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Harvard University Press Release
Nationwide Study Shows More Charter School Students Proficient On State Exams Than Public School Peers
December 14, 2004

According to a new nationwide study by Caroline Hoxby of Harvard University, ten percent more of the students in charter schools are proficient on state exams than those in neighboring public schools when a charter school has been in operation nine years or longer.

Hoxby also finds that students in charter schools that receive at least forty percent of local public school funding do particularly well on the state exams. Additionally, charter schools in areas with a high percentage of poor or Hispanic students appear to provide a special advantage for their students, as compared to the neighboring public school.

"Charter schools tend to arise in areas where students are disadvantaged and families have had little ability to exit underperforming schools," Hoxby said. "Sure enough, charter schools make the most difference with such students."

Oregon Live.com
To Catch Struggling Students, Tribes Turn to Charter Schools
December 12, 2004

Charter schools are cropping up throughout Indian Country, in states like Oregon, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Tribal officials have pinned their hopes on the start-up schools as their best chance to reach a generation of Indian students who've dropped out or drifted through traditional public schools.

In Oregon, Nixyaawii Charter School on the Umatilla Indian Reservation is a good example. In its first year, it serves students like Eddie Simpson, an 18-year-old born on the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, reservation who bounced from school to school before landing at Nixyaawii. Simpson is determined to get his remaining high school credits and graduate, and then plans to train to be an EMT. "If I don't do this, what's there for me?" Simpson asked.

American School Board Journal
Remaking High School
November 2004

A changing economy and an influx of aid are spurring the radical transformation of a faltering American icon.

Fifty years ago, the American high school was doing fine. Most students weren't headed for college. If they earned a high school diploma, they could land a well-paying job. If they didn't graduate, they could still find good work. "But today it's a disaster," says Tom Vander Ark, director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "A third of American students drop out, half of Hispanic and African Americans drop out. That's a civic, social, and economic disaster."

While different in philosophy and approach, reform models all seek to change the basic building blocks of high schools: their size and how and what they offer. The Gates Foundation and other private groups, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, are pouring millions of dollars in research and technical assistance into districts willing to change how they run high schools. This influx of cash and aid is propelling school districts around the country to radically transform one of the most firmly entrenched icons in American education.

Newsday
Teachers Union Challenges Bonus Plan for Urban Teachers
November 4, 2004

Connecticut's largest teachers' union is criticizing a plan by state Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg to offer bonuses and an exchange program to keep quality teachers from fleeing city schools.

Under the plan, 1,000 teachers who are successful in reducing dropout rates and raising student achievement would be eligible for a $3,000 bonus and a two-year contract that protects them from layoffs. Urban and suburban teachers would also be offered similar bonuses to trade districts for two years.

The union is balking because it says teachers should be paid based on experience, not merit. Union officials say the plan is illegal because it would conflict with collective bargaining and fair dismissal laws.

The Arizona Republic
Males' Learning Needs Ignored? Fewer Now in College, Expert Says
November 1, 2004

Are males on the verge of becoming an endangered species on college campuses? It's hard to say, but educator William Draves of the Wisconsin-based Learning Resources Network thinks so. He estimates that only 35 percent of today's U.S. undergraduate college students are men.

The problem, Draves says, begins in elementary school with the refusal to acknowledge that boys and girls learn differently. Boys are, in many ways, better suited than girls for work in the information age but are saddled with an educational model based on an agrarian society.

Draves says the system encourages girls to stay in school, much more than it does boys. "Boys do want to go to college," he says. "Schools (need to) gear education to meet the needs of both sexes."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Paving Way for Black Students to Succeed in High School
October 27, 2004

SEI Academy is a public charter school and an outgrowth of Self Enhancement Inc., a non-profit that has pushed since 1981 to broaden opportunities for children, with a focus on Portland's African American population.

The SEI Academy enjoys advantages many fledgling charter schools do not. It's housed in the organization's Center for Self Enhancement, which boasts a gymnasium, a dance studio, a computer lab with a full-time instructor, a library with a full-time librarian, and a cafeteria.

SEI Academy’s goal is to prepare the students to succeed in high school, with an emphasis on character building. "With charter schools, there's this big push to be creative and innovative," said Natasha Butler, the academy's educational director, or principal. "Our focus point is to be effective."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A Good Curriculum, Teachers with Passion Add Up to Smart Kids
October 27, 2004

The M.I.T.C.H. Charter School in the Tigard-Tualatin school district is the creation of Debi Lorence, a former public and private school teacher who serves as the school's director. The acronym stands for Multi-sensory Instruction Teaching Children Hands-on.

