Posts Tagged ‘School’
Cosby to headline school fundraiser
January 17th, 2012
Comedian and education activist Bill Cosby is visiting Connecticut to help a Hartford magnet school as it tries to raise $100,000 for college scholarships for its students.
Capital Preparatory Magnet School says it had raised $90,000 by mid-week and hopes to raise significantly more through Friday’s event, in which Cosby will give the keynote talk.
The Hartford Courant reports the $50-per-ticket fundraiser has sold out.
It will also include Soledad O’Brien of CNN, former NBA star Jalen Rose, education reformer Geoffrey Canada and NFL Hall of Famer Franco Harris.
Capital Prep prides itself on a 100 percent acceptance rate for graduating seniors to get into four-year colleges. But its founder and principal says that spiraling tuition costs make it difficult for many families to afford higher education without scholarships.
Tags: School, School Fundraiser
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Heading Back to School
January 3rd, 2012
1. Motivation. It’s so easy to let school slide. If you’re tired or don’t feel well, school is one of the first things to go. And after time off, it’s really hard to get up the motivation to leap back in. I suggest (and I plan to) making the first couple of days back fun days. Pull out the crafts and the educational games. Ease back into the routine by padding the way with fun rather than diving right back in to all the workbooks. I think the teacher needs this just as much as the students.
2. Lapses in memory. When I was a homeschooled kid, we did year-round school because we forgot too much if we took the summer off. The same thing can happen if you just take a few days off – your children can forget skills and concepts they were learning just before the break. If you need to backtrack, no worries-just go back to where they feel comfortable and move forward from there. It’s not a race.
3. Keeping it positive. Sometimes when we’ve taken a break, we put pressure on ourselves to get back into the swing of things. We worry about how much time we’ve lost, and if our kids are reluctant, we might put too much negativity into the process. Homeschool is about finding joy with our children, and if we get too stressed about catching up, we’re missing the most crucial part of why we chose to homeschool in the first place.
Welcome back to school, and may it be fun and rewarding for you and your children!
Tags: School
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Is a School Just a “Place”?
August 24th, 2011
Last week WAMU ran a segment on charter school closings in Washington, DC, that bothered me. Not because poorly performing (in terms of academics or finances) charter schools were closed (I firmly believe that low-performing charter schools should close), and not only because of the process by which the schools were closed (too late in the year for students to get into either the DCPS lottery for out of neighborhood schools or the lotteries of many other charters, and with little communication with the families of students attending the schools), but because of some of the language used to talk about the situation, specifically the word “placement.”
As the result of three charter schools closing and two eliminating their high school programs, nearly 750 students needed to find new schools. Several have had a great deal of difficulty in doing so. According to reporter Kavitha Cardoza, about 50% of students were without “placements” just ten days before the start of the school year. 64 of the 128 students impacted by the closure of the secondary school program at one charter school had found “placements.” 128 of 229 students from another closed charter had been placed, and there was a 53% “placement” rate for students from a third.
The word “placement” is so cold in this context. Schools are not just “places” where children go. They are one of the most central aspects of a child’s life, and often a key part of her identity. Going to a new school is going to a new “place” – but those places are not all equal in the eyes of a student.
A child’s school is one of the most central aspects of a parent’s life, too (one caregiver called her grandson’s move to his new school “a leap of faith,” having no prior relationship with it). But this story certainly did not give me that impression about schools in DC. The story seemed to portray schools as widgets, not the centers of community that they truly are (or at least, that they should be).
I got a completely different sense in reading (that same day) about the opening of schools in Joplin, MO on August 17, after one of the deadliest tornados in US history hit the town in late May. There was devastation throughout the community. Six school buildings were destroyed, with many others badly damaged. A promise two days after the storm by the superintendent to reopen schools on time was met with doubt. But it was a promise fulfilled.
As Ashley Micklethwaite, president of the local Board of Education, was quoted in the New York Times coverage of the reopening: “It became a rallying point for the community” (emphasis added). The opening of schools “led residents of a nearby retirement home to line the street cheering for the arriving teenagers.”
The Associated Press points out that schools played “an outsized role in Joplin’s recovery, for reasons symbolic as much as practical.” One example: The hours and locations of summer schools were expanded, allowing “the community’s children” (emphasis added) a reassuring routine and their parents time to deal with the adult issues that follow a tragedy like this – insurance agents, contractors and social services.
To me, that is what school should be. That should be the relationship we strive to have all students, parents and community members experience with their school. It is not just a “placement.”
Tags: School, School Just
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Oregon charter school debates lead to little progress
May 23rd, 2011
In Stefanie Baker’s second grade class, classmates at the City View Charter School explore sensory perception through taste. SALEM –With public schools closing, school years shortening and teachers being laid off, money is the No. 1 education issue on state lawmakers’ agenda. But there’s another education topic gobbling up just as much time in Salem — charter schools.
Charter schools, which are semi-independent public schools, serve only 3 percent of Oregon’s public school students. But the debate over them has eaten time, stirred ideological rancor and stalled other education issues, not just for this year’s Legislature but for the past several years.
This session, lawmakers have held nearly two dozen hearings and work sessions, with only one charter school bill successfully moved through a legislative chamber. Over the past five years, legislators have proposed more than 40 bills that focus on charter schools, debated them in more than 60 meetings, and passed only five laws, three of which had little impact on the way schools operate.
Supporters say charters are a key avenue of education reform and need room and resources to grow. Skeptics say charters destabilize traditional schools and don’t yield better student achievement. But both supporters and critics are frustrated with the Legislature’s record and say state leaders have let the issue be overrun by political wrangling.
