Race to the Top Reform = Charter, Charter, Charter

Here's a draft of the state's plan to reform the bottom 5% of public schools. You get to pick one option.

1. Restart

Close the school and reopen it under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization (CMO), or an educational management organization (EMO) that has been selected through a rigorous review process.

Admit, within the grades the school serves, any former student who wishes to attend.


Yeah, because everyone knows the solution to failing public schools is to turn them into charters. Even though the best, most current data shows that charters do no better than regular public schools. (Stanford, CA – A new report issued today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes CREDO) at Stanford University found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools. http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/National_Release.pdf) But why let facts get in the way?


2. Turnaround

Replace the principal

Replace at least 50% of the staff

Replace them with who? First-year newbies? Non-union teachers? Contract employees? Anne Sullivan? Who do they think these schools are going to be able to hire, knowing they may be next in line for the "50% Slash"? I wouldn't touch it with a 20-foot pole. And to top it off, here in my district some of our best teachers are in the lowest-performing schools.


Adopt a new governance structure, such as by reporting to a new "turnaround office" in the LEA or SEA, allowing a turnaround leader to report directly to the Superintendent or Chief Academic Officer, or entering into a contract with Lead Turnaround Partner to oversee the school.

Read: Charter

Implement a new or revised instructional program

Like they won't have implemented new programs in this school already?

Incorporate strategies designed to recruit, place, and retain effective staff

Laughable - see point above

Provide ongoing, high-quality job-embedded professional development designed to ensure that staff members are equipped to facilitate effective teaching and learning

Promote the continuous use of student data (such as from formative, interim, and summative assessments) to implement comprehensive, research-based, instructional programs that meet the needs of individual students

Use evaluations that are based in significant measure on student growth to improve teachers' and school leaders' performance

Get those test scores up or DIE!!!!

Establish schedules and strategies that increase instructional time for students and time for collaboration and professional development for staff

And when you've gotten that blood from the turnip, you can fart gold to pay for it.

Obtain Innovation School status or otherwise ensure sufficient operating flexibility (including in staffing, calendars/time, and budgeting), to implement fully a comprehensive approach to substantially improve student achievement outcomes

Provide appropriate social-emotional and community-oriented services and supports for students

3. Transformation

Develop teacher and school leader effectiveness by:

-Replacing the principal who led the school prior to commencement of the transformation model.
-Using evaluations that are based in significant measure on student growth to improve teachers' and school leaders' performance
-Identifying and rewarding school leaders, teachers, and other staff who improve student achievement outcomes and identifying and removing those who do not
-Providing relevant, ongoing, high-quality job-embedded professional development
-Implementing strategies designed to recruit, place, and retain high-quality staff.
-Implement comprehensive instructional reform strategies by:
-Using data to identify and implement comprehensive, research-based, instructional programs that are vertically aligned from one grade to the next as well as aligned with State academic standards
-Differentiating instruction to meet students' needs

Extend learning time and creating community-oriented schools by:

-Providing more time for students to learn core academic content by expanding the school day, the school week, or the school year, and increasing instructional time for core academic subjects during the school day
-Providing more time for teachers to collaborate
-Providing more time for enrichment activities for students
-Providing ongoing mechanisms for family and community engagement
-Provide operating flexibility and sustained support by:
-Obtaining Innovation School status or otherwise ensuring sufficient operating flexibility (including in staffing, calendars/time, and budgeting) to implement fully a comprehensive approach to substantially improve student achievement outcomes
-Ensuring that the school receives ongoing, intensive technical assistance and related support form the LEA, the SEA, or a designated external lead partner organization (such as a school turnaround organization or an EMO)

So where is all this "time" coming from? Our teachers already work 8 hour days. Non-student contact time is minimal and is used for the staff development they mention. How is that supposed to be increased?


Closure:

Close the school and enroll the students who attended the school in other, high-achieving schools within the district.

Uh . . . if we had a place to put the kids, we wouldn't have the school open in the first place.

Fortunately, we aren't in the bottom 5% . . . yet. But each year they add another 5%, and it cannot include an ALREADY identified school. So we'll all be there eventually.

I'm glad I only have five years to retire.

he has been promoting and opening charter schools for several months. Its off the radar to many as other issues such as the war and health take up the headlines.

He knows he can get away with it.

and finish the assassination of public education on the way.

What would happen if we all retired or left the field to the privatizers? How big would the pool of cannon fodder and expendable cheap labor be in the next generation be then?

there are hundreds more to take your jobs. School districts count on it, and that's why they treat their teachers like shit anymore and throw them out like dirty Kleenex.

Until students contemplating this career know the truth about public education as it is currently being implemented and avoid this occupation like the plague, nothing will change.

