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Trial set for man accused in Colo. school shooting (AP)

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:36:27 +0000

DENVER – A judge has set a trial date for a man accused of shooting and wounding two Colorado eighth-graders outside their middle school and is considering a request from prosecutors to order a second mental evaluation for the man.

A Jefferson County judge on Monday scheduled a March 2011 trial for Bruco (BROO’-so) Strong Eagle Eastwood, who faces 15 charges, including attempted first-degree murder. The judge says he won’t order a second mental health evaluation for now, but will make a final ruling later.

Eastwood pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Authorities say teachers tackled and restrained Eastwood until deputies arrived at Deer Creek Middle School in south suburban Denver on Feb. 23.

Trial set for man accused in Colo. school shooting (AP)

For Some Youngsters, a Second Chance at an Exclusive School

admin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:03:50 +0000

Parents of preschoolers who are applying to New York’s top private schools are now coming face to face with the test universally known as the E.R.B., a nerve-racking intelligence exam made more so because there is no do-over if the child has a bad day.

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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Claudia Singleton, center, the mother of a 4-year-old, at a workshop on how New York Cityâ??s top private schools decide which students to admit.

But for a select few students who do not score well, there is something of a second chance. Admissions consultants, preschools and some private schools acknowledge that a small number of children every year are permitted to undergo another round of intelligence testing to supplement their results on the E.R.B., which stands for the Educational Records Bureau, the organization that administers the test.

The practice is not publicized on schools’ Web sites, and the psychologists who offer the service do not openly advertise it. Nor is it entirely clear what qualifies a child for another test, although those who are children of alumni or have a sibling already at a school are most frequently granted the option, according to consultants and schools.

“It is a suggestion that we sometimes make to those whom are part of our community and are looking for advice,” said Margaret Metz, the director of admissions at the Nightingale-Bamford School on the Upper East Side. Those families are not getting preferential treatment, she said, but simply have access to the school staff that other families do not.

“We would be out of line to extend that kind of advice to a family we don’t know,” she said.

Private schools have always been able to admit anyone they want. But the practice of allowing a second test has nonetheless raised concerns about fairness in an admissions process that remains as competitive as ever, with three- and even four-child families showing up regularly at some schools’ doorsteps.

It is also provoking more questions about the relevance of the E.R.B., a mandatory $510 examination that is among the most nail-biting experiences in a parent’s life, and whose reliability is being attacked because of widely available preparation materials.

“It’s unfair for one child to have more pieces in the puzzle than others,” said Martha Hirschman, an assistant head at the Hewitt School. She said the school does not ask for additional scores. “It’s creating an uneven playing field if you’re allowing students to have other pieces that other students do not have the advantage of having.”

But Amanda Uhry, a private school admissions adviser, said it was just part of the game.

“These are private schools; it’s their rules,” Ms. Uhry said.

She said 2 percent to 5 percent of her clients each year were offered the option.

“Usually the people who get a retest are in some way connected to the school, or seriously a very, very excellent candidate,” she said, like a celebrity’s child or one with very wealthy parents willing to contribute to the school’s endowment.

It is an observation made by other consultants, too.

“This is how schools take care of their own,” Ms. Uhry said.

(Nightingale, for one, said parents who were boldface names or wealthy and who were not already tied to the school would not be granted the option. “We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, because you’re a big donor that we would recommend X, Y or Z,’?” Ms. Metz said.)

Although the E.R.B. carries great weight in admissions decisions, schools also rely on interviews, preschool reports and, in some cases, recommendation letters, all considered important criteria at top schools that are overrun with high E.R.B. scorers.

The hourlong test is administered one on one by a psychological professional and includes exercises to judge the development of a child’s verbal skills, reasoning and other abilities. The Educational Records Bureau’s rules permit students to take the test only once each admissions season, which runs from April to January. Preschool directors say that in rare cases, the bureau will grant permission for a second test if the child is demonstrably ill.

Asked about the practice of supplementing the E.R.B. results with a second intelligence test, Antoinette DeLuca, the executive director of the early childhood admissions assessment program at the Educational Records Bureau, said in an e-mail: “It is subject to each school or consortium of schools’ policy as to what information is required in order to make an application complete. However, the schools we serve acknowledge the E.R.B. report as their official admission assessment.”

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For Some Youngsters, a Second Chance at an Exclusive School

Conn. governor hopefuls say urban areas a priority (AP)

admin — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 04:35:42 +0000

STAMFORD, Conn. – More opportunities for jobs and education reform will help jumpstart Connecticuts urban areas, the state’s gubernatorial candidates told an audience Friday night.

