Do students attending charter schools outperform their peers? The highly charged issue is the subject of intense debate this week in both Chicago and Los Angeles. But for the most up-to-date answer to that question, one must turn to New York, where one researcher finds their impact on students to be extremely limited. “Although exposés in the media argue that a small group of high-profile charter schools is making waves and transforming the public school system, this analysis suggests that more charter schools are treading water,” concludes the University of Buffalo’s Robert Mark ... Read More
Chicago Charter Schools Aim to Lift Urban Education
August 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago's South Side has been beset for decades by a familiar and depressing assortment of urban ills — gangs, arson and depopulation. The commercial buildings that once lined East 63rd Street, the main business thoroughfare, have simply vanished, leaving blocks of vacant lots. Yet, Woodlawn Secondary School, a sixth-through-12th-grade charter in the heart of the community, is thriving. Last year, 98 percent of its graduates, most of whom are African American, were admitted to four-year colleges. It's an especially impressive outcome, considering that 85 ... Read More
Teacher Collaboration Gives Schools Better Results
August 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Five years ago, Sparks Middle School hit bottom. Its test scores were some of the worst in the district. A chain-link fence was locked after hours to prevent gangs from tagging the open-air hallways. Between classes, members of rival tagging crews would fight. Word came down to the La Puente, Calif., school from the Los Angeles County Office of Education: We may shut you down if you don't come up with a plan. Sparks embarked on a makeover. Sherri Franson, the school's new principal, took down the chain-link fence because she thought it made the school look like a jail. She lengthened the ... Read More
Charter Schools: What Would Dr. King Say?
January 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It is unfortunate that the charter school industry now finds itself on the wrong side of educational progress and civil rights history, even as spokesmen like Nelson Smith, writing at Miller-McCune.com last month, engage in a public relations campaign aimed to minimize awareness of the segregated conditions that exist in the majority of American charter schools today. Whether located in the poorest, brownest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities or in the leafiest, whitest suburbs of North Carolina, charter schools often engage in a form of intensely segregated schooling that either contains or ... Read More
Charter Schools and Equal Opportunity
December 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Remember Norman Rockwell's stark painting of the little African-American girl being escorted into a New Orleans schoolhouse by two deputy U.S. marshals? Today that little girl, Ruby Bridges, is working to open a public charter school in that same school building, which will house a civil rights museum as well. Wouldn't it be strange for a civil rights figure like Bridges to join a movement that was "accelerating re-segregation by race," as charter schools were characterized in a recent Miller-McCune.com article? Yet that's what some critics would have us believe, though more than a million ... Read More
Are Charter Schools a Choice for Segregation?
November 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When the charter school movement began 20 years ago, it was pitched to the public as a more flexible and autonomous alternative to traditional public schools. People believed, too, that charters would be less segregated because they could enroll students across district boundaries. Today, charter schools are getting a big boost in federal funding from the administration of President Barack Obama. This year alone, the number of charters has grown by 9 percent, to more than 5,450 schools. The popularity of the movement and the desperation of parents who enter their children in lotteries for ... Read More
A’s and F’s for Charter Schools
October 23, 2010 • By •
The hope and the hype for a few charter schools, so grippingly portrayed in the new documentary, Waiting for Superman, are out of sync with national reports on the lackluster performance of charters overall. Recent studies across multiple states by Stanford University, the Rand Corporation and the U.S. Department of Education show that, on average, charter school students do no better or worse than their counterparts at traditional public schools in the same communities — unless they're poor. Low-income students generally learn more at charter schools, and higher-income students learn ... Read More
Mixed Report Card for ‘Waiting for Superman’
October 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Some of the best bits in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary by Davis Guggenheim on the failures of American education, especially for the poor, are the shots of presidents promising to do something about it. “Now let us praise famous men,” the film as much as says, as it rolls out sequences of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signing legislation and pontificating. There’s George W. Bush, too, with the slogan, “No Child Left Behind” in large letters on a banner behind him, rolling out the latest ... Read More