M.I.T.C.H. students generally outdo their district peers on standardized state assessments. In both reading and math, every single M.I.T.C.H. third-grader met or exceeded standards in 03-04, a record unmatched by any of the district's nine other, bigger elementary schools. The charter school's fourth-graders registered a similar result in reading, while their 95 percent success rate in math trailed only one regular district school.

Asked why M.I.T.C.H. students fare so well, Lorence answered: "It's the curriculum. The curriculum is good because the teachers are passionate about it.”

Buffalo News
N.Y. Should Promote Future Growth of Charter Schools, Study Suggests
October 26, 2004

Charter schools in New York are providing the "seeds of change" for traditional schools, and state officials should not cap their future growth but provide them with more funding, a recent report by a Washington think tank concludes.

Though opposed by some school districts and teachers unions across New York, charter schools have shown early achievement results and offer alternatives that should be embraced by the state's education community, according to the Progressive Policy Institute. The institute is tied to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, a group whose members have included former President Bill Clinton.

The report notes that the rate of improvement of fourth-grade reading scores in New York City charter schools has exceeded those in traditional schools. And by being able to operate without the usual constraints, charter schools have been able to make achievements in other ways. It says, for example, that they often have become "models" for labor agreements. It cites one New York charter school with a six-page agreement, instead of the typical 200 pages or so, and with features such as teacher salaries based on "improvement in practice" as well as seniority.

The Detroit News
Progress Outpaces Public High Schools: Charters Gain in MEAP Scores
October 22, 2004

Michigan’s charter high schools are making faster progress toward meeting state standards than other public high schools. Charters’ performance in reading, writing, math, and science increased faster than the state average, and are higher than in the state’s inner-city district-run schools.

“What this shows is that charters both outperformed urban schools and improved faster than urban schools,&rduo; said David Plank, director of Michigan State Universityís Education Policy Center. “It looks like charters are proving they can be more effective in reaching a population thatís been underserved.&rduo;

The New Yorker
The Factory: At the Pacific Rim Charter School, They Make Scholars
October 18, 2004

More than three thousand charter schools have sprung up in the United States since 1991, when Minnesota became the first of forty-one states to establish alternative institutions as competition for the nation's troubled public schools. Of those institutions, Pacific Rim is one of the oddest. It was the inspiration of a Chinese-American dentist and father of three named Robert Guen, who believed that Boston's black-and-white politics were leaving Asian kids underserved by public schools. After Guen was appointed to the Boston school board, in the early nineteen-nineties, he and another public-schools activist, Robert Consalvo, began to think not just about different school policies but also about a different sort of school: small, marked by strict discipline, character education, and compulsory Tai Chi and Mandarin Chinese classes. Its school day would be eight hours and its school year eleven months-time in which students who had been overwhelmed by large, sometimes lawless public schools might peacefully prepare for college.

Guen and Consalvo applied for a charter, and in 1997, when the school they had envisioned opened, it proved more popular than they had anticipated. In September of 2003, two of Guen's daughters were enrolled at Pacific Rim. They were among the few Asian kids in the school. Given the grim educational options in neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, African-American and Haitian-immigrant students had come en masse. And so Pacific Rim became an Asian-Creole-American stew-a place where kids studying Mandarin and Tai Chi were mostly black and poor.

And it works. Every student in the school's inaugural graduating class of 2003 passed the state math and literacy competency tests on the first try. At the city's public schools, only the famed "exam" schools, like Boston Latin, matched this feat. The entire class of 2003 now attends a four-year college.

Seattle Post Intelligencer
No Progress in College Preparation
October 14, 2004

American high school students are no better prepared for college than they were 10 years ago, according to a new study by ACT, one of the two big organizations that offer college entrance tests.

The report said that students who took a minimum core curriculum of four years of English and three years each of mathematics, science, and social studies were more likely to be prepared for college-level work than those who did not. Students who took advanced courses beyond that minimum core fared even better.

Not surprisingly, the report found that on average, preparation for college differed among racial and ethnic groups. Fewer black, Hispanic, and American Indian students took a minimum set of core courses than non-Hispanic white students or Asian Americans. And fewer boys took the minimum core than girls.

The report proposes that all students, not just those headed for college, be required to take chemistry, physics, geometry, and trigonometry. ACT officials said that while they recognized that not all students wanted to go on to college, those entering the work force needed the same skills and knowledge as those pursuing higher education.