In one of their last public forums before next weeks election, Democrat Dan Malloy, Republican Tom Foley and independent candidate Tom Marsh promised a crowd of more than 250 in the auditorium of Stamford High School that the next governor will help spearhead state efforts to add more support for the states minority and poor residents.

The event was part of the annual convention of the Connecticut NAACP.

The three candidates are vying to replace Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who is retiring.

“Elections have consequences and this election may have more consequences then any other in our lifetime,” said Malloy, who is a former mayor of Stamford.

Foley, a Greenwich businessman, said he believes crime rates and school dropout rates will decrease if the next governor can help bring in more jobs and focus on improving education.

He said the state should work more closely with city law enforcement officials to aid in crime reduction efforts and advocated for more youth mentoring programs.

“We need to support parents in the household because in a lot of minority communities there are stresses that aren’t in any other households,” Foley said. “We need to have the programs where we can support young people and provide the type of nurturing experiences that they may not be getting in their households.”

Malloy said he would look into providing more mental health, drug and alcohol treatment programs for prison inmates and mentioned he would work to offer more support services for citizens transitioning from incarceration.

He also said he plans to expand access to pre-kindergarten, saying it was paramount in helping close the states achievement gap.

“We have to change our course when it comes to education,” he said. “The reality is people do not choose to fail to send their children to an early childhood learning experience, they only miss that opportunity because they can’t afford it.”

Marsh, first selectman of Chester, advocated that parents should be more involved in their children’s education but also said the state has to do a better job of giving them support.

“We need to make sure that every parent has the tools that are necessarily to start with their young and have the opportunity for a fair playing field so that their children can grow up and be nurtured and be educated and not be afraid on the streets,” he said.

Malloy said he would use his past experience as Stamford mayor to help bring more issues affecting the states urban population to light.

“I understand that we have to bring back our 19 urban communities in this state, if we are to move forward,” he said.

Foley, who described himself as a problem solver, told the audience that he would lessen state spending and not raise taxes to help close the states multi-billion dollar state budget deficit.

Marsh urged the audience to hold public officials more accountable and said they have to help the government spark change.

“Each and every one of us has to hold our legislators accountable, hold our elected officials accountable,” Marsh said. “If you don’t get out there and make your voice heard, nothing is going to change,” he said.

Conn. governor hopefuls say urban areas a priority (AP)

Alcohol fuels tensions between college students, police

admin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:59:13 +0000

WESTCHESTER, N.Y. — October has been a bad month for college towns.

On Oct. 2, a raid by New Haven, Conn., police to break up a party by Yale University students led to claims of police brutality and excessive force.

One week later, a party by Penn State University students turned violent when a fight between two women spilled out onto the streets of State College, leaving two students with stab wounds.

Last week, Pace University football player Danroy “DJ” Henry was shot and killed by police outside a popular eatery frequented by students from the nearby Pace campus.

What they have in common is alcohol — a common component in encounters between police and college students that can fuel tensions.

“Obviously you’re going to have some standard issues,” said Eugene O’Donnell, professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You’re going to have issues about later-night activity. You’re going to have alcohol-related issues.”

The violence outside Finnegan’s Grill in Thornwood, N.Y., came after a celebration of the school’s homecoming game, attended by about 150 people including students and members of the football team. The crowd spilled into the parking lot after 1 a.m. after a fight inside the bar. On Friday, a law enforcement source told The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News that Henry had a blood-alcohol level of 0.13%, exceeding the legal limit of 0.08%.

It was hardly the first run-in between police and Pace students. In November 2000, several students were among eight men who trashed a campus townhouse in retaliation for an earlier fight at a local bar.

And on April 25, 2008, a 21-year-old student was charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend in her dorm room during a drunken rampage.

“Pace is like a little city unto itself, and they do require police resources,” said Mount Pleasant (N.Y.) Police Chief Louis Alagno. “We’re called there mostly for things such as motor vehicle accidents and aided cases, but we also respond for criminal incidents. There are burglaries, larcenies and the occasional sex crime or assault. It does require police resources.”

You don’t have to tell police in New Rochelle, N.Y., a city with three colleges — College of New Rochelle, Iona College and Monroe College.

“We’ll have pockets of disturbances,” said New Rochelle police Capt. Robert Gazzola, head of the department’s police services division. “I don’t think there’s any lasting animosity between the police department, the Iona College students, the Monroe College students. A lot of it is isolated incidents that perk up and we have to respond.”

