More Good, Bad, and Ugly on Charter Schools
Quite a few interesting reads on charter schools:
Residential Charter School for Teen Mothers to Close: This one's complicated. On the one hand, the failure of the charter seems to a large degree due to sketchy oversight on the part of the DC Public School Board in approving the charter launch when it seemed far from ready; on the other, the cookie-cutter demands of the standardized-testing/accountability crowd probably guaranteed failure for this nontraditional student body from the start.
According to outside audits, interviews and staff reports, MEI lacked a coherent curriculum for its 50 students, with just two on track to graduate this spring. Last year, not one of the 15 10th-graders who took the DC-CAS standardized test achieved proficiency in reading or math.
[Executive director] Muhammad-M'Backe said those scores are not surprising, given that most students entered the school reading on a third- to fifth-grade level.
To reform the academic program, the school hired Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, a national educational consulting firm that specializes in serving nontraditional student groups by emphasizing hands-on learning in out-of-school settings. But Gladys Graham, the firm's regional director, said constant teacher and administrative turnover made it difficult to put the program into effect.
"The school is not in a place where we could implement the design," she said.
[...]One of the most serious issues was MEI's special education program. An inspection of the individual education plans (IEPs) required by federal law for each student showed that they were identical, with only the names changed.
Charter School Expenses | GothamSchools: Separate and unequal, it seems, is the story of the differences in funding between charter and public school students in NYC:
I calculated the total expenses per pupil at 58 New York City charter schools for the 2007-08 school year. Here is the workbook with my calculations.
The total expenses for the 58 schools was $236,230,149. The total enrollment was 17,680. This comes out to a per pupil calculation of $13,361. The average school expenses per pupil was $13,520. The median school was $12,948. For the 2007-08 school year, the “base funding” per pupil, i.e. the fixed amount per pupil received from the DOE, was $11,023. So spending on the average student was $2,338 above the base amount.
Boston Review — No Ordinary Succes: James Forman, Jr. gives a much more sensitive take on the Harlem Children's Zone than David Brooks did recently in the NYTimes. It's not a slam-dunk for Klein, Bloomberg, Sharpton, and the Education Equality Project, as Brooks would have it. It's got to be Broader and Bolder, too.
If we make schools better and improve the lives of some kids (or, in Canada’s case, a whole neighborhood) but do nothing to disrupt segregation, are we simply making separate a little more equal?
Despite these misgivings, I think I know how Canada, Feinberg, and Levin would defend their choice. I know it because, when I saw the terrible schools for jailed kids in D.C., I felt an obligation to help create a better alternative, even though I knew that almost every child in the school would be African-American and that most would be poor. I recognized the urgency of offering those kids the support and resources that no other program was going to provide. But I do not want to live in a society that accepts this situation as inevitable. And I am confident that Canada, Feinberg, and Levin do not, either.
--and speaking of Forman's "better alternative" in DC, his "Out of Jail and Into Jobs" feature in Education Next, about the Maya Angelou charter, is pretty compelling reading. I don't know what that school's politics are concerning unionized teachers and so forth, but the vision seems strong, and the cause commendable.
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