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.
Book examines four new teachers' experience at Watts' Locke High School: The author observed the troubled campus and the Teach For America participants for a year. She says the most important ingredient of success is high-quality teachers.
LOS ANGELES--Donna Foote spent a year at troubled Locke High School in Watts observing and documenting the workaday struggles of four new teachers. In her recently published book, "Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches With Teach For America," Foote delves into the lives of the teachers she met and reveals much about the high school. Locke is in transition: The Los Angeles Unified School District turned it over last month to Green Dot Public Schools, a charter operator that plans to break Locke up into eight smaller campuses to boost student performance. The teachers Foote chronicled during the 2005-06 school year were hired through Teach For America, a national group that places recent college graduates in urban schools and requires them to teach for at least two years. In the L.A. region, Locke had more teachers from the group than any other school. The teachers Foote followed -- Phillip Gedeon, Hrag Hamalian, Taylor Rifkin and Rachelle Snyder -- have remained in education; only one, Gedeon, had expected teaching to be his career. Here is an interview with Foote, a former correspondent for Newsweek who lives in Manhattan Beach, on the eve of Locke's transformation. (LA Times – registration required)
See also, Lessons From Locke in Newsweek
A Good School Saved
HARTFORD—Peel the onion on Hartford's troubles — crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, poverty — and the common theme is lack of a good education. Despite the best efforts of many, city schools failed too many youngsters for too long. It's critical that the city have schools that work. Thus we were pleased to see the announcement Wednesday of the eleventh-hour fiscal rescue of the Achievement First-Hartford Academy by a public-private partnership. The public charter school was created by Achievement First, the nonprofit that started the highly successful Amistad Academy in New Haven a decade ago. Amistad combines high expectations, great teaching and a rigorous curriculum, among other sensible measures. Hartford Superintendent Steven J. Adamowski pushed to bring the Amistad model to Hartford as part of his reform plan, and officials as well as parents back him up. The school should have been able to open without difficulty, but promised funding fell through when the General Assembly made the last-minute decision not to update the biennial budget. This left the academy, which had already recruited teachers and students, $2.3 million short of the money it needed to open this fall. Fortunately, the state came up with $500,000, the city found $400,000, no easy task, and private philanthropy provided $1.4 million. Perhaps most important, Gov. M. Jodi Rell has committed the state to funding of the school as part of the charter school program in the future. So, on Aug. 27, 252 students will begin kindergarten, first grade and fifth grade at the new school, to be located in the Mark Twain School building. The Amistad Academy was cited this year by the U.S. Department of Education as one of most successful gap-closing schools in the country. That is a result Hartford desperately needs. (Hartford Courant)
Watts' Locke High School is getting whipped into shape: Control, discipline and high expectations emerge
LOS ANGELES—It's almost 8 a.m. on 111th Street in Watts, and here's a scene that could make a cynic faint: A teenage boy is hustling across the street toward Locke High School while tucking a white shirt into his khaki uniform pants. He wants to pass inspection at the gate. I'm visiting what might as well be called Dropout High to see if things have changed in the early going since Green Dot Public Schools, took it over from Los Angeles Unified. Too soon to tell, for sure. We're only into the third week of summer school, which tends to be mellower than the regular school year and serves only 700 kids instead of the usual 3,000. The first thing I see after I park and walk onto campus are roughly three dozen tardy kids lined up against a fence just a couple of minutes after the hour, with