Rep. Betty Komp, one of the co-chairs of the Joint Ways and Means education subcommittee and a member of the policy-writing education committee, said the state has bigger education needs and issues than those raised around charters.
“How do we keep kids in school and have them ready for the workforce we so desperately need?” the Woodburn Democrat asked. “That’s the question we need to be asking.”
House Education Co-Chairman Matt Wingard calls charter schools the only type of education reform the state has really embraced and defends the time spent on them.
“We weren’t even having the conversation about these options in the past sessions,” says Wingard, who also heads a public relations firm that contracts with the state’s largest online charter school. “Ultimately, the conversations are not enough. We do want to see some of these reforms in Oregon. But having the conversation at all, that is an important step, it’s where we start.”
The other education co-chair, Corvallis Democrat Sara Gelser, spent months gearing up for what she hoped would be a final resolution on how online charter schools should operate in Oregon their size, their funding and their enrollment restrictions.
But she admits that there has not been a lot of discussion about the bill she sponsored which was based on recommendations from the Oregon Board of Education, and that there’s little likelihood that there will be enough political will to push it forward this session.
“I am disappointed we haven’t been able to do more for parents and kids to give them certainty,” Gelser said. “I really wanted to work. But I haven’t been able to find a partner that’s willing to put good policy above politics.”
Gelser’s frustration reflects both the partisan politics of the evenly split House and the ideological differences between those who want to give more power to charter schools and those who contend they need to be more tightly regulated.
Charter school parents say they want to see state leaders give families clear answers and direction on what charter schools, both traditional and online will look like in Oregon. Every year, the state’s two oldest full-time online charter schools must petition the state for waivers to continue operating while they wait for a permanent legislative solution.
Families are paying the price for legislators’ inaction, says Cindy McGraw, who leads a statewide online charter school parent group.
“I think we started making headway, but it’s been tough,” she said. “It’s tough to look at what has been put into this issue versus what we’ve gotten out, both as a parent and a taxpayer. It’s like paying $10 and only getting 1 gallon of gas.”
Kaaren Heikes, executive director of the Northwest Center for Education Options, said the charter school debate has been dominated by political extremes. That overshadows the fact that most charter school supporters are in the middle and open to discussion.
“The political polarization has only marginalized the thousands of kids, parents and teachers who are working in those schools,” said Heikes, whose group represents most of the state’s 108 charter schools.
Heikes was among more than one dozen education stakeholders from around the state who met in 2010 to discuss Oregon’s 11-year-old charter school law and make recommendations for the future. The school board members, teachers, district officials and parents couldn’t agree on more than minor changes to update the law and smooth the application process. But even that legislation, Senate Bill 255, is hung up in the House Rules committee after passing unanimously in the Senate.
As lawmakers get more focused on hashing out the details of the state budget, charter school policy issues are likely to take a back seat.
Some say that’s a good idea.
Chuck Bennett, government relations director of the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators, says lawmakers have spent more time on charter schools than necessary and need to stay focused on education funding and equipping schools with the freedom, training and tools they need to reach kids.
“We’ve got huge issues to address in public education,” Bennett said. “Charter schools is not one of them.”
And some argue that the debate over size limits, money and structure have obscured the major issues that should be explored about the state’s charter school effort: innovative teaching techniques and improved achievement for kids.
Rep. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, says the truly important discussions about charter schools have been essentially hijacked by lobbying power and politics.
“We’re seeing the classic clash of special interests,” he said, “and the kids of the state are paying for it.”
Tags: Charter School, School
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Cash-strapped districts considering switch to four-day school week
May 3rd, 2011
Is the 180-day school year going the way of slate chalkboards?
As California lawmakers are considering cutting back the school year about 150 days, two Pennsylvania school districts are looking at changing to four-day weeks to save money.
The Associated Press reports that Coatesville Area School District in Chester County and the Warren County School District are considering becoming the first in the state adopt shorter weeks to deal with shrinking budgets.
A four-day week would save Coatesville about $1.7 million a year because of lower operations and transportation costs, as the district faces a $12 million budget gap, superintendent Richard Como told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
He’d rather trim the days than cut 53 jobs, and could consider offering daycare if there was a demand for it.
Last month, Matthew Jones, coordinator of grants and foundation development for the Warren County School District, told a budget team the short week has worked well for districts elsewhere, which reported better attendance and student morale while lengthening the time spent in class each day, The AP reported.
Administrators there don’t think student achievement would suffer. It doesn’t seem like something that is going to impact it negatively,” Jones told the panel, according to the Warren Times Observer.
Districts are considering taking Mondays off, and Coatesville would extend the length of the school days.
Last week CaliforniaWatch.com reported that the state’s districts are facing a cut of $800 to $825 per student in addition to a $1,000-per-student reduction already in place.
Keep in mind that Michigan, like Oklahoma and some other states, shifted its attendance mandates to hours instead of days to give districts more scheduling flexibility. The 1,098-hour target works out to 165 days, though districts plan more.
And, consider that And Gov. Snyder announced his Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace approach on Wednesday that opens the door for changing the way we think of school in terms of attendance and the way students are taught.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan called blended learning, where students take part of their classes online and away from school, the future at the recent Governor’s Education Summit, so student might still be learning on those days when school isn’t scheduled.
And, when you make the switch from slate to wipe boards, remember to use dry-erase makers. I speak from experience.
Tags: Fourday School, School
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