The city, plagued for years by rowdy behavior in local bars tackled the problem years ago by passing a stricter “cabaret law” that allowed police to go after and target troublesome bars.

Police in Mount Pleasant and Pleasantville, where most Pace watering holes are located, have enforced underage drinking laws for years — a common tactic in college towns.

But the bar at the center of a fatal shooting had no recent history of problems involving students, according to state and local law enforcement.

Finnegan’s seemed an unlikely place for a violent encounter between police and celebrating college students last weekend.

Pace students interviewed by The Journal News said they generally had not had negative encounters with local police. Some went so far as to say they were shocked to hear of the violence outside Finnegan’s last weekend.

“I wouldn’t say they’re aggressive, they’re just doing their job,” said student John Tripodi. “I guess what they did (outside Finnegan’s) was a little excessive, but if I was him I don’t know what I would have done.”

But Megan Murphy, a freshman accounting major at the Mount Pleasant college, called the police account of the shooting “ridiculous.”

“It’s all too iffy right now. I’m not sure,” Murphy said. “I wasn’t there so I can’t say what exactly happened. (Henry) probably just panicked.”

Alcohol fuels tensions between college students, police

Report: School cooking blast injures 10 students (AP)

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 23:03:32 +0000

TORRANCE, Calif. – Officials say portable cooking equipment has exploded in a Southern California classroom, sending 10 high school students to the hospital.

Officials told the Daily Breeze that four of the injured teens at North High School in Torrance were seriously hurt in the Friday afternoon blast.

No other information was immediately available and calls to fire officials and the school district were not immediately returned.

Report: School cooking blast injures 10 students (AP)

Georgia school district wins $1 million Broad prize

admin — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:55:33 +0000

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia‘s largest school system has won the nation’s top prize in public education, which will provide $1 million in college scholarships for needy students in the district.

Gwinnett County Public Schools snagged the Broad Prize for Urban Education, an award the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation gives annually to urban districts that show the most gains in student performance and closing minority achievement gaps.

It’s the second year in a row the 150,000-student district was nominated for the prize.

The district is 28% black and 25% Hispanic, with about half of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. But last year in reading and math, Gwinnett County schools outperformed all other Georgia districts serving students with similar family incomes.

The district has among the state’s smallest achievement gaps between black and white students at all grades in math, and the district narrowed that gap for middle school math by 8 percentage points between 2006 and 2009. In the same time period, the rate of black students taking the SAT college entrance exam rose 9 percentage points.

Ninety-nine percent of the district’s schools met federal benchmarks in 2009, compared with 86% of schools statewide, and the superintendent has been in office nearly 15 years, providing consistency at the helm of the large district.

Gwinnett County beat out Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, and Socorro Independent School District and Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso.

Though Gwinnett County is in suburban Atlanta, the district meets the criteria for the Broad Prize because it has a high percentage of minority and low-income students.

The prize, created in 2002 by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, is the nation’s largest education award given to school districts. It is designed to reward schools for increasing graduation rates, improving low-income students’ performance, and reducing differences in achievement rates between minority and white students. Winners are chosen from the country’s 100 largest school systems serving a large percentage of low-income and minority students.

The prize money goes to college scholarships for students from each district. Runners-up win $250,000 for scholarships.

The Aldine Independent School District near Houston won last year. Other past winners include the New York City Department of Education, Boston Public Schools and the Houston Independent School District.

Georgia school district wins $1 million Broad prize

Flunking His Midterms? (The Daily Beast)

admin — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:55:52 +0000

NEW YORK – Obama’s ambitious education agenda is in peril, as his allies face firing at the polls in November. Dana Goldstein on the shaky state of school reform.

When Barack Obama was first elected president, his education agenda—deploying federal money to turn around failing schools, hold teachers accountable for student test scores, and open more charter schools—earned glowing reviews from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

At the Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander said, “President-elect Obama has made several distinguished Cabinet appointments. From my view of it all, I think you’re best.”

But those were more innocent times. With partisanship at record levels in the run-up to the midterm elections, Obama’s education-reform agenda—once the calling card for his commitment to bipartisan good governance—is under threat from both the left and right.

Congressional Republicans, including those, like Alexander, who once praised Obama’s education policies, are now calling for a return to 2008 levels of federal spending, which would stop the White House from funding additional Pell Grant student loans and cancel plans for another round of Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education-reform grant competition.