Assistant Principal Charles Boulden giving them what for. On a megaphone, no less. "Ladies and gentlemen," he barks, "school starts at 8 o'clock; 8:02 is like 8:14 to us." Two kids roll their eyes when I ask what they think of their new drill sergeant. "Nothing's going to change," one tells me while the other nods in agreement. But they're wearing uniforms. That's a change. And they're about to be marked tardy, then led to their classrooms in small groups. Other students say this clearly is not the Locke they knew last year. ... Zeus Cubias, who has taught at Locke for 14 years after graduating from the school and going on to UC Santa Barbara, says the early indicators are encouraging. ... Right off the bat, you step onto campus knowing there's control, discipline and high expectations, and the reality is that's something most kids wanted. "We had to step up our game, too," Cubias says. "I'm wearing a tie every day now." Cubias is one of the Locke teachers who originally felt insulted by Green Dot chief Steve Barr's claim that he could do a better job than L.A. Unified. Cubias spoke up about it, telling Barr he and other teachers had made strides despite great challenges. "Steve Barr's response was that that was exactly the kind of passion he was looking for," says Cubias, who became a convert during the long, acrimonious battle that ended with Green Dot winning support for a takeover. … When school starts in September, only 40 of last year's 120 teachers will still be there. Some left of their own accord; others weren't hired back. (LA Times – registration required)
Schools experiment with paying kids
WASHINGTON (AP) - Friday is payday at KIPP DC: KEY Academy, and some sixth-grade girls gather at the makeshift school store trying to decide how to spend their hard-earned money. They received paychecks for behaving well, doing their homework or making academic gains. The money is pretend. But it can be used at the store for genuine items such as pens capped with fluffy feathers, pencil cases shaped like animals and colorful erasers. Schools, under pressure to boost student achievement, are offering incentives - field trips and cash, for example - to motivate students. At KEY Academy, a public charter school serving low-income, minority students in the nation's capital, Cherise Johnson Wallace proudly clutched a pencil case she bought at the school store. She was glad to have the trinket, but even happier about what it represented. "It shows how I work very hard to earn good grades," she said, flashing a smile as she rattled off the A's she had earned. That kind of pride is what supporters of rewards programs point to. They say the prizes motivate kids at first, but that the children eventually form good study habits and become interested in succeeding regardless of whether rewards are on the line. The charter school's principal, Sarah Hayes, is a believer. KEY Academy is among the city's top-performing schools, as judged by test scores. "I think a lot of that is tied back to our incentives program because it reinforces to the students that our expectations of time on task are serious and that you get rewarded for them," Hayes said. (Associated Press via The Washington Post)
Alameda County judge upholds statewide charter school decision
ALAMEDA--The State Board of Education's decision to authorize a statewide public-school charter that bypasses local officials' input wasn't an abuse of authority, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled this week in dismissing a lawsuit. The California School Board Association's Education Legal Alliance sued the state board in October, claiming the board had overstepped its authority in January 2007 by approving Aspire Public Schools' petition to create "statewide benefit" charter schools; Aspire has opened schools in Stockton and Los Angeles under that charter. A 1994 law allowing such a charter - issued without local approval or oversight - requires the state board to make a formal finding, based on information provided by the applicant, that it will provide "instructional services of statewide benefit" that can't be provided by a charter operating only in one district or county. (Oakland Tribune)
Hope for Locke High: Finally, education leaders are signaling that they mean business at the troubled L.A. school.
