Click here for the cutest video you’ve ever seen.  It’s impressive, especially considering that our five year-olds have only been with us for a few weeks.

Click here for the video that was quickly posted on Governor Corzine’s website.

Some quotes from the ceremony:

Governor Corzine (video here): 

“Believe me, if I could have a hundred TEAM Academies from K through 12, you would find Jon Corzine standing next to them, making sure that happens because every child ought to be focused on 2022 or 2023 [the year they will go to college].”

Mayor Booker (video here):

“I want every single parent in our city to have quality options.  It’s not a crazy dream, it’s something that we can do.”

“We are going to get there … to the point where this school is not the exception but the rule.”

Click here for more videos.

As mentioned in the introduction of Gov. Corzine that day, TEAM Schools and many other charter schools serving low-income students in New Jersey benefited tremendously from the Governor’s School Funding Reform Act.  In addition to the extra funding, Commissioner Davy has smoothed the way for high-quality charter schools to grow, granting us expansion from just over 300 students when she came into office, to approval to serve over 2400 students over the next five years.   We’re deeply grateful for their commitment to Newark’s children.

Many thanks to the supporters who made this day possible, and the amazing founding staff and students of SPARK Academy.

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.”

By SHARON McCLOSKY

If, as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats, Newark, N.J. may soon need a marina.

Charter school advocates often contend the presence of successful charter schools in otherwise poor performing school districts can only help by forcing the remaining schools to improve.

They may have found a friend in Newark.

Challenged by a growing number of high-performing charter schools within its bounds, the Newark Public School District last week announced an ambitious plan to turn around its schools to create a system that is bolder, more accountable, more transparent and more innovative.

[Read More...]

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.

That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”

[Read More...]

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.

“It’s sort of a taboo topic that nobody wants to talk about,” she acknowledged in an interview in her office, not far from the Capitol. “I used to say ‘fire people.’ And they said you can’t say that. Say, ‘separate them from the district’ or something like that.”

But pussyfooting around difficult issues hasn’t helped America’s schoolchildren, and Ms. Rhee is equally candid about the challenges she faces in a district where only 8 percent of eighth graders meet expectations in mathematics.

“D.C. is known as the most dysfunctional and worst-performing school district in the country,” she said, noting that the failures are particularly acute for poor students and members of minority groups. A black child from a low-income family in Washington enters kindergarten at the same level as a comparable child in New York City but is two years behind by the fourth grade, she said.

“Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in this country,” Ms. Rhee said, adding, “That’s not the reality we have in D.C.” Instead, she said, children who grow up in Georgetown and those who grow up in the poor, mostly black neighborhood of Anacostia “get two wildly different educational experiences. There’s a lot of data showing that we’re utterly failing our children in this district.”

This is Ms. Rhee’s second school year, and there is upheaval and recrimination — but also progress. Test results showed more educational gains last year than in the previous four years put together.

Her aim is for Washington to become, in just six years, one of the best-performing urban school districts in the country, while drastically reducing the black-white achievement gap. “A byproduct of that,” she added, “will be that we will take away from all the other school districts and schools across the country the excuse that because the kids are poor, minority, whatever it might be, that they can’t achieve at the same high levels.”

Ms. Rhee’s weakness is her bedside manner. Her transition from rebel to chancellor has been a little rough, and she is often perceived as trying to mount a cultural revolution in a way that antagonizes teachers and itself can undermine education. Surveys show that when teachers leave their jobs, it’s not just because of low pay but also because of unhappiness with their bosses or work environment. Perhaps recognizing the problem, Ms. Rhee lately has reached out to teachers to try to explain her ideas.

The reform camp is driven partly by research suggesting that great teachers are far more important to student learning than class size, school resources or anything else. One study suggests that if black kids could get teachers from the profession’s most effective quartile for four years in a row, the achievement gap would disappear.

As a result, Ms. Rhee has proposed that teachers surrender some job protections in exchange for the chance to earn more money — up to $131,000 annually, more than double the average salary for an American public school teacher. But teachers worry, not unreasonably, that their performance is difficult to measure, that they will be judged by incompetent principals, and that promised bonuses may later dry up. For now the two sides seem stalemated.

“If we come to an impasse, we’re going to move forward with our reforms anyway,” Ms. Rhee said. “Then it potentially gets uglier.”

