Posts Tagged ‘Charter Schools’

Lives well lived, as well as facts well learned

June 28th, 2010

Submitted here on Monday, June 28th, 2010, in response to this and this.

Dear Governor McDonnell,

I write to urge you to spend an equal amount of political capital on establishing new charter schools in Virginia as you do on attracting national charter operators to the state. Organizations like KIPP offer college-prep curriculums augmented by extra time and stringent expectations of student compliance with rules. However, they do not in and of themselves offer models of project-based learning and student-centered pedagogies that better develop students’ collaborative and problem-solving skills – skills students will need to lead their own communities, businesses, and service organizations.

Consider Microsoft’s Educational Competencies, or compare the Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google with KIPP’s Five Pillars. We have schools like KIPP that reflect strict adherence to traditional instruction; do we have school’s that reflect the cultures of our world’s information-age pioneers? How do we develop those schools?

We develop them by taking advantage of Virginia’s relative inexperience with the national charter movement to innovate truly new types of schools. As state and local school boards partner with national charter operators that focus on replicating traditional notions of college preparedness, we should develop in parallel charter schools that research, develop, and share-out innovative cultures, communities, and practices – practices that allow students to discover new learning while still enrolled in public schools. Imagine schools that allow students to contribute to their communities, not just to graduate from them. Imagine schools that empower students to teach adults, not just to follow them. Imagine schools that inspire students to create and discover, not just to accept and cover.

As you search for viable models of charter education in Virginia, please look to programs like the Maine Farm Enterprise School, the New Country School and our own Blue Ridge Virtual Governor’s School for models of assessment, community, curriculum, and instruction that take students’ learning outside the classroom.

Virginia communities have wants and needs addressed by programs like KIPP. Be certain, though, that our children need more than academic preparedness to lead joyful, fulfilling lives of service to their communities, state, nation, and world. To serve others students must feel strong enough themselves to seek out new solutions to the problems with which we’ll leave them. We need schools that help students realize their potentials as artists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, leaders, volunteers, and visionaries – schools that don’t accept the limits of a college-prep curriculum – however effectively delivered – as the limits of teaching and learning. We need schools that look for the results of lives well lived, as well as the results of facts well learned.

Please use your political capital to lift up children and new models of education that serve them and their communities through innovative, project- and community-based learning and new assessment measures that accurately capture the results of this work. Please help Secretary Robinson to continue his efforts to do the same. It was wonderful to visit with him at my school, the Community Public Charter School, in Albemarle County. I enthusiastically invite you both to visit my classroom and to join with me in talking with Virginia’s students, parents, and educators about why we educate our children, as well as about how we can educate our children better.

Sincerely,

Chad Sansing, NBCT

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Two Takes on National Education Standards

June 3rd, 2009

By Norman Leahy

Responding to word that, at least in principle, 45 states and DC have agreed to the creation of a new set of national education standards, the Richmond Times-Dispatch coos:

The common-standards endeavor might complicate the effort of charter-school advocates who have been encouraged by President Obama’s openness to their cause. But it need not be a stumbling block. For one thing, wide disagreement about what kids should learn and when means any nationwide standards the states agree upon likely will set bare minimums. More to the point, the common standards will define a common finish line for each grade level. How schools get the students to cross it can still be up to them.


So all you school choicers — don’t worry your pretty little heads over this. Yes, it might make things tougher for you, but then again, maybe it won’t.

And, naturally, Virginia will benefit because the SOLs are already so rigorous that these new standards just might force those slackers elsewhere to catch-up.

Ah, the SOLs. The faith placed in bubble tests by the local gentry would be charming, or even mildly amusing…except for the manipulation of SOL data and the rather unimpressive showing of Virginia students on that already in-place national standard, the SAT.

“Bare minimums” indeed.

But another, and far less blinkered, view of national standards comes from Cato’s Neal McCluskey, who writes:

…when establishing national standards was attempted in the 1990s the real fireworks didn’t begin until proposed standards were published. Then, it seemed that everyone had a different reason they were outraged – outraged! – by the standards. At best, there was only one point of broad consensus: that the wannabe national standards simply had to go.

So are national standards a serious threat? They sure are: Were they to be enacted, the educationally deadly government-schooling monopoly would be complete, with even the ability to escape to better districts or states cut off.

But, he’s not overly concerned these standards will ever see the light of day, given the fractiousness of the parties involved.

We shall see.

(cross-posted at Tertium Quids)

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On Charter Schools, Part 5: Separate but … Better?

