TEAM Charter Schools

Glen Rock natives both teach and learn from urban students
Jane M. Dalton | Glen Rock Gazette | January 15, 2010

“I love being a Teach for America corps member because I have a built-in support system who understand how difficult yet rewarding this adventure has been,” she said. “I live with two other Newark corps members, so having roommates who understand the time commitment and energy it takes to teach is very comforting.”

Pollack also credits “seeing optimism and potential in my students” with keeping her motivated as a new teacher.

“At SPARK Academy our students know and can tell you that they will be attending college in 2022. There is a true culture built around a love of learning that makes me excited to go into work every day,” she wrote…

“The students need a teacher who is willing to work long hours, plan extensively, give out their cell phone number, support their students inside and outside the classroom and hold them to the highest standards,” she wrote. “Fortunately, I couldn’t see myself working anywhere else.”

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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.”

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.

The Big Fix
New York Times Magazine
By David Leonhardt
Published: January 27, 2009

“… Fortunately, we know much more than we did even a decade ago about how education works and doesn’t work. In his book, “Whatever It Takes,” (and in this magazine, where he is an editor), Paul Tough has described some of the most successful schools for poor and minority students. These schools tend to set rigorous standards, keep the students in school longer and create a disciplined, can-do culture. Many of the schools, like several middle schools run by an organization called KIPP, have had terrific results. Students enter with test scores below the national average. They leave on a path to college.

The lessons of KIPP — some of the lessons, at least — also apply to schools that are not so poor. Last year, the Gates Foundation hired an economist named Thomas Kane to oversee a big new push to prepare students for college. Kane is one of the researchers whose work shows that teachers may matter more than anything else. Good teachers tend to receive high marks from parents, colleagues and principals, and they tend to teach their students much more than average teachers. Bad teachers tend to do poorly on all these metrics. The differences are usually apparent after just a couple of years on the job. Yet in a typical school system, both groups receive tenure.

The Obama administration has suggested that education reform is an important goal. The education secretary is Arne Duncan, the former school superintendent in Chicago, who pushed for education changes there based on empirical data. Obama advisers say that the administration plans to use the education money in the stimulus package as leverage. States that reward good teaching and use uniform testing standards — rather than the choose-your-own-yardstick approach of the No Child Left Behind law — may get more money. [view article . . . ]

Malcolm Gladwell, who regularly contributes writings to The New Yorker and published several books, including the best-seller The Tipping Point recently released Outliers, The Story of Success. In his new book he says:

The KIPP program represents one of the most promising new educational philosophies in the United States.

To learn more about his book visit his website or order it Amazon.

An outlier is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience… I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Click here to read more.

January 26, 2009
By Bill Gates
www.gatesfoundation.org

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 . . . ]

Monday, January 12, 2009
By JOEL I. KLEIN and AL SHARPTON
The Wall Street Journal

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.

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