Ventures in the News
Given the great work they are doing, our portfolio ventures are regularly featured in local and national news. Click on the links below to read recent articles showcasing their achievements.
Charter Schools Flourish in Harlem: But teachers unions are still trying to stop their growth.
NEW YORK--The Harlem Armory in upper Manhattan was built in 1933 to honor the celebrated 369th Regiment—also known as the Harlem Hellfighters, the first black regiment to fight in World War I. On a recent Saturday, however, the Art Deco edifice at Fifth Avenue and 142nd Street hosted an army of parents and educators who are fighting to provide Harlem children with decent schools. Despite heavy snowfall the night before, more than 3,000 people trekked to the third annual Harlem Education Fair. … Today there are 24 Harlem charters. They select students by lottery, and they educate about 7,700 of the community's 50,000 school-age kids. Another 5,700 children matriculate at one of Harlem's 30 private and parochial schools. "Harlem now has more school choice per square foot than any other place in the country," says Eva Moskowitz, who operates four charters in Harlem. Nationwide, the average black 12th grader reads at the level of a white eighth grader. Yet Harlem charter students at schools like KIPP and Democracy Prep are outperforming their white peers in wealthy suburbs. At the Promise Academy charter schools, 97% of third graders scored at or above grade level in math. At Harlem Village Academy, 100% of eighth graders aced the state science exam. Every third grader at Harlem Success Academy 1, operated by Ms. Moskowitz of Success Charter Network, passed the state math exam, and 71% of them achieved the top score. … Ms. Moskowitz, a former city council member, says that turnout at the education fair—hundreds of parents and children arrived early and stood outside in the cold before the doors were opened—refute claims that low-income minorities are indifferent to their children's educational needs. "I've never met an apathetic mom of any race or ethnicity," she says. "They all want good schools for their kids. It's a problem of supply, not demand." (Wall Street Journal – subscription required)
Building a Better Teacher
NEW YORK--ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing. … Lemov doesn’t reject incentives. In fact, at Uncommon Schools, the network of 16 charter schools in the Northeast that he helped found and continues to help run today, he takes performance into account when setting teacher pay. Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. And there is still a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math. The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching. (New York Times Magazine)
More Funding for Principal Training Deemed Vital
NATIONAL--As principals come under more pressure than ever to improve underperforming schools, leadership experts say it’s time for the nation to emphasize recruiting and training the next generation of school leaders. “There’s been a lot of emphasis on teacher quality and teacher development, but not nearly enough in the area of leadership development, and specifically, principal development,” said Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “You will have transformation of a school with strong leadership. It will not happen without it.” Mr. Domenech’s Arlington, Va.-based association, which represents primarily district-level officials, and two groups that represent the nation’s principals are hopeful that a reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act will increase federal support for the recruitment and training of principals.…. Gail Connelly, the executive director of the Alexandria, Va.-based NAESP, said about half its 25,000 members have been part of the organization for five years or less, marking the influx of younger school leaders into the nation’s principal ranks. The elementary principals’ group has long run its National Mentor Program, in which veteran and retired principals coach their less experienced peers across the country. And Ms. Connelly pointed to the success of programs like the New York City Leadership Academy, which prepares principals in the nation’s largest school district, and New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit group that trains principals for urban districts, in bringing new blood into the field But Ms. Connelly said that while those efforts are laudable, they are expensive and produce relatively few principals, which is troubling because guidelines for spending federal economic-stimulus money for education require that principals be replaced in school turnaround efforts. (Education Week – subscription required)
Candidates to run Phila. schools cut to 6
PHILADELPHIA--The Philadelphia School District said yesterday that it had narrowed to six the nonprofits eligible to take over some of the city's lowest-performing schools. The six - they include Mastery Charter Schools and Congreso de Latinos Unidos - were chosen from 28 applicants vying to participate in Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's Renaissance Schools initiative. Five are Philadelphia groups that operate charters and want to convert district schools into charter schools. The sixth - Johns Hopkins/Diplomas Now, based in Baltimore - has proposed taking over schools but staffing them with district employees. All the selected organizations have strong academic track records and demonstrated community support, said Benjamin W. Rayer, associate superintendent for charter schools, partnership schools, and new schools. Next, the six will submit detailed proposals describing their proposed curricula and spelling out how they would achieve academic success at schools with long histories of poor performance. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Turnarounds can work: Here's Howe: Fresh start, fresh attitudes have made all the difference (By Mary Mitchell)