May 8th, 2009
Education, Poverty & Race

That an achievement gap exists in the United States across racial and socio-economic lines is undeniable. This gap can be seen in “standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college-enrollment and -completion rates.” Few would deny the connection between race and poverty in the United States. According to a recent study published by Kansas State University, this poverty in America is rooted in our education system. According to Kay Ann Taylor, associate professor of secondary education,

Because public school funding relies, in part, on property taxes, in communities with little property ownership in the way of a tax base, schools and children suffer.

Even more frightening is the fact that our leaders seem to be well aware of these problems … and completely ineffectual at confronting them. The only education reform act passed by congress in the last 40 years, the No Child Left Behind Act, has as one of its stated goals, the narrowing of the Achievement Gap. But according to a recent New York Times article, NCLB is not closing this gap: “Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students.” The article continues,

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.

Perhaps the question we need to ask ourselves is, what are education reformers doing to tackle the problems of Racial and Socio-Economic Segregation?
Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which Blacks and Whites inhabit different neighborhoods of vastly different quality.
The percentage of black children who now go to integrated public schools is at its lowest level since 1968. The words of “American apartheid” have been used in reference to the disparity between white and black schools in America.
Charter Schools and Segregation
Thus far in my writings for the Edurati Review, I have been focusing on the burgeoning Charter School movement. I would prioritize my perspective on this movement as such: 1) an urban, mathematics educator, 2) a school reform advocate teaching for an high-profile Charter Management Organization (CMO) and 3) a Master’s Candidate in Public School Administration. In this column, I hope to delve deeper into the issues of Poverty and Race as they effect and are effected by Charter Schools.
I have written about this issue previously in a post on Criticisms of Charter Schools. In this post, I wrote

That minority parents should be embracing charter schools should not be surprising. I believe that our nation’s Achievement Gap speaks to the fact that problems faced by our public education system are compounded for minority communities. As a result, “charter schools in most states enroll disproportionately high percentages of minority students, resulting in students of all races being more likely to attend school that on average, had a higher percentage of minority students.”

Indeed, much of the research on segregation and charter schooling points to this sort of pattern. As education reform advocate, Derrell Bradford, commented on the post,

These schools serve residential assignment patterns that already mirror segregated housing patterns created to send kids to traditional district schools. These concentrations, particularly of black parents, in charter schools are less about housing and assignment, patterns, which predate charters, as they currently exist (and school segregation that is endemic of that) and more about the ethnicity of the people who feel the most urgent need for an alternative. Harlem is full of black people. The traditional public schools in that area are terrible overall. So this is a natural response from the most put-upon sector of students who attend those schools.

This would be inline with findings by the Civil Rights Project, whose 2003 report on Charter Schools and Race found that:
  • Seventy percent of all black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority schools compared with 34% of black public school students. In almost every state studied, the average black charter school student attends school with a higher percentage of black students and a lower percentage of white students.
  • Becuase of the disproportionately high enrollement of minority students in charter schools, white charter school students go to school, on average, with more nonwhite students than whites in non-charter public schools. However, there are pockets of white segregation where white charter school students are as isolated as black charter school students.
Separate but Better?
In his comment on my April 24th post, Bradford states

school integration is laudable, but I don’t particularly think it should be considered a goal. Which is to say, if there’s a school where 100% of the kids are black or 100% are Latino, and everyone is testing advanced proficient, I think that should be enough for everyone.

While Charter Schools are segregated, this is most likely no fault of their own, but reflective of historical trends. Bradford is, in essence, asking, If Charter Schools are largely segregated, but they are performing, is segregation a problem? Conventional wisdom would point to research that connects segregation to the achievement gap, and answer “yes.” The standards-based education reform movement attempted to tackle this problem head-on and has been marginally successful.
Now, consider the fact that segregated Charter Schools are performing.
The Charter Practice Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently published Inside Urban Charter Schools, an analysis of the five high performing Charter Schools with whom the project works closely. While the crux of the Charter School movement is in what these five schools are doing with their freedom, it is important to this post that these five schools are “serving predominantly low-income, minority youth.” The CMO I work for recently had three of its schools selected as California Distinguished Schools. All three of these schools serve overwhelmingly low-income and minority students. Does this mean that the research was wrong and that segregation does not breed an achievement gap or does this mean that with the freedom that a Charter provides, a new breed of pioneering and innovative educators have found a solution to Poverty and Race?