Forbes Magazine
Where Everyone Can Overachieve
October 11, 2004

High Tech High is doing wonders with disaffected high-schoolers in San Diego, the first step in a grand plan to reverse America's failure at mass education. The nation's richest philanthropists are lining up behind it.

This new school's philosophy is that if you treat kids like adults, even the most bruised and battered will play up to the role. High Tech High has enrolled 650 kids since 2000 and produced two graduating classes so far. All students go to college. Fifty-six percent were the first in their families to attend college; in some cases, the first to finish high school. Students at High Tech High also test better than peers statewide.

Most high schools are failing to do the two things they're supposed to do: help families move up the economic ladder and provide skilled labor for businesses. But principal Larry Rosenstock is betting that schools like High Tech can work anywhere, as long as they're kept small. Size, he says, is one of the things that doom city high schools: "These are factories, not places you want to go to learn."

The Times-Picayune
Transformed School Builds Parents' Hopes
October 11, 2004

After years of issuing warnings and sending in outside help, the state of Louisiana in April moved to take over the P. A. Capdau school, converting it to a charter school under the control of the University of New Orleans (UNO). It is the first time the state has taken over a locally controlled school for academic failure. And the transformations began.

If the school proves successful, it will be a model for other failing schools. It will also provide proof to skeptics who believe that public schools cannot work and to those who claim that they don't have enough money to succeed, said Leslie Jacobs, a member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. But most important, it is another option for hundreds of New Orleans school children who are trapped in failing schools, she said.

State officials are looking for a success that can be replicated at the other 16 failing schools in the state, 15 of which are in New Orleans.

More than 500 students applied for the 264 available spaces at the school. The response from parents and community members surprised school officials. More than 200 people crowded into church pews to participate in each of three public forums held to unveil plans for Capdau. Certainly there were skeptics, but they were far outweighed by voices of hope and faith. "May the Lord bless you for what you're doing at that school," Loyce Sparrow, a grandmother of two Capdau students, told state and university officials. At a crowded forum at New Genesis Baptist Church, Sparrow said the takeover was the answer to her prayers for the school.

The Quad-City Times
Keyes, Obama Discuss Charter School Benefits
October 7, 2004

U.S. Senate candidates Alan Keyes and Barack Obama agreed Thursday that establishing more charter schools was one way to improve the nation’s educational system, but they differed on the overall role that government should play toward that goal.

Obama said the federal government should fully fund the federal No Child Left Behind law, investing more money in early childhood education, teacher training, and charter schools, which get public money but operate free from many state rules. “It is my strong belief that the more we can foster experimentation, the more we can foster a different set of models that can be franchised across the system, the more successful we can be,” Obama said about charter schools.

Carolina Journal
Charter Schools Meeting Students’ Needs
Volume 13, Number 10, October 2004

Two reports released in mid-September by the North Carolina Education Alliance provide compelling new findings about the state’s diverse and growing charter school movement, suggesting that charter schools are meeting a previously unmet need in the state for educational options.

Charter Schools in North Carolina: Innovation in Education describes the progress of the charter school movement in North Carolina since 1996, and provides a thorough and relevant analysis of the issues and obstacles facing these schools.

“While charter schools have experienced some of the struggles common to any new reform, this report shows that they are excelling at providing choices for students and families, many of whom have been failed by traditional public schools,” said Lindalyn Kakadelis, director of the N.C. Education Alliance (NCEA).

In addition to the policy report, NCEA simultaneously released a parents’ guide to charter schools. A Choice for Children provides parents with facts and information explaining charter school basics, and shows parents how to get involved in the movement to support charter schools.

Carolina Journal
KIPP School Puts Zip Into Education
Volume 13, Number 10, October 2004

Gaston County’s unemployment rate is among the highest in North Carolina, the local schools are ranked among the state’s lowest performing, and less than 9 percent of local residents hold four-year degrees. But as student Victoria Bennett says, “KIPP: Gaston College Preparatory Academy (GCP) is a different story. It’s the silver lining in Gaston’s dark and gloomy cloud.”

GCP is the sixth-highest performing school in North Carolina, and the only school among the top six that works with an educationally underserved community. Blacks comprise 95 percent of GCP’s student body, and more than 80 percent of students receive free or reduced lunch.