CHICAGO--To an outsider, Howe School of Excellence rises from the landscape like a decaying fortress. But to the people who work there every day -- the principal, administrators, teachers and students -- Howe is a haven in a sea of chaos. Two years ago, Howe was one of the feeder elementary schools completely shut down under the controversial "turnaround" movement that continues to draw heated protests. On Wednesday, for instance, teachers and the Chicago Teachers Union were out in full force at Phillips High School to protest the Chicago Board of Education's plan to close that school. This is a complex issue, and some would argue that because CPS can't fire all the parents, it has decided to fire all the teachers. But if Howe, on the city's West Side, is an example of what a fresh start can do, then the "turnaround" process is worth the pain. Howe reopened with a new principal and a new staff. It is now managed by Academy for Urban School Leadership, a not-for-profit group that trains teachers to work in urban, high-poverty communities. (Chicago Sun-Times – registration required)
Big changes slated for 3rd Ward schools: Phillips would undergo turnaround
CHICAGO--The Chicago Board of Education was expected to affirm a plan to “turnaround” Wendell Phillips High School, 244 E. Pershing, at its Feb. 24 meeting, and designate a nonprofit organization, the Academy for Urban School Leadership, as the school’s new operator. Final results from the board meeting were unavailable as of Chicago Journal’s Feb. 24 noon deadline. The turnaround strategy Chicago Public Schools proposed for Phillips would leave its current students in place while dismissing all adults in the building, from classroom teachers to school janitors. They would be allowed to reapply for their jobs. Phillips enrolls students from across the mid-South Side area and includes much of the South Loop inside its neighborhood attendance boundary. At a Feb. 18 meeting sponsored by Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), CPS chief administrative officer Bob Runcie called Phillips’ graduation and attendance rates (34 and 68.5 percent, respectively) simply unacceptable and noted an average ACT of 13.8 that was lagging behind the rest of the district. Officials from the Academy of Urban School Leadership promoted their academic program, promising community input into how Phillips would be remade during a six-month planning process. Donald Feinstein, the organization’s executive director, said major changes were occasionally necessary for such struggling schools as Phillips. (Chicago Journal)
Rookie Chicago Public Schools teachers get full-time coaches: School district expands mentor program, sees early signs of success in battle against high turnover rate
CHICAGO--Halfway through Mandy Nelson's first year of teaching struggling fifth-graders, she has a different reaction than many newbie teachers: She loves it. A high percentage of teachers in the Chicago school system — as many as 39 percent, by one study — leave after their first year, frustrated by difficult conditions, lack of resources and indifference from higher-ups. Nelson believes the difference for her was a mentor from the New Teacher Center to help her navigate the many rough patches and occasionally act as her advocate. "I feel like [the New Teacher Center] is one thing in CPS that's really working. Everyone at my school is stretched thin and doesn't have time to mentor me," she said. The California-based nonprofit provides full-time mentors to coach first- and second-year teachers. CPS is expanding what had been a pilot program to try to curb the high churn rate of new teachers, an expensive and disruptive problem, said Sheri Frost Leo, a manager in CPS' Office of Human Capital. "At the schools where the New Teachers Center was in place [with the pilot program], turnover decreased," said Frost Leo, leading CPS to enroll increasing numbers of beginner teachers every year since 2006. (Chicago Tribune – registration required)
New Orleans charter schools form partnership to analyze performance
NEW ORLEANS--In an unusual collaboration, 10 diverse New Orleans charter schools have banded together to share data and test score results during the school year, with the goal of better gauging their strengths and weaknesses. The Achievement Network, an organization that already works in Boston and Washington D.C., creates a series of tests for the schools to administer every six to eight weeks. A school can then analyze its results classroom by classroom, and compare its overall results with the other nine schools, allowing administrators to pinpoint areas of concern well before the students take the state's standardized exams, the LEAP and iLEAP tests, in the spring. The 10 schools participating this year include some of the city's most high-performing charter schools, and some that perform below average. Charter schools receive public funding, but are privately run. … The Achievement Network hopes to expand its work in New Orleans, adding more schools each year. This year, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans paid about two-thirds of each school's fee, with the schools picking up the remaining $10,000. The cost per school will go down next year, and New Schools for New Orleans will probably continue to pick up a portion, although specifics have not been outlined yet. (Times-Picayune – registration required)
Report: Federal Policymakers Urged to Focus Education Funding on Building Effectiveness of Teaching Forces: Changes to Federal Education Funding Could Reverse the “Widget Effect” and Close the Achievement Gap
NEW YORK, NY—The New Teacher Project today released a blueprint for how federal education funding could be better used to address students’ most pressing need: effective teachers. The policy brief, “How Federal Policy Can Reverse the Widget Effect,” illustrates how current funding priorities designed to improve teacher quality inadvertently reinforce the tendency of school systems to treat teachers like interchangeable parts rather than acknowledging and responding to differences in teacher effectiveness.