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(Re) Emerging Trend: Disruptive Innovation

May 4th, 2009


By Jason Flom

(This article is cross-posted on Ecology of Education)

Let’s take an imaginary trip through some snapshots from our Educational Landscape Photo Album:

  • Here’s Achievement Gap on a culinary tour of Urban Areas, circa 2009. Bigger than ever and looking healthy.
  • Take a look at High Stakes Test — that trickster keeps giving our schools bunny ears.
  • How cute! In this one the Basil Readers team spelled out BLAND using only textbooks.
  • Oh, check out the Teachers’ faces when they realized Standardization got rid of all the food at the annual picnic except for potato salad. Good times.
  • Don’t show this one to too many people, but here is the Education Technology Crew, looking like CIA agents as they scheme of ways to get around blocked sites.
  • And finally, the memorable series of the Kids playing 21st century games on their cell phones:
    • Climatic Sorry!
    • Petro-opoloy
    • Financial Market Jenga
    • Hungry, Hungry Energy
    • International Squabble
    • Meal or No Meal
    • Who Wants to be an Immigrant?

Collectively, such snapshots (though fictional) illustrate current themes that point to the idea that education is undergoing a transformation: from the complacency of yesterday to the eventuality of tomorrow. As a result, we stand today in a period of disruption and change. Budgets are suffering, drop out rates are on the rise again, curriculum is being narrowed, and for every one writer who offers constructive ideas, there are three others doing their impressions of Chicken Little: “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

You can barely open the paper, surf the internet, or tweet merrily without bumping up against some big debate about the nature of learning, what our schools should and should not be doing, and/or reform for this century or some other.

This is very good news.

While evolutionary biologists can argue over the exact mechanisms that lead to specific mutations, an undisputed fact remains: disruption stimulates change.

And, when it comes to development, growth and innovation, change is not only good, it is necessary.

For example, the rapid demise of the dinosaurs left the landscape in comparative chaos. Mammals capitalized on the available resources, and over time, changed considerably (exhibit A). Had the reign of the dinosaurs not ended, the mammals might have had a much more difficult time thriving, because, let’s face it, mammals taste delicious. (Full disclosure: I do not eat mammals, but I hear many animals — people included — enjoy them often enough. exhibit B)

The colosal failure (fail whale?) of reptilian megafauna cased a disruption in the biosphere that effectively spurred rapid growth, cultivating previously unavailable niches that in turn, spurred more growth. (While anyone watching My Super Sweet Sixteen might wonder if that growth has, in fact, been good, when I see my daughter laugh, I’m inclined to believe that it has been.)

So?

So, the current turmoil in our nation’s school system amounts to a national disruption that is stimulating change.

Robert Bruner, Dean of Darden School of Business at University of Virginia, recently posted an article to his professional blog entitled, Innovation in Disruptive Environments. He opens by considering how “innovators respond to uncertainty.” He goes on to suggest the importance of collaboration and networks in surviving (and ultimately thriving) during periods of challenge and disruption. He writes:

Successful inventors in history, such as Thomas Edison, were champions at collaboration with people of diverse expertise. In his book How Breakthroughs Happen, Andrew Hargadon wrote, “What set Edison’s laboratory apart was not the ability to shut itself off from the rest of the world, to create something, to think outside of the box. Exactly the opposite: it was the ability to connect that made the lab so innovative. If Edison ignored anything, it was the belief that innovation was about the solitary pursuit of invention. Edison was able to continuously innovate because he knew how to exploit the networked landscape of his time.” What really mattered was Edison’s network of invention. Hargadon argues that the most successful inventors are very good at technology brokering: borrowing here and there to create something new. Furthermore, good inventors recombine what they gather; as Hargadon says, “All innovations represent some break from the past…By the same token, all innovations are built from pieces of the past”—very few are truly revolutionary, radical, or discontinuous. What matters is the inventor’s network of connectivity to the past, and to inventions in the present.

With this in mind, the educational uncertainty and disruption currently affecting us today might become our stepping stone by utilizing three behaviors:

  1. Reflection and Planning: Long term, sustainable growth should be intentional and well thought out. We need to reflect on what is known and contemplate what might be. What’s our blue sky? What is achievable today? Tomorrow? And how can we ensure that the next generation of educational innovators can stand on our shoulders with solid feet to envision their tomorrow?
  2. Partnership and Collaboration: An education system that leaves no child behind requires that diverse vested interests work together in teams and partnerships to identify patterns, trends, and emerging relationships, before setting a course. It behooves us to include diverse knowledge and wisdom and ideas.
  3. Action and Exploration: Like scientific research that can take years (even decades and centuries) to mature into customer ready products, we need additional environments (like charter schools) for innovators to explore and develop new methodologies for reaching the wide range of students, interests, and cognitive needs of our diverse population. With strategic efforts we can then determine which strategies work locally and which could be applied on a larger scale. Then, repeat process.