Principal Caleb Dolan attributes the school’s success to the flexibility allowed charter schools. In his school, teachers are available nightly for advice via cell phones, parents commit to read to their children each evening, and students spend almost 70 percent more time in class receiving instruction than the average public school student. “It is important as a school leader to have the ability to control how money is spent, and to hire and fire,” he said.

The Philanthropy Roundtable
Jump-Starting the Charter School Movement
October 2004

Many private funders put improving public education at the top of their agenda, but for many years donors have struggled to have a real impact on sub-par schools. Too often, grants to support reform in existing schools have made little difference in students' lives.

Enter charter schools. A new kind of public school-independently operated, typically started from scratch by impassioned education entrepreneurs-charter schools strike many funders as an ideal way to invest in public education. Since they are created anew, with freedom from many laws and regulations that constrict school districts, charter schools have the potential to be dramatically more effective than the typical public school. Since they are schools of choice, they have to satisfy families or go out of business. Since they are held accountable for results, they can be closed if they don't work. If they are successful, they can serve as models for others starting charter schools or seeking to change existing ones. And if they reach a critical mass, they can induce school districts to improve their conventional schools.

Portland Oregonian
High Test Scores Validate Charter Schools
September 30, 2004

With a few years of strong test scores to their names, the Three Rivers Charter School in West Linn and Mitch charter school in Tualatin have established themselves as serious places to learn.

The test scores come as affirmation to advocates of West Linn's and Tualatin's charter schools, who said their schools, once questioned by skeptics, are gaining wider respect.

More than 50 charter schools have opened in Oregon since they were authorized by the state in 1999. Most originally were created by parents or teachers who hoped to offer a type of schooling they thought was unavailable in their district. Today, many are started by school districts.

Debi Lorence, Mitch school director, credits her school's scores to its focus on core knowledge and a carefully choreographed curriculum that doesn't repeat itself as the curriculum does in many traditional public schools. Students start learning Spanish in kindergarten. This year, they began wearing uniforms. Each is taught personal responsibility for his or her learning.

San Diego Union-Tribune
Novel Fix in Works for Ailing Schools: S.D. District May Recruit Outside Management Help
September 26, 2004

The San Diego Unified School District is about to undertake dramatic overhauls at nine chronically underperforming campuses that could result in outside organizations managing the campuses, starting next fall. Over the past six years, millions have been invested in teacher training, instructional materials, and new leadership at these schools, which have large English-learner and low-income populations. The investment has yielded some improvement, but the schools continue to be labeled as unsatisfactory.

District officials say they are seeking outside proposals because they need an infusion of new ideas. "We have invested a lot of work in these schools. We have really tried to improve instruction, but we are still not where we need to be as required by the state and federal government," said Ricardo Soto, the district's deputy general counsel.

King/Chavez Academy of Excellence, a well-regarded charter school in Barrio Logan, has confirmed that it's interested in submitting a proposal to restructure King Elementary, if the Stockton community supports its vision. King/Chavez Academy and King Elementary are different schools but both are located in South San Diego and face similar challenges of educating low-income students and those learning English.

Dennis McKeown, head of King/Chavez Academy, believes the reason behind his school's dramatic improvement and others' failure is its focus on school "spirit," cultivated through the enrichment of the mind, body, and soul of teachers and students. Its education philosophy revolves around three "A's:" academics for the mind, athletics for the body, and arts for the soul. All too often, McKeown said, schools cut out enrichment programs to make time for remedial instruction, resulting in education becoming more and more mechanistic and sterile. "Before I came to Barrio Logan, they told me I would fail because the children are poor and don't speak English. That's not true. They are rich in spirit," he said.

Harvard University Gazette
Charter Schools Get High Grades: Charter Students More Proficient than Traditional Peers
September 23, 2004

When the American Federation of Teachers published a study that found students at charter schools performing worse than their peers at traditional public schools, more than a few hopes were dashed. But to Harvard Professor of Economics Caroline Hoxby, something in the study seemed amiss. Why would parents would keep their children in charter schools if their kids were performing poorly?

Hoxby quickly gathered data, and her study, A Straightforward Comparison of Charter Schools and Regular Public Schools in the United States, is making news with findings showing that, on average, students in charter schools are 5 percent more likely to be proficient in reading and 3 percent more likely to be proficient in math than students at the closest public schools with similar racial composition. In states where charter schools are well established, the advantage is even more pronounced: up to 35 percent greater proficiency among charter school students in the District of Columbia, for instance.

