles out” after their daily breakfast and morning meeting.

The no-excuses model doesn’t always attract middle-class and affluent parents, Goldstein writes. But there are 299 Cumberland and Lincoln students signed up for BVP’s next lottery as well as 431 Pawtucket and Central Falls students. That should boost the percentage of middle-class students.

RIMA is awaiting approval of five new regional charter schools in a partnership between Providence and the town of Cranston.

Goldstein also visited troubled Central Falls High, a failing school in a failing  town. New leaders are trying to change the school culture, she writes, but it’s hard when the teachers are demoralized after last year’s mass firings. Discipline remains a problem.

“The kids, when they’re here, need to know this is a place of learning,” (math teacher Anthony) Kulla said. “Right now they don’t.”

Central Falls High students are predominantly low-income and Hispanic.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Judge: Count ‘parent trigger’ signatures

March 23, 2011 By

Signatures on a “parent trigger” petition must be counted, ruled Judge Anthony J. Mohr, saying Compton school district violated parents’ rights by “imposing an onerous signature verification process.”

In the first use of California’s parent trigger law, a majority of McKinley Elementary School parents petitioned to turn control of the low-performing school to a charter operator, Celerity.

Mohr said the verification process that the district had demanded, including presenting a photo ID and a personal interview with administrators, violated parents’ first amendment right to petition their government.

Mohr suggested the signatures be counted by a neutral party, such as the League of Women Voters, but the district rejected that recommendation.

The state board of education is expediting the law, allaying proponents’ fears that the new board, with fewer charter school advocates, would undercut parents’ rights.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Detroit: We’ll convert 41 schools to charters

March 22, 2011 By

Faced with closing 41 schools, the bankrupt Detroit school district wants charter operators and Education Management Organizations to take over its failing schools by the start of the school year, reports the Detroit Free Press. That’s six months away. It may be impossible.

However, charter school operators and advocates across the nation said they believe the time line for chartering 30% of the district is too ambitious, given the amount of work that goes into hiring and training staff and developing a school design.

Converting low-performing California schools to charters didn’t raise reading and math scores, concludes a 2010 Brookings Institution report, which found converted schools “look more like traditional public schools than start-up charters.”

“The challenge of coming into an existing school is it frequently has a strong culture which might be dysfunctional, particularly if it’s been low-performing,” said Doug Ross, CEO of New Urban Learning, a nonprofit that operates charter schools in seven locations in Detroit.

KIPP, which prefers to start schools from scratch, already has said it won’t bid on Detroit’s surplus schools. Neither will Green Dot.

New Orleans, with 61 percent of students in charter schools, has seen significant progress since Hurricane Katrina “swept away much of the school system in 2005,” notes the free Press. “Prior to Hurricane Katrina, about 62% of New Orleans students attended failing schools. Today, that number has dropped to 17%.”

New Orleans schools that don’t improve are placed under the management of a high-performing school, said Paul Vallas, Recovery School District superintendent.

DPS should close its 41 schools, let those students be absorbed elsewhere and then convert some surviving schools to charters with rigorous standards, Vallas said.

“That would not only solve financial problems, it would solve your problem of school quality,” he said.

In addition to New Orleans, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Denver have given up control of the most troubled schools to outside operators, notes Ed Week.

However, only 5 percent of turnaround schools have been turned over to outside management, notes Title 1-Derland.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »