Thursday, July 1, 2010

The trouble with charter schools - chicagotribune.com

The trouble with charter schools

Clarence Page
Bio | E-mail | Blog | Recent columns

It's easier to open a new one than to close a bad one

Clarence Page

June 30, 2010

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Charter schools receive a lot of well-deserved attention this time of year when they appear to be performing miracles. But what about the ones that don't?

The Obama administration believes, as did the Bush administration, in taking harsh action against "failing" schools, such as firing staff, closing the school or turning over control to the state or private charters.

Much of the news has been encouraging, especially in schools where graduates outnumber dropouts for a change.

It was exciting to hear that Urban Prep Academies, a charter school on Chicago's South Side, is sending 100 percent of this year's 107 graduates to college. That's particularly impressive for a school where only 4 percent of its original 150 students were reading at or above grade level when it opened four years ago.

It was also exciting to hear that Anacostia Senior High School, the District of Columbia charter school where first lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address this year, reported 79 percent of its seniors were graduating, up from 50 percent in 2009.

Plus, 95 percent of this year's graduates have been accepted to college, school representatives say. When

School Improvement Grants: How Many Charters are Eligible? - State EdWatch - Education Week

School Improvement Grants: How Many Charters are Eligible?

By Lesli Maxwell on July 1, 2010 10:20 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Charter schools are getting lots of media attention this week—from theappearance of Bill Gates at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago to the release of a new federal study that found charters have little edge over regular public schools. Then there was the bombshell that dropped late Tuesday night that some congressional Democrats want to shift $100 million in federal money meant for charters to the $10 billion bill aimed at staving off widespread layoffs in public schools.

So let me just add to this week's charter school overload.

Hearing Bill Gates call for the shuttering of bad charters—which is exactly what Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the national charter schools audiencelast year—made me think I should scour the states' applications for $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants to see how many "persistently lowest-achieving schools"—the campuses that are eligible for the money—are charters.

I naively thought I could look at the 32 state applications posted on the Education Department's website in half a day's time to compile my list. It was clear after combing through Arizona's list and confirming which schools were in fact charters that I would have to scale back my ambitions.

So I settled on a sample of five states to give a snapshot of how many charters are performing poorly enough to meet the federal government's rules that

Weingarten Accuses ED of Protecting "Pet Programs" - Teacher Beat - Education Week

Weingarten Accuses ED of Protecting "Pet Programs"

by Stephen Sawchuk

The feisty president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called this morning to give me an earful about the debate on Capitol Hill over the $10 billion edujobs fund.
As colleague Alyson Klein reported extensively yesterday, some of those dollars would be funded by offsetting appropriations for the Teacher Incentive Fund and the Race to the Top. Now, Weingarten is furious that the Department of Education wants to preserve those programs.
"The department was all for saving jobs until it was their pet programs or pet projects that have to share in some of the pain," she said. "I'm very upset. You have an immediate, well- documented harm to children, because of budget cuts. Everyone's been trying to talk about that. All of a sudden, Congress was forced to come up with offsets, and [Rep. David] Obey did and made sure nobody was insulated, and you have this hew and cry."
To be clear, the AFT preferred the former, $23 billion version of the jobs bill that did not raid other pots of

Appeals court rules against Plano ISD in Christian candy cane case 11:55 AM CT | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News

Appeals court rules against Plano ISD in Christian candy cane case11:55 AM CT

12:30 PM CDT on Thursday, July 1, 2010

By MATTHEW HAAG / The Dallas Morning News
mhaag@dallasnews.com

Two Plano school principals violated the Constitution when they confiscated Christian-themed materials, including candy cane pens, that students planned to hand out at school, an appeals court has ruled.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Wednesday ruled that the principals could be held liable for taking away the items. The principals had argued that the First Amendment doesn't extend to students distributing noncurricular items at school.

Also Online

Download: See the court's ruling

U.S. Supreme Court denies appeal over candy cane pens, other religious materials in Plano schools

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"They are wrong," the judges wrote.

The principals "had fair warning that the suppression of student-to-student distribution of literature on the basis of religious viewpoint is unlawful under the First Amendment," three judges concluded in a sometimes strongly worded decision.

Josh Skinner, the principals' attorney, said he was disappointed by the

My ISTE �Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

My ISTE

by Dean Shareski

The whirlwind event that is ISTE represents for me, I tremendous learning environment. I realized after my first ISTE in 2008 that this is about people. While in the past serendipity seemed to rule my thinking, I was slightly more intentional this time around and yet left lots of room for impromptu learning. I may have crafted a near perfect learning experience for myself.

My intentional learning revolved around specific sessions I choose and specific conversations I wanted to initiate.

While I thought that ISTE did a fine job of offering variety in their sessions, I only had a handful that I felt I must attend.
Bernie Dodge (when an educator has a wikipedia article, you link to it. We don’t have many there) has always been someone I wanted to hear, and his talk about engagement was one I was hoping to listen to with Chris Lehmann who has already blogged a little about that. Chris wrote about this earlier and listening to the two of them, helped me get a better handle on this. Lynell Burmark is someone I’ve seen before but wanted to grab a few key ideas from her as I plan to present on similar ideas in the future. Nothing life changing here but certainly solid ideas I can use. There were a couple of other sessions that were okay but these two were certainly the most useful for me.

There were several conversations that I had hope to have with people

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: NYT editorial got it wrong on small schools

NYT editorial got it wrong on small schools

by Mike Klonsky

The Times lauds the reported success of NY small schools as shown in a recent MDRC study. Of course the benefits of small schools and smaller learning communities is nothing new and has been documented in study after study (including my own) for many years. But the editorial, as expected, puts its own spin on the research and credits that success to Bloomberg's school closing policies and top-down reform strategy.

The study validates the small school policies of the Bloomberg administration, which has shut down 20 large, failing high schools and replaced them with more than 200 small schools, about half of which were the focus of this study.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Times confuses authentic small schools with Bloomberg/Klein's chains of privately-managed charter schools which were imposed on protesting communities and implanted in neighborhood school facilities. Study after study has found those charters to be no better and often worse than the closed neighborhood schools they replaced.

Of course there is some overlap between charter schools and small schools, a point not taken into account in the recent study, which was paid for by the Gates Foundation (isn't everything these days?).Charters on the whole, are small and benefit from the positives that small size brings, ie. stronger relationships between teachers and students and opt-in by parents and students. But those benefits, when gained Bloomberg-style, do so at the

Edujobs: What Might Be Some Other Offsets? - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Edujobs: What Might Be Some Other Offsets?

by Alyson Klein

So, yesterday we wrote about a proposal from Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., to cut $800 million in Obama administration education priorities as part of a wider effort to provide $10 billion to thwart teacher layoffs and nearly $5 billion to fill a major shortfall in the Pell Grant program.
The proposed cuts include $500 million from Race to the Top, $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund, and $100 million intended for charters.
The U.S. Department of Education and some moderate Democrats are urging Obey to find other areas to cut instead. Even the Washington Post editorial board has weighed in.
Peter Cunningham, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, reiterated to me today that the department would like to help Congress identify other offsets.
The question is, will Obey and company go along with that? And if they do, what could those other cuts be?

The Compost Diaries � The Spin on Urban Agriculture

The Spin on Urban Agriculture

By Spring Gillard on June 30, 2010

Can urban agriculture save the world? My friend David Tracey(Guerilla Gardening, A Manualfesto, New Society, 2007) and I did a series of podcasts that attempted to answer that question. All of our guests (there have only been three to date – a roof top farmer , an urban farmer, and a uniquely localcorner store) answered no or probably not. They are probably right.

Michael Pilarski, founder and director of Friends of the Trees Society, has explored the role of home gardens in world food production. Pilarski makes the case that 50 percent of the world’s food supply could be grown on 10 percent of the arable land. He ventures a guess that currently gardens supply somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. Guess it depends how you define home garden. He hauls out the usual urban ag precedents, the World War II Victory Gardens and Cuba after the Russians pulled out.

So just how much land do you need to feed one person? There are a lot of differing facts and figures out there. John Jeavons (How to Grow More Vegetables, 10 Speed Press, 1974) from Ecology Action in Willits, CA came up with a pretty good estimate: 10 feet by 100 feet (1000 square feet) or 1/43 of an acre. Pilarski says he can feed himself on about a tenth of an acre and puts in

This Week In Education: Business: Selling For-Profit Education Companies Short

Business: Selling For-Profit Education Companies Short

"Two renowned short sellers have been lobbying lawmakers and administration officials, warning that for-profit schools are positioned for the same kind of crash that recently hit the subprime mortgage industry." (Short sellers flag school stocksPolitico). Previous posts here, here, here.

Thompson: The Case For Edujobs

Rep, David Obey says, "When a ship is sinking, you don't worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat" so he seeks to shift $800 million from "reforms" to the pared-down bill for saving teachers’ jobs. "Obey's proposal crystallized a debate among Democrats about federal aid to schools," but that is only the first step. At times like these, we need to pull together, and even educational consultants should sacrifice. If

AM News: Jobs Vs. Reform

Moderate Democrats Push Back on Cuts to Race to the Top, TIF EdWeek: Democrats who have supported education reform efforts are pushing back against a plan to divert funding already appropriated for the Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and charter schools to the education jobs bill... Lawmaker wants to shift some 'Race to the Top' funds to prevent teacher layoffsWashington Post: Lawmaker wants to shift some 'Race to the Top' funds to prevent te

acher layoffs...Funds for Race to the Top May Be Cut NYT: House Democrats have attached a provision to a war financing bill that would spend $10 billion to help school districts avoid teacher layoffs, paying for it, in part, with cuts to Education Department programs previously financed by last year’s stimulus bill...States, Districts Scramble on Turnaround Deadline EdWeek: Some still await federal approval—and money—for plans to overhaul poorly performing schools starting this fall... Education" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(51, 153, 204); ">Massachusetts: Psychiatrist Departs After Baby Einstein Controversy NYT: Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint is leaving the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston and closing his Media Center, which for 16 years fought harmful media influences on children... Math, reading gap among Native American students AP: Native American students at schools overseen by the federal Bureau of Indian Education performed significantly worse on national standardized tests in reading and math compared with those in public schools.... Rule tightened for exam schools Boston.com: The Boston School Committee tightened the residency policy last night for students applying to the city’s three exam schools to prevent out-of-towners from gaining admission.

Today's Big Education Ape Posts on Parents 4 democratic Schools

"killing an ant with a nuclear weapon."

"killing an ant with a nuclear weapon."

You're the 'Ones Out of Touch,' responded Boehner to the criticism. "The American people want us to deal with the economy and jobs. And what have [Democrats] dealt with? They've dealt with health care. They've dealt with cap and trade. And then they've gone overboard with financial regulatory bill. Growing the size of government, taking more from the American people at a time when Americans want them to focus in on the economy."

The Answer Sheet - Why Rhee's mayoral comments are troubling

Why Rhee's mayoral comments are troubling

Let’s set aside the question about whether D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee should have taken sides in the city’s mayoral race. Even if she had said nothing, everybody would know she stands firmly with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, the man who hired her and who has given her free rein.

But her all-but-direct threat to quit if Fenty loses to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray in September’s Democratic Party raises a question about her priorities, not to mention her reluctance to admit that she might not have all the answers to fixing D.C. schools.

My colleagues Bill Turque and Nikita Stewart wrote in a Post article that Rhee on Tuesday said in two separate interviews -- one with WAMU’s Kavitha Cardoza and one with The Post -- that she would not work for a mayor who did not share her education reform ideas, and then she made it clear that Gray doesn’t.

So Rhee is all but saying that if city residents don’t give her her way by reelecting Fenty, she is out of here.

Never mind that she really doesn’t know how Gray will approach their relationship. What political candidates say during a campaign is not always what they do if they win and take office. Considerations change.

What is more important, and of more concern, is that Rhee surely knows the importance of consistency in school leadership. She knows she was the seventh person to head the school system in a decade when she arrived in 2007, and that the constant turnover at the top was disastrous for the city’s schools.

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Thursday, July 1, 2010