Across the country, politicians who strongly support Obama’s education-reform agenda are at risk of being unseated by those who oppose it, or—like incoming Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray—are more ambivalent.

Across the country, politicians who strongly support Obama’s education reform agenda are at risk of being unseated by those who oppose it.

Obama ally Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his D.C. reelection bid in part because of voter dissatisfaction with his hard-charging schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who announced her resignation Wednesday.

Though Rhee’s take-no-prisoners style was a far cry from Obama’s conciliatory tone, her policies on school closings, teacher dismissals, and performance pay closely mirrored the administration’s, and won D.C. $75 million in federal Race to the Top funding.

Gray has been vague about his specific education-reform plans, and did not respond to a request for comment. Janet Bass, spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Gray, says “implementation of Race to the Top is key now, and must be done collaboratively with teachers, school administratiors, and others.”

In Colorado, long considered ground zero for bipartisan education reform, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett, the celebrated former superintendent of Denver’s public schools, is trailing his Republican Tea Party opponent Ken Buck, who—like fellow Tea Party Senate candidates Sharron Angle and Rand Paul—has said the federal government should stay out of local education policy.

In Denver, Bennett’s handpicked successor as superintendent, Thomas Boasberg, has come under fire from parents’ groups for pursuing an Obama-inspired agenda of school closings and teacher dismissals in poor neighborhoods.

Also at risk is Colorado’s commitment to reforming the teaching profession. Last May, in anticipation of Obama’s Race to the Top grant competition, the state legislature passed one of the most aggressive teacher-reform laws in the country, declaring that student test scores would count for 50 percent of teacher evaluation ratings, and reforming the way teachers are granted tenure and awarded salary increases.

Though a Colorado local of the American Federation of Teachers supports the law, the Colorado Education Association, affiliated with the National Education Association teachers union, has targeted legislators—especially Democrats—who voted for the bill.

Advocates are racing to protect the politicians who’ve supported the Obama reform agenda.

“We’ve been raising money for candidates in Colorado who supported SB 191,” the teacher-evaluation bill, said Charles Barone, federal policy director at Democrats for Education Reform. “We had an event for the sponsors of the bill in D.C.”

Stand for Children Colorado, an education-reform advocacy group, will spend between $150,000 and $300,000 on the campaigns of 18 Democratic and Republican supporters of SB 191 who have been targeted by the Colorado Education Association.

“Regardless of Race to the Top, I think the election would still be difficult and challenging,” said Lindsay Weil, executive director of Stand for Children Colorado. “Winning Race to the Top wouldn’t have changed the positions of the organizations who opposed reform.”

Colorado is not the only state that passed controversial education legislation in part to attract Race to the Top funding, only to be denied the extra federal dollars. Advocates also worry about the sustainability of new education-reform laws in Illinois, Michigan, and Louisiana, none of which won the competition.

“I think in states that didn’t win, the likelihood of some of this stuff getting eroded is real,” said Andrew Rotherham, a former Clinton administration education official and cofounder of the consulting firm Bellwether Education Partners. “I’m not optimistic about [the staying power of] some of these changes.”

Another potential, longer-term pitfall for Obama is whether the education policy levers favored by his administration will lead to lasting gains in student achievement, better teaching, and higher high school and college graduation rates. Research on the outcomes of teacher merit pay programs and charter school expansion, for example, remains mixed.

“The public is not going to care about structural reforms” such as replacing principals or changing teacher-evaluation policies, said Justin Cohen, president of the School Turnaround Group and a former Michelle Rhee staffer in the D.C. public schools. “I would love to see the conversation shift away from those input policies to what we expect to happen as a result of this.”

The Obama administration should set timelines for states and school districts to improve student performance, and should withhold competitive grant funding from those who don’t, Cohen said—regardless of the political fallout.

“I don’t think folks quite understand how troubled the most troubled, lowest performing schools are,” he continued. “The worst thing would be to let them continue failing. Folks need to be very blunt and take the Band-Aid off. Unless people understand just how underperforming these schools really are, we won’t have the outrage we really need.”

Dana Goldstein is a Spencer Education Journalism Fellow at Columbia University, and a former associate editor at The Daily Beast. Her writing on politics, women’s issues, and education has also appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, and Slate. You can follow her work at www.danagoldstein.net.