LOS ANGELES--Locke High School is on the verge of a transformation that didn't come quite soon enough to prevent this month's melee involving hundreds of students. Behind the brawl were decades of neglect by the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the swift response by the new school leaders in town -- charter operator Steve Barr and the district's No. 2 man, Ramon C. Cortines -- brought a seeming promise that the inertia is coming to an end. Locke has long exemplified the underachievement and safety concerns that ail L.A.'s inner-city schools. Now, preparing for a takeover by Barr's Green Dot Public Schools, it might become a model of how dramatically a student-centered approach can buoy a foundering school. Already, Barr speaks with encouraging specificity about what it will take to make his students secure and to educate them better: buses to ensure safe passage to and from campus; breaking the school into smaller academies, each with its own cafeteria and staggered lunch hours to limit the number of students loose on campus at any time; a building-trades academy with a college-prep curriculum; engaged teachers who aren't averse to patrolling the campus if it keeps students safer and saves money for, say, reducing class sizes. Barr is even looking for oak trees to provide more hospitable spots on campus where small groups can gather, instead of the single shady zone where hundreds now crowd together and any toe-stepping can easily get out of hand. (LA Times - registration required)
Against Odds, New Orleans Schools Fight Back
NEW ORLEANS--It is little more than a collection of prefabricated steel-and-wood classrooms floating in a no man’s land by the highway, and its vague location and bootstrap atmosphere sum up the problems and promise of the big education experiment now under way in this city nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina. There is no gym and no auditorium at Carver, and at breaks the school’s 350 students congregate on unshaded strips of concrete between the trailerlike boxes. Carver’s only context is ruin — it sits across a field from the flooded-out pre-Katrina Carver High — and yet it is trying all over again, with new teachers and new methods, at what largely failed before the storm and immediately afterward: educating its students. Carver High is hope’s challenge to bleak circumstance. And it is beginning to meet that challenge. Though there is disorder in many classrooms, there is also learning going on, amid the struggle. In an English class taught by Courtney Stuckwisch, the searing hard-times images of a Langston Hughes poem touch a chord, and the students look up eagerly. … “There’s a recognition that it matters who’s in the building,” said Sarah Usdin, founder of a nonprofit here, New Schools for New Orleans, which is playing a leading role in formulating policy. “They have to perform.” Citizen-run boards have suddenly been thrust into managing individual schools all over the city. Neophyte teachers barely out of college instruct students sometimes older than they are. A wide range of teaching styles has been employed, from the rotelike call-and-response methods of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation school to more traditional textbook-based approaches. For the first time, parents are being asked to choose schools for their children (though in many cases the parents are absent, and the student is being raised by relatives). (New York Times – registration required)
Charter Schools To Receive Multimillion-Dollar Boost
NEW YORK - Charter schools that have been struggling to find homes in New York will receive a boost today from the Bush administration, in the form of a multimillion-dollar grant.Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is presenting the award to a local group that finances, constructs, and renovates charter school buildings, Civic Builders, Inc. The money will be used to aid building efforts in New York City and Newark, N.J., charter schools, according to sources familiar with the grant. Both the New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the Newark mayor, Cory Booker, will be on hand at today's announcement. … Civic Builders helps charter schools construct and lease buildings that are separate from public facilities. With the help of private philanthropy, it has transformed a Bronx parking garage into a 43,000-square-foot school and a kosher salami factory in Hunts Point into a school with an arts specialty, and built a 90,000-square-foot school complete with a 10,000-volume library, a climbing wall, and a rooftop athletic area in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The grant is part of a federal program aimed at making it more attractive — and less risky — for philanthropists to invest in charter school construction projects. The Bush administration has already awarded more than $175 million in grants to similar projects across the country, according to Education Department grant lists. (The New York Sun)
Editorial: DPS should cooperate with successful charter schools
DETROIT - The Detroit Public Schools sees charters as its biggest threat and fiercest competitor, vying with the district for the same students and the state per-pupil funding that comes with them. But there's no reason the two can't work together for the good of Detroit's children. The best charters could teach the city's public schools much about how to successfully educate disadvantaged urban students. The newest trend in the charter movement is "coopetition" -- part cooperation, part competition. Los Angeles, New York and other cities leading school reform see it as one of the most important developments in education, with the potential to boost student performance in every kind of school. Detroit, with its public schools rapidly sinking, would be irresponsible not to accept what help the charters have to offer. The district should consider teaming with leading charter schools -- University Prep Academy, Henry Ford Academy and others -- to quickly improve existing schools and open great new ones. That pathway is radically reshaping New York City's educational landscape. Four years ago, NYC Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein attracted a few of the most successful national charter networks -- KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), Achievement First and Uncommon Schools -- to come to the city. He rented schools to the operators for a dollar a year and challenged them to produce better results. They did. Now, New York's schools, both public and charter, are working together to improve teacher training and student performance, and pooling resources to get the best results for their money. The new schools' test scores are hitting the top of the math and reading charts. The model easily could be adapted in Detroit. The district has empty school buildings that could be rented to charters to expand education options in the city. (The Detroit News)