A Houston charter school gets its students motivated by making college the goal. (AP)
A Michigan teachers college has incorporated med school-like “rounds” into its teacher training. (NPR)
A perpetual substitute teacher says teachers like her go unregulated in many districts. (Times)
Neighborhoods in Chicago will compete to open a Harlem Children’s Zone of their own. (Chicago Tribune)
Michael M.
Re item sixth from last, Kevin Huffman (ex-husband of pro-charter DC Schools Chancellor Rhee) editorial:
“Finally, parents need to take the reins. There are about 50 million children in U.S. public schools, and their parents can and should win every political battle. The key is asking the right questions, rooting everything in what is good for students. Will this teacher/school/policy help my child learn? Most important, can I see the data, please? School by school, district by district, parents must enter the fray and demand what is best for their children, rather than letting adult needs drive policy. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), whom I have known and admired since his days running the Denver Public Schools, has said, “To me the burden of proof is not on the people who want to change the system, the burden of proof is on people who want to keep it the same.”"
Note he did not say MAYORS need to take the reins. When was the last edu-political battle NYC PARENTS won?
Ironically, in NYC, it is PARENTS who want to change the system, and Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein who want to keep it the same.
Parents want real change; they want the best schools possible. Some want charters, for sure. Others want honest data — and REAL improvement for the great sprawling vast majority of over 1,000 schools serving over 1,000,000 kids.
Happy New Year to all.
Happy New Year
The UFT’s report on charter schools is on the mark and long over-due. It’s amazing how hard people like Thomas Carroll will go to make sure charter are not held accountable. It really makes you wonder how much these schools are really hiding. These are public schools. That means transparency. That means accountability.
E.J. Luther
I’d take what Happy New Year said and go a step further. People like Carroll never bother to stick up for public schools and push back against threats to their growth and improvement. They just don’t care what happens to the 99% of students who aren’t in charter schools. Disgusting.
Ellen McHugh
I am shocked, truly shocked, to learn that there is discrimination occuring in NY City’s publicly funded charter schools. After all, eveyone knows that is it difficult and expensive to educate students with special needs. They require a good deal of one to one assitance, time and effort. Heavens but charter schools just don’t have the time or the money to do that. They need to give their time and money to fund raising, slick publicity, soliciting students who have high reading and math scores, hiring buses to take supporters to rallies, and paying the directors exhorbitant salaries.
It equals public money for private discrimination
http://www.sinksalive.blogspot.com KitchenSink
Kirkus review (for the nostalgic among us): This report is quite loose with the facts. When was the last time a charter school fought FOIL? I’d gladly stand corrected, but as I sit here and write I’ve seen a bunch of union FOIL requests over the years and I’ve never heard of a charter not complying.
In fact, I’ve had the repeated impression that charters are more transparent than the district pubilc schools, not less so.
The assumption that a bogus, bumbling audit by the state comptroller is going to be better than an authorizer review – including, mind you, the proposed-to-be-eliminated SUNY authorizer, the only one in the state to close charters – is ludicrous.
Strip away the nonsense rhetoric and the question I was left with from this report is, “How does a set of schools that are required to admit students by lottery ensure a representative student body in each school?”
More data in the public sphere is definitely a good thing. The raw data at the end- which appears to be missing a few charter schools – should be a good starting point for debate.
Maybe if Dominic Carter hadn’t been fired for domestic violence he could have hosted a Peter Murphy vs. Leo Casey debate starting with those figures on NY1.
I actually like the suggestion of having a common application form, and efforts to remove barriers for enrollment, and I’m sure there are other gems in there. (For example, does the suggestion that pensions should be paid out of a separate state fund mean that those charter schools that provide pensions will actually see more per-pupil funding than those that don’t? That would be really pro-teacher…if the money were there.)
But unfortunately, the disgraceful attempt to handicap charters that is written between the lines will move the conversation no-where-fast.
Peter S.
Ms. McHugh, I’d like to respond to two points you make:
As for charter schools devoting “time and money to fund raising” and “slick publicity”: when I taught in the DoE, UFT dues used to get deducted from my paycheck. This paycheck came from the taxpayers of New York. The UFT, at the time, had its office on Park Ave. It still has a formidable PR operation.
Re: “soliciting students who have high reading and math scores”: this sounds to me like what, say, PS 321 does. It does this by accepting any child from the neighborhood – a neighborhood of million-dollar homes. In the charter school where I teach, we hold a lottery in which any NYC family can participate. The majority of our incoming students have dismal math and reading scores.
Respectfully,
Peter
Ellen
Hello Peter
The issue is access and recruitment.
The intent of the charter school movement is to provide alternatives in those neighborhoods where the public schools are under performing. Not a problem by me. The problem is the willingness to exclude those students for being too difficult or to needy to be included in the charter school. Or, and I believe this is even more outrageous, to refuse to admit students with disabilities in the formative years of the charter school because staff is not ready or available to work with those students. I am glad that your school has no qualms about taking in under performing students and working with them and I know how demanding that effort is on all parties: students, teachers, support staff and parents.
However, the fact still remains that charter schools, as well as other, newly created, small schools do not have a population that is reflective of the population the NYC school system is meant to serve.
I don’t think charters are bad ideas, but I do know that discrimination is a very bad idea.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.