Hoxby maintains her large sample size makes her findings robust and, ultimately, more credible. She used standardized test results from 99 percent of the nation's charter schools, while the AFT study that prompted hers surveyed similar results from only 3 percent of charter schools.

While viewing parents as customers who are free to "shop" at the traditional school down the street may seem harsh, Hoxby says it has forced charter schools to set up a different, and positive, model of parent interaction. "Parents can walk away at any time, and I think this changes the whole nature of the relationship between parents and schools," says Hoxby. "A lot of parents who send their kids to charter schools have never dealt with a school that cared about their opinions before. It's really wonderful how engaged they get when they see that the school needs them. It's inspiring."

The Washington Post
Boarding Schools Nurture Low-Income Students
September 21, 2004

Most schools try to persuade students to get out of bed in the morning by lowering their grades or giving them detention when they don't, but Maya Angelou Public Charter School is one of a small but growing number of schools that have a different approach to the problem. They invite teenagers who need extra help to live in school quarters.

A generation ago, American boarding schools were generally of two kinds: private institutions for the college-bound children of the wealthy, or state-supported facilities for children under court supervision. But now a few private schools and charter schools have set themselves up as boarding schools for low-income students who want many of the advantages and the support given to bankers' and lawyers' children at Groton and St. Mark's.

"Local philanthropists, educators, judges, clergy and others around the country are starting local residential schools rather than just despair of the conditions so many youth live in, and fail in," said Heidi Goldsmith, founder and executive director of the Washington-based Coalition for Residential Education. There are only about 30 such schools, public and private, in the country, but more are planned, she said. Educators say many students thrive under 24-hour supervision.

The Washington Times
Study Shows Charter Schools Better
September 18, 2004

The vast majority of children attending the nation's 1,146 charter schools with at least 10 fourth-grade students are more proficient in reading and math than their nearest regular public school with a similar racial composition, a Harvard University study found.

"In states where charter schools are well-established, charter school as students' advantage in proficiency tends to be greater, " economics researcher Caroline M. Hoxby concluded.

Dr. Hoxby, an expert on the economics of school choice with the National Bureau of Economic Research, said the AFT study was "junk research" and "misleading." Because charter schools enroll only 1.5 percent of students in America, she said a 3 percent sample amounted to only four fourth-graders in Connecticut charter schools, 14 in the District, 32 in New York, and 38 in New Jersey.

"A state's charter school policy cannot be evaluated using the equivalent of one or two classrooms of students," she said.

"This study uses assessment data on 99 percent of fourth-graders enrolled in charter schools, except that fifth- or third-graders are used in states that do not test fourth-graders . . .

"Although it is too early to draw sweeping conclusions, the initial indications are that the average student attending a charter school has higher achievement than he or she otherwise would," Dr. Hoxby said.

CNN.COM
U.S. Lags in High School Diplomas
September 16, 2004

A growing number of nations are doing a better job than the United States in getting young people through high school and college, a study found. Among adults ages 25 to 34, for example, the United States is 10th among other industrialized nations in the share of its population that has a high school diploma.

Education Week
Study Finds Out-of-School Factors Less of a Hindrance
September 15, 2004

It is a question that affixes itself to countless debates in education: To what extent do poverty, instability at home, and other socioeconomic factors undermine the ability of students and schools to prosper academically?

Now, a new study attempts to quantify the advantages and disadvantages students face outside of school—defined as "teachability"—and to evaluate how successful states are in helping them learn, despite those hurdles.

The report shows that "student disadvantages are not destiny," its authors say. "Some schools do much better than others at educating students with low levels of teachability."

The Los Angeles Times
It's Back to School for 2,600 Displaced Students
September 14, 2004

More than 2,600 students, who were displaced last month when California Charter Academy’s (CCA’s) 60 schools were closed due to legal and financial turmoil, are now enrolled in other charter schools.

"After no longer tolerating this one bad apple, the charter school community rallied together to ensure that CCA’s former students have a soft landing into high-quality programs," said Caprice Young, chief executive of California Charter Schools Association.

Also, it turns out that CCA enrolled about 4,000 students fewer than the almost 10,000 it had claimed. Of its 5,495 students, 2,195, were adults. Of the remaining 3,300 kindergarten through 12th-grade students, about 80% have enrolled in other charter schools.

U.S. Department of Education
California Awarded $49.2 Million “No Child Left Behind” Grant to Provide More Educational Options for Parents
September 9, 2004

California has been awarded a $49.2 million grant over five years to support its efforts to provide more educational options to parents through charter schools.