Education’s soil is being turned, and now is the time to plant seeds for tomorrow. Not for today’s gains, our own glory, or to get a politician re-elected, but to ensure that this disruption’s growth amounts to long term innovation for our children, their children, and the world they live in.

As the Chinese proverb states, “One generation plants the seed, the next enjoys the shade.

Graphic: jaylopez

Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen, page 17.
Hargadon, page 32.

Follow Jason Flom on twitter (@jasonflom)

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On Charter Schools, Part 4: Smaller is Better

May 1st, 2009
This is the fourth in a series on the growing Charter School movement in American education. Previous articles have outlined the general disrepair of the American public education system , attempted to define specifically what is meant by the term “Charter School” and outlined criticisms of charter schools. This series is being cross-posted at the blog, the Sweat & Technique.
I began my teaching career in the second largest school district in the country, the Los Angeles Unified School District at Crenshaw High School. The summer before I began my first year as a teacher, Crenshaw made big news when it lost its accreditation. At this point, I had only worked at the school as a long-term substitute. As my friends and family asked endless questions about Crenshaw, I could tell them nothing except what we assumed to be true about urban education: that it was in a sorry state.
In the spring of that first year, Crenshaw’s accreditation was restored. While the initial loss proved to have been a snafu on the part of the school’s administration, for many long-time Crenshaw teachers and supporters, the loss came as a blessing in disguise. What I would learn during that first year, is that there was a deep and well thought-out plan for school reform on the table at Crenshaw. A group of parents and teachers had been working for several years to draft a plan to transform Crenshaw from one large school of more than 3000 students in to several Small Learning Communities (SLC), each numbering around 600 students. The problem was that this plan had never been taken seriously by the school’s administration. When the loss of accreditation brought attention to the state of affairs at Crenshaw, suddenly any plan for change sounded like a good one.
So far in this discussion of Charter Schools, we have highlighted the autonomy that a school’s charter provides. As we continue this discussion, I think it pertinent to accept this autonomy as a clear benefit of Charter Schools, but the important question to consider is What is being done with this autonomy? In January of 2008, Crenshaw was inducted into a pilot Innovation Division and was granted a large degree of autonomy from LAUSD. As part of applying for this autonomy, Crenshaw had submitted a proposal for transforming the school into several SLCs. In other words, Crenshaw was seeking autonomy from the larger school district with express purpose of restructuring into smaller schools.
Since leaving LAUSD, I have been working at a small Charter School managed by Green Dot Public Schools. Green Dot is a CMO (Charter Management Organization) in its ninth year of existence that has already established itself as a successful model for education reform. This year, three Green Dot Public Schools were recognized by the California Department of Education as California Distinguised Schools. Some attribute Crenshaw being granted its autonomy to the recent Green Dot takeover of LAUSD’s Locke High School in Watts.
Green Dot is very clear about the success of their schools. From the beginning, Green Dot has operated under The Six Tenets of High-Performing Schools. When asked, “What will you do with your autonomy,” this was Green Dot’s response. Number One on this list is, Small, Safe, Personalized Schools.

