TEAM Charter Schools

Ryan Hill, Founder and Executive Director of TEAM Charter Schools speaks in favor of more time in school, as practiced at TEAM in Newark and the rest of the KIPP schools across the country.

On this national issue, President Obama says, “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers… That calendar may have once made sense, but today it puts us at a competitive disadvantage… That’s why I’m calling for us to not only expand effective after school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time.”

Education’s Ground Zero
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Op-Ed Columnist
Published: March 21, 2009

Michelle Rhee testifying before the House Education and Labor Committee at a hearing on mayor and superintendent partnerships in education held last July.

The most unlikely figure in the struggle to reform America’s education system right now is Michelle Rhee.

She’s a Korean-American chancellor of schools in a city that is mostly African-American. She’s an insurgent from the school-reform movement who spent her career on the outside of the system, her nose pressed against the glass — and now she’s in charge of some of America’s most blighted schools. Less than two years into the job, she has transformed Washington into ground zero of America’s education reform movement.

Ms. Rhee, 39, who became Washington’s sixth school superintendent in 10 years, has ousted one-third of the district’s principals, shaken up the system, created untold enemies, improved test scores, and — more than almost anyone else — dared to talk openly about the need to replace ineffective teachers.

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Watch Bill Gates‘ much-discussed TED Talk about the two questions that keep him up at night. With US public education as a point of discussion, Gates describes KIPP as a source of hope.

The section on KIPP begins at about minute seven.

There are a few places, very few, where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP.

NewTalk is a nonpartisan online forum where invited experts discuss America’s most pressing domestic issues. Ryan Hill, Founder and Executive Director of TEAM Schools, participates in a NewTalk discussion on NCLB.

MODERATOR John Merrow:

Any talk of abandoning No Child Left Behind is foolish because NCLB is the continuation of a long trail of federal education legislation that traces back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

Congress and the next Administration must do something, but what? That’s the question posed to a remarkable roster of deep thinkers and activists.

Can NCLB be fixed? If so, what changes must be made? How wholesale must they be?

What good has NCLB done in its short history? What harm has it done?

Its supporters say that it has forced schools to—finally—pay attention to certain groups of children who have been all but ignored. By requiring that all identifiable groups of a certain size make what is called ‘adequate yearly progress,’ NCLB has held schools’ feet to the fire.

Critics point out that the law is riddled with loopholes, and that alone has created contempt for the law. States and districts have wiggled out of many of the law’s provisions—by changing the size of the subgroups, for example, rendering ‘results’ virtually meaningless.

Supporters say NCLB forces school districts to pay attention to the credentials of the teachers it hires—finally. No longer can districts put a warm body in front of classrooms, thanks to NCLB.

Read more: http://newtalk.org/2008/08/do-we-need-a-basic-rewrite-of.php

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer

Some of the most troubling questions about schools, such as what causes dropouts, have few clear answers because there is so little research. And the reason that data is lacking, at least in part, is that educators who would otherwise demand it are too busy with more even pressing issues, such as…

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/30/AR2008063000016.html?hpid=news-col-blog

By Julie Bennett

The franchise model applied to schools

KIPP was founded in 1994 by Teach For America alums Michael Feinberg and David Levin, who now run KIPP schools in Houston and the South Bronx. In 2000, Gap founders Doris and Don Fisher donated $15 million to start the KIPP Foundation, with a goal of replicating Feinberg and Levin’s charter school model across the country. Since then, more than 50 founding principals like Singer have launched 57 KIPP schools in 17 states, plus Washington, D.C., serving over 14,000 students. Another 13 Fisher Fellows are now searching for sites and teachers for schools they will open in 2008. CEO Richard Barth says the network expects to have about 100 KIPP schools operating by 2011.

That rate of expansion is rare in today’s charter school world. Beginning in the late 1990s, for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) like New York City-based Edison Schools began expanding at what Ste­ven F. Wilson, author of Learning on the Job, called a “dizzying pace.”

Read more: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/18844759.html

Yesterday a group of the nation’s and Newark’s most influential foundations announced that they are coming together to build a $25 million fund to support the growth of high-quality charter schools in Newark.

Fund created to support Newark charter schools via The Star-Ledger