The Charter School Facilities Incentive Grants program encourages states to develop and expand per-pupil facilities aid programs, which make payments to charter schools to provide them with financing that must be used for the funding of facilities. Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools do not typically have access to facilities through bonding or taxing authority. Most charter schools must pay for facilities out of their general revenue, which could be better targeted for educational purposes.

New York Sun
Charter School Students Outperform Peers, Study Says
September 8, 2004

Students at charter schools outperform their peers at geographically close and demographically similar public schools, a new report that will be released this week finds.

The author of the report, Caroline Hoxby, a Harvard University economics professor who specializes in the economics of education, said she analyzed the scores of fourth-graders at 99% of charter schools across America.

The Denver Post
Charters Targeting Niches in Populace
September 7, 2004

For more than a decade, charter schools have been an alternative for Colorado parents less than satisfied with traditional offerings. The lure is often a focused curriculum, small classes, and parental involvement in the school's operation. Now two new charter schools are looking beyond curriculum to target specific niche groups.

Districts, large ones in particular, are charged with serving the needs of a wide range of students. If they serve 85 percent of their families well, they're doing a good job. Charter schools, by comparison, have more flexibility to design programs to serve specific populations.

The Honolulu Advertiser
Charter Schools Compare Well
September 3, 2004

In the first broad attempts to analyze the performance of Hawai'i's charter schools, the state Department of Education and the Hawai'i Educational Policy Center have found that charter-school students are doing as well as or better than students at traditional public schools on the state's proficiency tests.

"It's certainly a good indicator for us," said Steve Hirakami, principal of the Hawai'i Academy of Arts & Sciences on the Big Island and interim executive director of the state's charter schools. "It shows that charter schools are ironing out some of the kinks."

Also, a study last year paid for by the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs found that Native Hawaiian students in charter schools did better than Native Hawaiian students in traditional schools.

The Seattle Times
John Kerry on the Issues
August 27, 2004

Democratic Presidential Nominee John Kerry supports charter public schools but opposes vouchers

The Courier Journal
KET2's 'Gap' Examines Charter Schools
August 25, 2004

Amistad Academy is a Connecticut charter public school that receives $4,000 less per student from the state than do New Haven’s regular public schools. Almost 85 percent of the children qualify for federal free lunches.

The student body, selected by a blind lottery, is evenly divided between boys and girls and is 64 percent African American, 34 percent Latino and 2 percent white.

Its students, which the school says come from some of the worst neighborhoods in New Haven, arrive there lagging two years behind their grade level.

They wind up scoring in the top percentiles in national tests in grades 5-8. Amistad students also regularly outperform public school students throughout Connecticut in reading, math and writing.

How do they do it? It's not money.

So what is its secret? It would seem to be a big dose of inspiration, coupled with hard work and an emphasis on attitude.

The school, founded in 1999 by a group of Yale University law students, says it holds students to standards of behavior as demanding as its academic principles. It expects students to be responsible, respectful and to give it all they've got. The school says it also teaches children how to treat others and manage their time. It stresses firm, confident handshakes, looking people in the eye and speaking clearly.

It's obvious that whatever Amistad is doing it's working. The school may be helped by only having a student body of 250 and a highly motivated teaching staff.

The Kansas City Star
City's Charter Schools Show Some Improvement
August 25, 2004

Mayor Bart Peterson released the 2004 accountability report on five mayor-sponsored charter schools Wednesday. Each was evaluated in four areas: academic results, parent and teacher satisfaction, site visits by a team of experts, and financial management.

The results show improvement over last year. Academically, 77 percent of students progressed at a faster pace than their peers nationally. As for satisfaction, 88 percent of parents are happy with their charter school and 87 percent are pleased with the quality of teaching their child receives.

The Washington Post
School of Hard Choices: In the KIPP Academy Program, It's Motivation That's Fundamental
August 24, 2004

When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin met at a 1992 summer teacher training institute in Los Angeles, they were typical of young people signing up for the Teach for America program: smart, idealistic, confident. Then they started to teach, and realized they had no idea what they were doing.

Feinberg and Levin might have given up on teaching that first year, but they were so annoyed by their inability to make headway in their classrooms that they began to devote every waking hour to turning themselves into at least passable teachers.

By 1999 Feinberg, with fifth- through eighth-graders in trailers on a school parking lot, and Levin, with the same grade levels on the fourth floor of a public school surrounded by housing projects, had the best performing middle schools in Houston and the Bronx, respectively.