(TNTP Policy Brief)
A Quick Fix for America's Worst Schools
PHILADELPHIA--In 2006, Shoemaker was considered one of Philadelphia's most troubled schools. Fewer than a third of its eighth-graders exhibited proficiency on the state math exam. Fewer than half were proficient in reading. Violence was common, and students had full run of the hallways. Most of the bulletin boards had been torched, and the principal's office had metal bars on the windows. One teacher says even the UPS guy was hesitant to go inside. Three years later, students walk through Shoemaker's halls quietly in single-file lines, the school's walls are graffiti-free, test scores have increased dramatically, and packages are presumably being delivered on time. If this sounds like an entirely different school, that's because it basically is. In fall 2006, the School District of Philadelphia gave the building over to Mastery Charter Schools, a local operator of charter schools — that is, ones that are publicly funded but privately managed. The adults left, the kids remained, and the once failing school has been turned around. (TIME Magazine)
D.C. public schools reevaluating lunch program
WASHINGTON--A top D.C. public schools' official said this week the District is reevaluating its multimillion-dollar contract with a major national food service provider and considering significant reforms to its school lunch program. The official acknowledgement of the decision to improve student meals in the District — a bellwether city for school reform that also suffers the highest child-obesity rate in the nation — comes on the heels of an investigative report by The Washington Times and as lawmakers weigh the nutritional standards of the food that schoolchildren eat. Ms. Rhee and D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said at the time they hoped to improve school meals and save the city money by privatizing food service. However, The Times' investigation in January found that Chartwells, with a contract that could total $140 million by 2013, had served sugar cereal for lunch and nachos every day in other school districts, failed to meet federal requirements for iron in D.C. schools, and neglected to post nutritional information online. In 2007, Chartwells failed to inform school officials in Racine, Wis., of previous reports of tortilla contamination and a national recall by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). More than 100 children in Racine who ate the tortillas became ill. By the end of the current school year, the District will have paid Chartwells more than $50 million. The contract gives the District the option to renew in May. Mr. Tata said the District is looking to consider "all available options." Chartwells is one of three companies that responded to the recent request for information. The others are: SodexhoMagic, the company that lost the 2008 bid to Chartwells; and Revolution Foods, an Oakland, Calif.-based provider that partners with Whole Foods and local growers to produce handmade meals. (Washington Post – registration required)
5 city schools get reprieve, won't close: CPS Huberman cites safe-passage concerns for kids
CHICAGO--Five city schools were spared from closure or other major shake-ups -- in several cases because of student safety concerns -- under a series of last-minute reprieves announced Wednesday by Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman. Huberman made the changes to his original list of 14 shake-ups just days before a City Council hearing on the school closure process. A resolution by Aldermen Pat Dowell (3rd) and Freddrenna Lyle (6th) contends that confusing criteria were used to pick schools for shake-ups with "little or no input'' from the community and little time to respond. Both also want a one-year moratorium on closings. A City Council Education Committee hearing on the resolution is scheduled for Monday, just two days before School Board members are to vote on the new recommendations. Huberman said Wednesday his latest plans show he listened to the community. He said he took very seriously concerns about gang conflicts, arguing that it's tough to foresee some potential problems until the shake-ups are announced. "The community helped us work through understanding the complexity for students that some of these moves would cause,'' Huberman said. "Where a safe-passage concern became paramount, we altered course.'' Concerns about children crossing unsafe areas to new receiving schools were part of the reason Huberman said he canceled the closure of Guggenheim in the Englewood neighborhood and Curtis in the Roseland neighborhood and withdrew the consolidation of Paderewski, in South Lawndale. Curtis still faces a shake-up; its management will be taken over by the Academy for Urban School Leadership. (Chicago Sun-Times)
