Morning Shots

In 1983, A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform was released. This report from the U.S. Department of Education highlighted a number of troubling findings on the state of education in the U.S. The most disturbing – U.S. students are lagging behind in test scores when compared to their overseas counterparts. According to the 1997 Florida Statute 228.056, one of the many purposes of charter schools was to “make the school the unit for improvement.” Charter schools have become the needed catalyst for change in public education. It is not surprising that both charter and traditional school test scores have enjoyed steady improvement since the charter onset.

I am therefore deeply disappointed with the Orlando Sentinel’s recent charter school series entitled Charter Schools: Missing the Grade. The series attempts to paint with one brush all of the Florida charter schools. It is true that there are low performing or fiscally irresponsible charters that need to be closed. However, the same holds true for traditional schools. Adding insult to injury are the series’ attempts to explain that good charters exist because they implement discriminatory practices. The facts and figures have been presented in an incomplete manner and have been massaged to accommodate one newspaper’s viewpoint. Its references and innuendos bring to mind a number of fallacies including hasty generalizations, false dilemma, slippery slope, and appeal to emotion.

Charter schools have faced an incredible struggle in the past 10 years. I was one of those people, who, like The Sentinel, perpetuated misinformation about charters. Then one day, someone educated me. Today, I am a principal for three charter schools that serve more than 1,200 students. It is my hope that The Sentinel’s writers and editors – and readers – will read this rebuttal with an open mind and

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On March 22 the Missouri State Board of Education voted to remove the Saint Louis Public Schools’ provisional accreditation. The decision hands control of the district to a transitional panel consisting of three members appointed separately by Gov. Matt Blunt, Saint Louis Mayor Francis Slay, and the president of the Board of Aldermen. The takeover will be effective at least through 2013; the elected school board will remain in place, but it will no longer have any control over the district’s operations.

The state takeover follows years of volatile leadership and deplorable academic performance. The Saint Louis Public Schools have gone through six superintendents since 2003. A series of disputes and resignations by school board members has marked district politics, drawing attention towards personalities and away from education reform. On top of all this, the district is in debt for nearly $25 million.

Some high school students in the Saint Louis Public Schools vocally opposed the takeover and the district’s loss of accreditation that triggered it. The students demanded guarantees that their college and scholarship applications would not be jeopardized. They held a four-day sit-in protest at Mayor Slay’s office the week before the state board’s vote and presented ten demands, some of which involved issues Slay said were in the state’s jurisdiction and out of his control. When questioned about possible repercussions for college-bound students, Slay said that the district’s loss of accreditation should not prejudice students’ college applications, and he promised to write a letter to universities asking them to consider Saint Louis students for admission without regard to the district’s accreditation status. A spokesman for the University of Missouri told reporters that the takeover should not adversely affect students’ applications.

Some students continued to protest the following week at the board of education

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Edupundits have chosen very complex subject matter for their investigations and reports. They study and write about dropouts, vouchers, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, budgets, curricula in all subjects, union contracts, school management issues, and many many more.

Meanwhile, practically all of them fail to give any attention to the basic purpose of schools, which is to have students do academic work. Almost none of them seems inclined to look past the teacher to see if the students are, for instance, reading any nonfiction books or writing any term papers

Of course all of the things they do pay attention to are vitally important, but without student academic work they mean very little. Now, I realize there are state standards in math and reading, and some states test for writing after a fashion, but no state standards ask if students have read a history book while they were in school or written a substantial research paper, and neither do the SAT, ACT, or NAEP tests.

Basic math skills are important, and current standards try to find out if those graduating from our high schools can do math at the 8th-grade level, and a similar standard is in place for reading, but for the time being, higher education and the workplace are still not well designed for students with 8th-grade math and reading skills.

Students in Massachusetts who pass the state test for graduation, the MCAS, find out when they take their college placement tests that they have come up against a different level of expectation. In Massachusetts, more than 60% of those who go to community colleges have to take remedial courses and 34% of those who go to the four-year colleges have to take remedial courses. As the Commissioner of Higher Education in the Commonwealth has pointed out, the

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