Sunday, May 2, 2010

Challenges in Replicating Charter School Success - NYTimes.com

Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Williamsburg Collegiate in Brooklyn, whose students outscore their district counterparts. More Photos »

Published: May 1, 2010

REPRINTS

In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.

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Many Charter Schools, Varied Grades

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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Jason Skeeter using an overhead projector to teach math to fifth-grade students at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn. More Photos »

Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.

Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers’ unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine “your ideas with our dollars” from the federal government. “What you have created,” he said, “is a real movement.”

That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter

More Pre-K Pupils Qualify for Gifted Programs

By SHARON OTTERMAN

The minimum score for the most competitive of the programs, which have 300 slots, was achieved by 1,788 students.

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Sandra J. Oliveira, executive director of financial aid at Providence College, has 100 appeals for more aid to go through.

A Fairy Godmother to Help With College Aid

By JACQUES STEINBERG

When financial aid is not enough, families can ask for more help. Judging those appeals falls to people like Sandra J. Oliveira.

A New Emotional Intimacy in a Class on Human Anatomy

By JAMES WARREN

Some Northwestern medical students who dissected donated human bodies got to know their donor better thanks to a new wrinkle at a post-course gathering.

The Crouch siblings of Danbury, Conn., from left, Kenny, Martina, Ray and Carol, in December after Yale offered them early acceptance. They were believed to be the first quadruplets ever to have received such an offer from Yale, and this week they said yes.

For Individual Reasons, Quadruplets Pick Yale

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Carol, Kenny, Martina and Ray Crouch considered going their separate ways for higher education, but in the end, they all liked what they saw at Yale.

City Pushes Shift for Special Education

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Principals at 1,500 schools must enroll all but the most severely disabled students by fall 2011.

A Long Walk for a Cause

Four students arrived in Washington, having walked from Miami to support a bill that would give legal status to immigrants who arrived at age 15 or younger.