KIPP combines several methods: up to 9 1/2-hour school days, required three-week summer school, regular Saturday sessions, close teacher cooperation, regular parental contacts, consistent methods of punishment and reward, and keen attention to test results. It is becoming the model that all other attempts to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students must measure themselves against.

California Charter School Association
AFT Report Actually Bolsters California Charter Schools' Effectiveness at Improving Student Achievement
August 18, 2004

A report released yesterday by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and prominently covered in yesterday's New York Times actually showed that students in California's public charter schools are doing as well and even slightly better on student achievement than those in California's broader public school system. The AFT study looked at reading and math scores from the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

"California's charter schools have shown that even despite significantly less funding and in the face of constant political obstacles, teachers that are given freedom to implement real reforms can improve student achievement for their students," said Caprice Young, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association. "Considering that California's charter schools are performing as well or better while serving a higher percentage of lower-income students, imagine how well we could do with equal funding and with less politics."

The Los Angeles News
Charters Lagging Behind?
August 17, 2004

The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The data shows fourth-graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math. Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth-graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, compared with 30 percent who were proficient in reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools."

But in California, where one in 40 students is educated in charter schools -- including more than a dozen campuses in the San Fernando Valley -- supporters said they've seen only success.

"Every study that has looked at student achievement in California has shown that despite less funding, charter schools are keeping pace with -- and in many cases outperforming -- the broader school system," said Gary Larson, a spokesman for the California Charter Schools Association, a membership organization for the state's 460 charter schools.

Student achievement comes even while California's charter schools are educating a higher percentage of lower-income pupils and those with learning problems than public schools.

In fact, results from California's High School Exit Exam released Monday showed sophomores from Granada Hills and Palisades charter high schools well outpacing their peers in the Los Angeles Unified School District and across the state.

"Clearly we're onto something here in California," Larson said. "When educators are given freedom to implement real reforms, and a little bit of time to serve their students ... positive results happen and student achievement improves."

The state will see 70 new charter schools open this fall.

The Buffalo News
School Days of Summer
July 29, 2004

More than 4,000 Buffalo students now attend publicly funded charter schools, and many of them spend large portions of the traditional summer vacation in class.

"A lot of the charter schools are concentrated in urban neighborhoods and believe that a longer school year or school day is just necessary for the student population they serve," said Peter Murphy, vice president of New York Charter Schools Resource Center. "Hopefully, that will put pressure on the traditional school districts to look at the scheduling issue."

School days or school years have recently been extended in some traditional public school districts. But those changes generally are measured by hours or days rather than weeks or months, and the traditional 10-week summer break remains largely intact.

In contrast, charter schools, which are not bound by calendar restrictions contained in conventional teacher contracts, are using large portions of the summer for instruction.

Many local charter school students are from lower-income backgrounds and are struggling academically.

KIPP Sankofa combines three summer weeks with a 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. instructional schedule during the regular school year. That exposes pupils to 60 percent more instructional time than they would receive in a traditional public school.

At the Pinnacle Charter School, located at Genesee and Ash streets, classes were in session most of July. Instead of a 10-week summer vacation, Pinnacle students have monthlong breaks during December, April and August.

"Research shows that students don't lose as much (knowledge) over four weeks as they do over 10 weeks," said Heidi S. Rotella, the school's chief academic officer. "We've noticed a huge difference. They don't do what we call the one-step forward, two-step backward dance."

The New York Times
Chicago has a Non-Union Plan for Schools
July 28, 2004

By 2010, Chicago will replace 60 failing public schools with 100 new ones, and in the process turn one in 10 of its schools over to private managers, mostly operating without unions.

"It's time to start over with the schools that are nonperforming," Mr. Daley said in an interview July 19. "We need to shake up the system."

Chicago has long struggled to raise achievement at schools that are among the country's most troubled. In 1995, the Illinois legislature gave Mayor Daley control over the system, and in the years since, he has sought improvement through balancing budgets, reducing waste, firing bad principals and founding charter schools. But the worst schools have resisted change.

"Chicago has a long history of tinkering with failed schools," said Tom Vander Ark, executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed some $25 million since 2001 to school reform efforts in Chicago. "They've called it re-engineering, reconstitution, restructuring. They would change a few things, but not surprisingly, it's never worked very well.

Until now, the closest Chicago has come was the 2002 closing of three elementary schools for academic failure. One was Williams Elementary. Cassie Sweeney taught there in the four years before its shutdown.