She’s right on both counts — it could get very ugly, and Washington’s children shouldn’t suffer indefinitely in broken schools just because of a collective-bargaining stalemate. It would help if President Obama firmly backed Ms. Rhee.

Education reform could be the most potent antipoverty program in the country, and Ms. Rhee represents the vanguard in this struggle to try new tools to revive American schools. Unless we succeed in that effort and get more students through high school and into college, no bank bailout or stimulus package will be enough to preserve America’s global leadership in the long run.

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.

It is invigorating and inspirational to meet with the students and teachers in these schools and hear about their aspirations. They talk about how the schools they were in before did not challenge them and how their new school engages all of their abilities. These schools aim to have all of their kids enter four-year colleges, and many of them achieve that goal with 90 percent to 100 percent of their students. Every visit energizes me to work to get most high schools to be like this [view article . . . ]

The new basement will house Rise Academy’s first eighth grade class. TEAM Schools typically begin with one grade, adding one grade level each following year until reaching capacity. Rise Academy will do so next year with 360 students in it’s campus at 21 Ashland St.

Below are some pictures of the recent reconstruction. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to such a necessary and exciting project.

May 2008

January 2009

It is not acceptable for minority students to be four grade levels behind.

Dear President-elect Barack Obama,

In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.

That appalling four-year gap is even worse in high-poverty high schools, which often are dropout factories. In Detroit, just 34% of black males manage to graduate. In the nation’s capital — home to one of the worst public-school systems in America — only 9% of ninth-grade students go on to graduate and finish college within five years. Can this really be the shameful civil-rights legacy that we bequeath to poor black and Hispanic children in today’s global economy?

This achievement gap cannot be narrowed by a series of half-steps from the usual suspects. As you observed when naming Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education, “We have talked our education problems to death in Washington.” Genuine school reform, you stated during the campaign, “will require leaders in Washington who are willing to learn from students and teachers…about what actually works.”

We, too, believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment. And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to “what works” to dramatically boost academic achievement — rather than clinging to reforms that we “wish would work.”

Those beliefs led us to form a nonpartisan coalition last year, the Education Equality Project (EEP), which seeks to greatly narrow, if not eliminate, the achievement gap. Mr. Duncan has signed on to the EEP, as have most of the nation’s leading big-city school superintendents, such as Paul Vallas in New Orleans, Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Colorado’s new U.S. senator, former Denver superintendent Michael Bennet. Mayors Richard M. Daley in Chicago, Michael Bloomberg in New York City, Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C., and Cory Booker in Newark, N.J., are on board, too. Several prominent Republicans, including John McCain and Newt Gingrich, have joined our coalition as well.

EEP seeks to ensure that America’s schools provide equal educational opportunity, judged by one measuring stick: Does a policy advance student learning? It’s an obvious litmus test. Yet the current K-12 school system is designed to serve the interests of adults, not children.

EEP’s mission thus turns out to be unexpectedly radical — and we have run afoul at times of longtime Democratic allies. While we recognize that the No Child Left Behind law has numerous flaws that need correcting, we staunchly support NCLB’s core concept that schools should be held accountable for boosting student performance. Dismissing the potential of schools to substantially boost minority achievement, as is now fashionable in some Democratic circles, is ultimately little more than a recipe for defeatism. Like you, we also support expanding parental choice. High-performing urban charter schools such as the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools are showing that minority students can close the achievement gap if given access to high-quality instruction.

Finally, our coalition also promotes the development and placement of effective teachers in underserved schools and supports paying them higher salaries. By contrast, we oppose rigid union-tenure protections, burdensome work rules, and antiquated pay structures that shield a small minority of incompetent teachers from scrutiny yet stop good teachers from earning substantial, performance-based pay raises.

What can you and your administration do to close the achievement gap? Although the funding and oversight of public schools is chiefly a state and local responsibility, you still retain the power of the bully pulpit. Beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, as you have proposed, we would urge you to press forward with two other, far-reaching policy reforms.

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today’s inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

Second, the federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor.

Study after study shows that good teachers have, by far, the highest impact on student learning. “The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of [a student's] skin or where they come from,” you stated on the campaign trail. “It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have — it’s who their teacher is.” We couldn’t agree more. To close the achievement gap, start with a three-word solution: Teachers, teachers, teachers. The fierce urgency of now cannot be allowed to dissipate into the sleepy status quo of tomorrow.

Mr. Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, and Rev. Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, are co-chairmen of the Education Equality Project.