Revolutionary Educators
NATIONAL – Educational reforms typically have incremental gains at best; tiny upticks of one-quarter to one-third of a standard deviation in standardized test scores. Throwing dollars at the problem doesn't work either. In Washington, D.C., one of the worst public school systems in America, only 43% of students graduate high school--yet the district spends 50% more per pupil than the national average. What is needed is a revolutionary approach. The 14 educators on our list are taking radical tacks, and in many cases, they are accomplishing the seemingly impossible. … Three of the revolutionaries on our list--Mike Feinberg, Dave Levin and Michelle Rhee--are Teach For America alums. Teach for America was founded by Princeton grad Wendy Kopp in 1990 to entice top college students to pass up lucrative careers to teach in the nation's poorest schools. In 2007, before the recession unfolded, 18,000 college seniors were applying to teach in the nation's highest-poverty neighborhoods, nearly a 40% increase from four years earlier. Last year, a record 35,000 applied. Among those, were 11% of Ivy League college seniors turning down consulting and investment banking gigs to teach. The latest study (2009) by the Urban Institute found that TFA teachers have at least twice the impact on student performance as teachers with three or more years' experience. (Forbes)
When the War for Talent Ends With a Peace Treaty: How an agreement between Teach for America and its competitors helped all the organizations grow and serve their common mission.
NATIONAL – What if the war for talent ended in a peace treaty? That was the question Teach For America asked itself several years ago as it confronted a recruitment and retention problem that was growing in proportion to the expansion of the national nonprofit and the like-minded institutions that spun off from it. Teach for America, which trains recent college graduates to teach in America’s most underserved schools, has grown rapidly since its inception in 1990 with 500 teachers to more than 7,300 today. Five years ago, the organization decided it wanted to double the number of teachers it placed in schools to 8,000 by the end of 2010. In one year its administrative staff grew by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the organization’s success has spawned similar but separate institutions, some launched by former Teach for America employees. These institutions share Teach for America’s broader mission to end educational inequity and ensure that children in poor school districts have access to the highest standards of public education that children in wealthy districts have. Like Teach for America, these organizations also are growing rapidly, often with the help of similar sources of funding. They also share a need for experienced, energetic educators and staff members. The organizations found they were increasingly competing for employees, a problem complicated by the fact that they shared similar goals. The more they could work collectively to help one another, the more they could do to provide children with a better education. The approach may offer for-profit organizations a lesson: Consider forming alliances and protocols with competitors or customers to avoid conflict while recruiting. Teach for America proposed to its allies the creation of an agreement to guide the recruitment process. Though called the Partnership Agreement, it operates more like a nonbinding memorandum of understanding. It went into effect in 2008 and governs the way recruiters across the country recruit teachers and staff members. Organizations signing the agreement include Achievement First, which has launched charter schools in New York City and Connecticut; and Lighthouse Academies, which has established schools in New York, Chicago, Washington, Indianapolis and Gary, Indiana, as well as Little Rock suburb Jacksonville, Arkansas. Other organizations train school leaders. New Leaders for New Schools, headquartered in New York, trains school leaders to work in public schools across the country. The New Teacher Project, also in New York, helps train teachers to work in low-performing schools nationally. (Workforce Management)