Contrary to what students have been taught in teachers' colleges, teachers AREN'T decision makers; public education is run like the military. Independent thinking is not allowed.

"Hundreds more looking for your job..." When I worked in CA, there was always a teacher shortage. My district recruited from all over the nation, and even in Canada on some years, to fill the jobs.

In my current district, there have been more applicants than jobs available, and that was before all the RIFs last spring.

I don't think that's going to continue to be the case. In the early years of NCLB, 3 young teachers I worked with chose to go back to school and get another Master's in something else; they'd just finished their degrees and credentialing, had taught for 2-3 years, and decided that they had time, and didn't want to stick around to deal with the bullshit.

Another teacher with 15 years under her belt simply quit. Her spouse made enough money to carry them both, and she didn't want to deal with the bullshit.

Prospective teachers ARE rethinking their options. They've had years to see the damage being done, to see the attacks on public education, the way teachers are treated, and the organized efforts to privatize. Those agendas aren't in the closet; they are out there for all to see. Job and career prospects aren't good in that climate. I think there will be a severe teacher shortage coming down the line in another generation.

I haven't seen any indication of this in my neck of the woods or in most areas of the country I've heard about.

Abusive conditions in the school workplace is education's filthy little secret. Privatization is accelerating the trend. The problem is administrators are virtually unaccountable for their actions, from principals on up.

Giving a charter school to those with extraordinary needs and abilities, yes... giving it to everyone, no. Course thats just me.

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". . . The report found several key positive findings regarding the academic performance of students
attending charter schools. For students that are low income, charter schools had a larger and
more positive effect than for similar students in traditional public schools. English Language
Learner students also reported significantly better gains in charter schools, while special
education students showed similar results to their traditional public school peers.

The report also found that students do better in charter schools over time. While first year charter
school students on average experienced a decline in learning, students in their second and third
years in charter schools saw a significant reversal, experiencing positive achievement gains.

The report found that achievement results varied by states that reported individual data. States
with reading and math gains that were significantly higher for charter school students than would
have occurred in traditional schools included: Arkansas, Colorado (Denver), Illinois (Chicago),
Louisiana and Missouri.

States with reading and math gains that were either mixed or were not different than their peers
in the traditional public school system included: California, the District of Columbia, Georgia
and North Carolina.

States with reading and math gains that were significantly below their peers in the traditional
public school system included: Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas. . . "

Denver charters are all application-based. Not all provide transportation or food service, so that's going to eliminate a lot of low-income kids. Denver Science and Tech, for example, has an eight-page app that is due in January, and is provided only in English. It shouldn't be hard to figure out who will apply and be accepted there.

Not that all charters are bad, I know. But the assumption that they can be compared on an apples-to-apples basis is utterly false. It is NOT a level playing field.

can be compared to each other -

states are too different from each other, districts are too different from each other, - indeed - schools within a district can be too different from each other.]

we only have one charter in our county, and it is incredibly successful. In getting it off the ground, parents did some major research. Essentially, if you look at all the charters out there & split them up into two groups - schools started by for profit enterprises and those started by parents & educators, the latter group have an incredible success rate. Basically, what you're doing is giving parents & educators a green light to dispense with all the bullshit the public entities have to put up with. Even with quasi competent educators & administrators, you seem to get a better product.

We have plenty of charters here started by parents that have been rather disasterous. Right now, the Chavez Academy, for example, is having a terrible time with its founders who were found to be paying themselves well over $200K per year for a system of schools under 2,500 kids. Nepotism runs rampant. Pinnacle Charter here in Denver had the director, her husband and her kids all working in the school, pulling in very high salaries. Another charter in Brighton had hubbie hiring his wife, who then turned around and started having sex with her students - oops! So they're not a guaranteed success by a long shot.

On the other hand, some of the for-profit ones can do very well - if all you really care about is test scores. KIPP Academy, for example, is lovely if you want your child to learn to stay on the blue line from the classroom to the cafeteria. It's regimented as hell, but I guess that's what some parents want . . .

And then there's the small school districts that get lost in all the talk of Chicago and DC and Miami. We don't have metal detectors here in my little district. We don't have shootings. I think a kid had a knife in the park a few years ago, so it's not all hunky-dory. But we're about 77% free/reduced, over 70% hispanic, and 40% come in monolingual Spanish, so we're right in there with the big boys. Gangs are a problem, but we keep it out somehow. And last year more than 90% of our kids applied and were accepted to college. Did they all go? Of course not - some just need to work, others went into the military . . . but a lot did, and the others could have if they'd wanted to. But somehow, I guess that just isn't good enough because we aren't charters.

It's depressing.