"It had a failed culture," Ms. Sweeney said. "There was always yelling, hostility from parents, students assaulting staff."

During its last year before closing, less than one in five students at Williams performed at grade level, she said, yet many teachers appeared complacent.

"Teachers get burned out, but with the union contract they felt well-protected, and they just weren't putting everything into their jobs," she said.

"The new teachers have a save-the-world attitude, and we needed that," Ms. Sweeney said. The proportion of students performing at grade level rose to 36 percent from 16 percent in its first year, she said.

Success at Williams and at other new small schools that Mr. Duncan has started or strengthened, which include some 20 charter schools, emboldened him to draft Chicago's sweeping new plans for the 100 new schools, which are to open by 2010 and include 30 additional charters and another 30 new contract schools, created by private groups that sign five-year, renewable contracts with the district.

The Daily News
Like Manna from Haven, 5 Charter Schools Coming
July 21, 2004

Achievement First, an outfit founded by Yale Law School grads, has been invited to open five charter schools in New York City by 2006. The proposal is part of Mayor Bloomberg's plan to open 50 charter schools in the city.

Achievement First will seek to duplicate the formula that bumped test scores at the middle school it runs in New Haven above local and Connecticut averages. The organization hopes to put all the new schools in "high-need areas" and to teach students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The Oregonian
Arthur Academy Students Gain in Achievement Tests
July 13, 2004

Stanford Achievement Test results released Monday show that Arthur Academy students -- kindergarten through second grade -- made dramatic strides in reading and math in one year.

Last fall, the 20-student 2003-04 kindergarten class, on average, scored in the 35th percentile in reading in the national test; by spring they finished in the 88th percentile. Math scores jumped from the 46th percentile to the 77th percentile during that same period.

The Christian Science Monitor
Starting from scratch: A Young Principal Spends Her Summer Pounding the Pavement in Search of Students to Fill Her New School.
July 6, 2004

Public school principals generally don't spend their summers recruiting students for their schools. Most often they're appointed to schools where decisions about location and student enrollment have already been made and often even the hiring and firing of faculty is beyond their purview.

But with the birth of the charter-school movement has come a new kind of administrator with a new set of duties and concerns. Educated at top US schools, Zhumkhawala, at 28, is idealistic, ambitious, and eager to shake up the system. Before she can run her new school, however, she has had to create it from scratch - sell the community on the idea, raise money to supplement state funding, find a site, hire teachers, and, now, hardest of all, persuade parents to trust her with their children.

But if the charter-school movement means a sometimes staggering set of new responsibilities for principals like Zhumkhawala, its intent is to create options for families like the Garcia-Bustamantes.

Delia's parents attended elementary school in Mexico. Her father works in a warehouse. Her mother, Alicia Bustamante, makes and sells tamales.

"I don't want Delia to end up like us," says Delia's father, Geronimo Garcia. "She tells me she wants to be a lawyer or a doctor. I want her to be something."

California Department of Education Press Release
California Department of Education Receives $75 Million Federal Charter School Grant
June 29, 2004

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell today joined U.S. Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige as he awarded the California Department of Education (CDE) a $75 million grant from the federal Public Charter Schools Grant Program.

The New York Times Magazine
The Harlem Project
June 20, 2004

Experts have figured out how to educate one disadvantaged child or one classroom full of kids, but no one seems to have any idea how to change a whole school system or a whole neighborhood. And that's what Geoffrey Canada is doing, with a mission both radically ambitious and startlingly simple. He has chosen as his laboratory a 60-block area of central Harlem that he calls the Harlem Children's Zone.

Canada's program combines educational, social, and medical services, starting at birth and following children to college. It operates on the principle that each child will do better if all the children around him are doing better. The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through.

As Canada's program develops, he is focusing more and more on education. He has been pouring huge amounts of money into Harlem's public schools and scores have barely budged. He now sees it as a systemic problem, something that can't be solved by the kind of supplementary services he has been offering. ''We've got to really do something radically different if we're going to save these kids,'' he said.

Canada's educational philosophy emphasizes accountability and testing, and includes starting new charter schools and converting existing district-run schools to charters. His charter schools will use non-union teachers who will be paid more than district-run school teachers, but will also work longer days and for 12 months a year. Canada also wants a free hand to fire teachers who aren't performing up to his expectations, authority Canada says he feels sure the union will not give him. At his new school, he will have it.