Codman Academy and the Huntington Theater

A senior at Codman Academy is featured in Adrian Walker's column in today's Globe, which highlights Codman's affiliation with the Huntington Theater.

Roxbury Prep in EdWeek

Roxbury Prep is featured in an article in the February 4th edition of Education Week. You need to be a subscriber to get online access the whole piece (which is highlighted in the Marshall Memo this week).

Are You Out There?

Not sure if anyone is reading this blog yet, or if I'm effectively talking to myself. If so, please consider leaving a quick comment so I can get a sense of readership. Also, if you have any thoughts on possible future posts, I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks!
mathteacher

Charter School Basketball Star

Nice story in the Globe today (front page, no less) about a Springfield charter school student who is now the leading scorer in MA girls basketball history.

Schools Matter: My Way or the Highway

Jim Horn, a professor at Cambridge College, writes a blog called Schools Matter. In it, he rails against charter schools, KIPP, TFA, etc. arguing that they exist to serve the needs of their racist, business-centric, foundation-supported masters. A fine piece of arch-liberal demagoguery. I like it because it pisses me off and makes me think. He writes:

"This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasizing testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build."

Professor Horn is from the school of thought that says that until poverty, recism and inequity are eradicated in this country, the public schools are doomed. I would agree with much of that.
Unfortunately, he also seems to believe that we in education should stay the course until those problems are fixed. I agree we need to fix those problems. However, I disagree that we should wait until they're fixed to educate urban kids.

I want my students, the ones facing oppression, racism, classism, etc. to have opportunites to have a better education than their parents. Hell, I want them to have a better education than I had. But for that to happen, they need to be able to read and write and calculate. I, for one, think that my school and others like it are making it happen for a group of kids who wouldn't have had that opportunities in the district schools. It's sad that Professor Horn doesn't think that's ok.

(I wonder if he's even been to a charter school before or has even met the dedicated young people who make up Teach for America. Often, I don't think charter school critics have...)

Too MANY IEPs?

A new 6th grade student at our school arrived earlier this year with a massive IEP. He had been an enormous behavior problem at his previous schools - charter and public alike. He had trouble with attentional issues and got in a lot of trouble. One of the goals on his IEP was that he should be able to spend 15 mintues in a classroom without disturbing his peers. Then, we found out that he was reading on a 2nd grade reading level. Not good signs.

Here's the amazing part. The 6th grade team put in place a number of supports, especially around reading. He began getting daily phonics support and started reading "just right books" that were on his reading level. As a result of this attention, he's made massive improvement, improving more than 2 whole grade levels in reading in half of a year. What's more, he hasn't been a behavior problem in the least. It seems to me that many of his behavior problems were the result of being in chaotic schools and having never learned to really be a reader.

My question is this: Did this student really need an IEP? If he had been at our school or a school like it in the earliest days of his education, would he have been on an IEP? I don't know him well enough to know the full story, but you have to wonder.

Charter schools are often critiqued for not having as many IEP students. But maybe, just maybe, district schools have too many -not because of schools choice, but because sometimes kids just need a more structured environment or a little more support than a teacher can provide with 25 kids in a class. I wonder if sometimes students who get labeled in district schools wouldn't really need those labels in a different envirnoment. Not all of them, of course. But maybe enough to make the percentages a little more equitable between district and charter schools.

Globe Editorial: So-So Suggestions from Patrick

On Thursday, the Globe published an editorial commenting on Governor Patrick's charter school proposal from earlier in the week.

Today, they published some of the comments to this piece in the Advice and Dissent feature.