Why Small Schools?
I recently went to my mailbox on campus to discover a nice, glossy publication by the School Redesign Network at Stanford University, entitled Redesigning Schools, What Matters and What Works: 10 Features of Good Small Schools, by Linda Darling-Hammond. Of these 10 features, I would separate them into two categories: 1) those that are immediate advantages of a small school and 2) design aspects that can be easily implemented at a small school. Here I will focus on the immediate advantages.
a Small Learning Community
Anyone who has done serious study within a learning cohort can attest to the importance of forming a close-knit community around learning. An obvious advantage of a small school is that it is small. The school I teach at is in its third year of existence and currently has less than 400 enrolled students. Next year, we will be a complete ninth through twelfth grade high school and will have about 550 students. For many Americans, 550 students is the size of their graduating class. At a school this small, it is possible for everyone to know everyone else.
Continuous Relationships
Effective small schools are not only designed to support relationship; they are also structured to allow these relationships to develop over time.
Linda Darling-Hammond, Redesigning Schools
Having a small school allows the school to foster strong relationships amongst students, parents and teachers. Here we emphasize the community aspect. Some schools adopt advisory programs, in which students are literally paired with a teacher through their four years of school, to help foster this sort of relationship. The size of the school and programs such as advisory also help to foster parent outreach. It is feasible for advisory teacher to contact 3o parents and for a parent coordinator to contact 500. This sort of outreach is not possible at a larger school.
Collaborative Planning & Professional Development
Going from a staff of more than 150 and a department of more than thirty to a staff of twenty and a department of four, perhaps the single largest change I noticed was in the Professional Development I received. Where as in in a large district school, Professional Development largely focused on logistics with the occasional safety training thrown in, at a small school it became possible for Professional Development to focus on actual pedagogies. Our school has this year taken on the goal of developing our teaching of vocabulary. It is a modest goal, but even this would prove difficult at a much larger school. In the Math Department, this year we have focused our energy on the problems faced teaching Algebra I. Having a small department makes the implementation of large scale changes such as double-blocking feasible.
Democratic Decision-Making
This may be the most crucial aspect of small schools. Indeed, at Crenshaw, a desire for democratic decision making was the very impetus for the move toward the change. Dr. Darling-Hammond spells out the benefits afforded to small school in terms of decision making. First amongst these, is the proximity to the classroom of the decision making. In this way, “decisions are made by those who best know students and their needs”. Second, is the fact that the school is governed by the faculty. This is, in fact, one of Green Dot’s Six Tenets: 3. Local Control with Extensive Professional Development and Accountability. According to Green Dot, “local control works in Green Dot’s school model because schools and all stakeholders within them are held accountable for student results.” Finally, Dr. Darling-Hammond emphasize the importance of student and parent involvement in school decision making. In this way, “students develop new skills and learn to be responsible members of a democratic community.” This also helps to foster ownership of the community around the school.

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Case Study: Sizing Up Baltimore’s Charter Schools

April 28th, 2009

An article in today’s Baltimore Sun serves up a wonderful real-world opportunity to examine both sides of the charter school argument.

For those unfamiliar with the charter concept, Josh does a nice job in both defining and critiquing them. Joe also offers up some thoughts here.

On her blog, The Sun’s Sarah Neufeld writes,

Here’s the report on Baltimore charter schools that I write about in today’s newspaper. Not surprisingly, the report found that academic performance at the city’s charters varies significantly. Climate-wise, they seem to be better than regular city schools, especially at the middle school level. We’ve always known that charter students (except those at neighborhood conversion charters that take the place of zoned schools) have an inherent advantage because their parents are making a choice and seeking out a quality option on their behalf. Now we know how that translates: The charters have fewer special ed, over-age and free/reduced lunch students than regular schools do. As a whole, they’re also more racially diverse, though there are examples of charters that are almost completely segregated and charters that are almost perfectly integrated. One finding that was a little surprising: There aren’t
many students coming to the charters from out of the system, though seven schools are the exception to that and draw students who wouldn’t be attending city public schools otherwise.

Last week, Jacques asked if charter schools are the ends or the means. Rather timely for this discussion.

Considering the Baltimore report, at what point do the means become unjustifiable? Does that point even exist, given the underlying goals of the education reform movement?

If charter schools are indeed ‘factories of innovation’, are we simply witnessing the natural progression of innovation underway? In the meantime, who wins? Who loses?

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Are Charter Schools the Ends or the Means?

April 23rd, 2009

by Jacques Arsenault

Charter schools have been a hot topic in the news recently, with charter debates raging in several states, charter schools being praised by President Obama (who signed the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act at a SEED Public Charter School this week), and by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But if these schools have made an impact on the education landscape, what is the end goal, collectively, of the charter school movement? Josh Cook writes in his recent Edurati post “What is a Charter School“:

When states began passing laws allowing public schools to be chartered they did so with the understanding that these schools would be in more direct, local control of their day-to-day and year-to-year operations, but the trade off would be that these schools would have to show superior results when compared to the local public school they would be competing with. In this sense, a school charter is two things: 1) a granting of rights to the charter’s managing body and 2) a performance contract between this managing body and the sponsoring institution. To put it succinctly, a charter school must outperform the public school to remain in existence. To quote Spiderman’s Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Charter schools can serve a number of functions:

  • Innovation – given the flexibility that charters are given, they have the ability to experiment with new content, pedagogy, or technology.
  • Variety and focus – perhaps a focus on arts, or leadership, or kinetic learning, or serving adjudicated youth, some charter schools are created to serve the particular needs of a specific group of students.
  • Different management structure – because most charters do not have to work with unions, they are able to build in different management and performance structures for teachers, as well as for students.
  • Longer school days/years: many charter schools, particularly some of the nationally-known models like KIPP have longer school days, weeks, and years than the districts in their regions.
  • Community focus: some of the earliest charter schools were those created by community leaders in a local neighborhood setting. These are still a source of charters, though their performance results don’t necessarily match the results of KIPP, SEED and other national CMOs or charter networks.