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For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Flunking His Midterms? (The Daily Beast)

State Is Likely to Ease a Rule on Extra Help for Students

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:00:08 +0000

The New York State Board of Regents is set to excuse school districts from a requirement to provide extra help to all students who fail the state’s standardized exams, a number that grew by hundreds of thousands after the state made the exams tougher to pass this year.

The vote by the board, which is scheduled for early next week, would cover more than 125,000 students in New York City alone. City officials, however, played down the issue, saying it would not change their requirement that schools come up with plans to address the needs of all their struggling students.

John King, the state’s deputy education commissioner, said Tuesday that the loosened restriction was intended to reduce the financial burden on districts at a time of shrinking budgets. It is also part of a move by Albany to give districts more flexibility in following a policy that, since 1999, has mandated academic intervention for children who fail the standardized tests.

When the tougher standard on math and English tests for third through eighth graders was announced this summer, Mr. King said, “districts around the state had already passed their budgets, and there was a question of whether the Regents were in the position to essentially impose a new, unfunded mandate.”

Students who would have failed their English or math exams even under the old, easier standard will still receive extra help, usually in the form of tutoring or counseling. The vote would relieve districts of the requirement to provide help to the large number of students who would have passed under the old standards but failed under the new. The relief would last a year.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s deputy chancellor for performance and accountability, said that while budget cuts meant there would be no extra money to pay for help for the struggling students, schools were expected to improve instruction and have more flexibility in their planning time. “I don’t think the Regents’ vote will have much impact one way or other,” he said.

But some city elected officials and advocates expressed concern that schools would use the leniency as an excuse not to provide help to children who need it.

“I don’t want to see school districts let off the hook here,” said Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate. “We had a seismic change, and so far, what we have seen is an attempt to minimize the meaning of it.”

Mr. de Blasio released new data from the city on Tuesday that gave a clearer picture of who exactly those children were. Of the 239,000 city students who failed the English test, 108,000 would have passed last year. Of the 196,000 city students who failed the math test, most, 125,000, would have passed under the easier standard. Surprisingly, the newly failing students were spread relatively evenly throughout the city’s 32 school districts, which vary widely in income and race. Between 20 and 30 percent of students in many districts were in the category.

Bob Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, said an informal survey of 14 rural and suburban districts found that about half planned to use the state’s flexibility to not offer academic intervention to students who would have passed in 2009.

“Most had said early on they were going to do whatever they could, so I’m surprised,” he said, adding that his association supported the move as a way to avoid more painful cuts, like teacher layoffs. There were also, he said, “significant doubts” in the state about the effectiveness of the mandated tutoring policy.

One group, the Coalition for Educational Justice, planned a rally in Brooklyn on Wednesday to ask the Regents to reconsider.

The exemption for the newly failing students for tutoring and intervention was passed on an emergency basis in July, and Mr. King indicated that he expected the Regents to approve it again next week. That sentiment was echoed by Merryl H. Tisch, the Regents chancellor.

“I just think that at the end of the day the focus on these districts to move their kids to meet the new bar is going to be significant and intense,” even without the mandate, Ms. Tisch said.

State Is Likely to Ease a Rule on Extra Help for Students

Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Difficulties

admin — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:44:31 +0000

President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.

Movie Review | ‘Waiting for â??Superman’: Students Caught in the School Squeeze
(September 24, 2010)

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Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Julio Rodriguez, standing, teaches physics and earth science at Promise Academy. Donielle Richards, foreground, worked on a physics problem.

Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.

But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start earlier this decade typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada’s two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’?” the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.

A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Gal?pagos Islands or Disney World.

The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And its cost — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about its utility as a nationwide model.

Mr. Canada, 58, who began putting his ideas into practice on a single block, on West 119th Street, in the mid-1990s, does not apologize for the cost of his model, saying his goals are wider than just fixing a school or two. His hope is to prove that if money is spent in a concentrated way to give poor children the things middle-class children take for granted — like high-quality schooling, a safe neighborhood, parents who read to them, and good medical care — they will not pass on the patterns of poverty to another generation.

“You could, in theory, figure out a less costly way of working with a small number of kids, and providing them with an education,” Mr. Canada said. “But that is not what we are attempting to do. We are attempting to save a community and its kids all at the same time.”

Few would deny that a middle-class renaissance is under way in the sections of Harlem where Mr. Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone have focused their efforts. The zone extends from 116th to 143th Streets, between Madison Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

All children who live in the zone have access to many of its services, including after-school programs, asthma care, precollege advice and adult classes for expectant parents, called Baby College. The organization has placed young teaching assistants, known as peacemakers, in many of the elementary school classrooms in the area and poured money into organizing block associations, helping tenants buy buildings from the city, and refurbishing parks and playgrounds. By linking services, the program aims to improve on early-childhood programs like Head Start, whose impact has been shown to evaporate as children age.

