Lawmakers question Obama's NCLB overhaul
Rural schools may face new challenges under the president's plan
President Obama (AP).
College visits: The ‘East Coast’ thing
I received the following e-mail from one of my favorite readers, Louis Wilen of Montgomery County, about my request for readers to write in about their college visits this spring. (You can learn all about College Tour ‘10 here.)
I also mentioned that I would be taking my daughter, a high school junior, to some East Coast schools. Here’s what he wrote, followed by my response.
Continue reading this post »I also mentioned that I would be taking my daughter, a high school junior, to some East Coast schools. Here’s what he wrote, followed by my response.
Daring new high school rating system
[This is my Local Living section column for March 18, 2010.]
On my blog I gush over my many genius ideas, worthy of the Nobel Prize for education writing if there was one. Here is a sample from last month:
“Why not take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a new essay exam that measures analysis and critical thinking, and apply it to high schools? Some colleges give it to all of their freshmen, and then again to that class when they are seniors, and see how much value their professors at that college have added. We could do the same for high schools, with maybe a somewhat less strenuous version.”
Readers usually ignore these eruptions of ego. But after I posted that idea, a cruel young man named Chris Jackson e-mailed me that his organization had thought of it four years ago and had it up and running. Very cheeky, I thought, but also intriguing.
I never thought anyone would try such a daring concept. If your high school’s seniors didn’t score much better than your freshmen, what would you do? What schools would have the courage to put themselves to that test or, even worse, quantify the level of their failure, as the program does?
Continue reading this post »
Numbers say charter migration a trickle, not flood
The first quarter of the year always brings the same anecdotes. A Ward 6 elementary school principal reported that five children from public charter schools showed up on a recent Monday morning.
"The charter schools are letting their favorite children go," she said.
A parent at a Ward 5 middle school says "a record number of kids have been pushed back on us by charters."
A parent at a Ward 5 middle school says "a record number of kids have been pushed back on us by charters."
The conventional wisdom is that the District's public charter schools, which operate with more autonomy than traditional public schools, shed themselves of undesirable students with impunity as the year goes on. Many of them end up back at their neighborhood public schools, while the money that the children represent -- a District per-pupil funding level that averages about $9,000 -- stays at the charters, forcing DCPS to serve kids they have not budgeted for.
But school officials on both the public and public charter sides say there is no data supporting the phenomenon of some vast annual migration. According to DCPS, of the 2,529 mid-year admissions during the 2008-09 school year, just 264 (7 percent) were from public charter schools. The rest were kids who were either new to city, who had dropped out and returned, or who came from private and parochial schools.
DCPS spokeswoman Jennifer Calloway also said the 264 figure does not represent a net gain, and that it is offset by students who leave. "DCPS students also transfer to charters mid-year--and the funding doesn't follow them either," she said.
Barnaby Towns, communications director for FOCUS (Friends of Choice in Urban Schools) an advocacy group for D.C. Public Charter Schools,