Charter schools can incorporate one or more of the above functions, though rarely all of them. And many charters have demonstrated compelling, inspiring results for students that often would have been written off.

But what is the lesson to be learned from charter schools? Are they the means or the end for ensuring an excellent education for all children? In other words, if we have learned new pedagogical and/or management insights:

  • Should we be continuing to add new “firms” to the competitive landscapes (by raising charter caps)?
  • Should we be trying to take advantage of innovation, and incorporate some of these lessons in our traditional public schools?

In other words, is the ultimate end goal to have traditional public schools in low-income replaced by a menu of charter and other options, or is there still an intrinsic value of strengthening school districts ?

And what of the approach to new charter schools:

  • Should we encourage new entrepreneurs to continue creating new schools and new schooling models?
  • Or should we instead encourage expansion of the franchises (YES Prep, Imagine, etc.) that have shown good results?

As we see political showdowns around charter schools, and few if any states have reached a saturation point in terms of charter school supply, it is crucial to ask questions about the overall goal of “the charter movement” — or more accurately “the many charter movements” in order to begin answer some of the questions above.

Your thoughts?

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The Science of Charter Schools

April 16th, 2009

(by Joseph E. Ocando)

“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom.” - Milton Friedman: “Free to Choose”

“I’ve consistently said, we need to support charter schools.” – Barack Obama

Caroline Hoxby’s studies at Harvard demonstrate that charter school students are more proficient in reading and math than public school students. Critics state that the results are useful but incomplete. Ironically, the advantage of charter schools (typically having much less numbers of students than their public school neighbors) makes acquiring statistically significant data difficult.

A direct comparision of the charter school to public school student involves many variables. Parental involvement, socio-economic status, cultural barriers, past performances on assessments, length of time at either a charter or public school, access to enrichment programs and district specific policies are but a few. From a scientific standpoint ideally there should be only one variable between the two populations: the one in question, math and reading proficiency. Larger sample sizes would dilute the potential offsetting impact of any one of these outside variables and increase confidence levels in the data ascertained.

Indeed the number of charters has grown to more than 4000 serving 1.2 million students. A recent study by Kevin Booker and Ron Zimmer shows that charter school students are 7-15% more likely to graduate from high school and attend college than their public school counterparts. In addition they state that charters do not generally draw top students away from traditional public schools.

While teaching middle school science in an under-resourced under-privileged area I collected mass amounts of data on a regular basis. This primarily involved efficient and appropriate facilitation of innovative tools kids could use on their own unique paths of self-discovery. Cognitively, my strategies heavily centered around inquiry-based learning to develop critical thinking. No matter the particular external variable or how many of them there were, the results consistently and repeatedly pointed to only one outcome: all children can learn.

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Ed Rev’s West Coast Flava: Meet Josh Cook

April 9th, 2009

Joshua P. Cook was born into a life of service as a member of the Peace Corps (children born to active volunteers are born into service and paid a wage) in Halfway Tree, Jamaica. He served as a literacy tutor through Americorp as a member of the East Bay Conservation Corps in Oakland, Ca.

After a few years teaching Algebra I at Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles, Joshua moved on to teach at a fledgling charter school, Ánimo Justice, a Green Dot Public School, in the historic South Central district. At Justice, Joshua works in his capacity as Department Chair of Mathematics to develop an Algebra & Geometry curriculum that is both conceptually challenging and friendly to students learning to speak academic English and requiring remediation in mathematics.

Joshua received his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature (though he managed to squeeze in a class in American Studies with a young Pedro Noguera) from the University of California at Berkeley. He did his teaching credential through UCLA’s Center X. Joshua is classified as a highly qualified teacher under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Joshua is an avid bicyclist. In 1999, he rode from Los Angeles to San Francisco. In 2006, Joshua and his wife were the sole American representatives on an IPPNW, anti-nuclear proliferation peace ride around the Baltic Sea. On this ride, more than 30 participants from a dozen nations cycled 1500 km from Talinn, Estonia to Helsinki, Finland. Joshua is also a musician and enjoys DJing under the moniker, DJ Regular. Visit his blog, Sweat and Technique.

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