Amid the facades of new condominiums that signal gentrification, however, deep poverty remains. So does low student performance in most of the neighborhood’s public schools, despite modest gains over the past decade and a growing number of better-performing charter schools, a development Mr. Canada helped pioneer.

Last month, the Obama administration awarded $10 million in grants to 21 neighborhood groups around the country to help them plan their own versions of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the president is seeking $210 million for next year, although appropriations committees in the Senate and the House have earmarked only $20 million and $60 million, respectively.

But there has been some criticism. Grover J. Whitehurst, a co-author of a Brookings Institution analysis of the zone (pdf), said there was still too little evidence that its approach, of linking social services to promote student achievement, justified an investment of federal education dollars, and urged that a more rigorous study be conducted.

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Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Difficulties

Chicago News Cooperative: Charter Education Expanding in Chicago

admin — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:02:04 +0000

From a windowless basement office on Chicago’s West Side, Greg White is trying to answer public education’s $2 million-dollar question: What is the top priority for a school in Chicago’s cash-strapped district?

Chicago News Cooperative

A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of Chicago and the surrounding area for The New York Times.

The answer for Mr. White, chief executive of the LEARN Charter School Network — which received two $1 million grants from Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network and the United States Department of Education last month — is to open a fifth charter school in the network next fall. It is one of 10 charter schools in Chicago that Mr. White said he wanted to open in as many years, which would allow him to hire dozens of out-of-work teachers.

A month ago, those ambitious plans were in jeopardy. Chicago Public Schools approved a budget that cut district financing to charter schools by 6 percent, which could remove more than $400,000 from the network’s budget this year. The two grants will cover the cost of opening the fifth school, Mr. White said.

The Noble Charter School Network, also based in Chicago, received $3.3 million from the same Department of Education grant, also to help finance its plans to open more schools.

The gifts come amid debate over the sustainability of charter schools’ explosive growth, and the quality of their education. In Illinois, charter schools are public schools approved by the Board of Education, but are operated by for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Charters may develop their own curriculums and hire non-union teachers.

Charter school proponents said the awards were a vote of confidence for high-performing, nontraditional schools and could bring jobs to the school district, which was forced by budget cuts to lay off hundreds of teachers.

But Timothy Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute, said the projected growth of LEARN and other charter school networks posed a threat to neighborhood schools because most district financing was allocated per-pupil.

Mr. Knowles said that as charter schools siphoned students from the surrounding area, neighborhood schools might face underenrollment and closing.

“The economies of scale don’t work,” he said. “Are neighborhood school institutions going to go away if charters grow and continue to be successful?”

Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, is not convinced that LEARN has the financial support to grow that quickly, but he said he would rather see the network expand into more of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

“Whenever a business scales from 3 to 10 stores, the question is always whether or not you can maintain the same management quality,” Mr. Broy said.

LEARN, a nonprofit organization, has a bare-bones budget that does not include gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias or playgrounds — unless the classroom space it rents from the public schools or private landlords already includes those amenities.

Mr. White said he preferred to use extra money to bring in more teachers.

Last year the network hired 57 additional people at its four schools, some at salaries lower than those of public school teachers. Next year it expects to hire 14 full-time teachers and 9 instructional assistants at the new campus.

Mr. White said the network had received more than 150 teaching applications since Ms. Winfrey’s televised donation.

Chicago News Cooperative: Charter Education Expanding in Chicago

Holy Family School » school

Trial set for man accused in Colo. school shooting (AP)

For Some Youngsters, a Second Chance at an Exclusive School

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Conn. governor hopefuls say urban areas a priority (AP)

Alcohol fuels tensions between college students, police

Report: School cooking blast injures 10 students (AP)

Georgia school district wins $1 million Broad prize

Flunking His Midterms? (The Daily Beast)

State Is Likely to Ease a Rule on Extra Help for Students

Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Difficulties

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Movie Review | ‘Waiting for â??Superman’: Students Caught in the School Squeeze (September 24, 2010)

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Chicago News Cooperative: Charter Education Expanding in Chicago

Chicago News Cooperative

Movie Review | ‘Waiting for â??Superman’: Students Caught in the School Squeeze
(September 24, 2010)