I reached Carolyn Gramstorff, Director of the North Oakland Community Charter School, by phone and I asked her this question. Here's what she had to say:
"I think charter schools play an important role in the mix of school reform. No one thing is the answer, but charter schools play an important role in helping kids move into the next century of public education. One intent of charter education is to serve as a model of innovation. What does a high quality school like? What are principles that are operating within that system that can be scalable and usable at different levels of the larger school system? Charter schools can play that role, to model new approaches. And charter schools that are successful should be held accountable in that question of how to model innovative approaches to education."
An East Bay charter school called FAME serves Alameda County's multi-lingual Asian and Middle Eastern communities, with campuses in Fremont and San Leandro. Their charter is up for renewal. Next week, dozens of parents, teachers, and students plan to make the case for their school at an Alameda County Board of Education public hearing. FAME is planning to become the nation's first Arabic immersion school. Read about it here.
A new study says that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition. This is on top of a Stanford study showing substantial grade improvements in "poor urban children" whose primary education is at charter schools.
Shouldn't everybody just go to a charter school? What do you think?
Here's a letter from today's Wall Street Journal commenting on the "new study" link in my previous post:
Thank you for your editorial...praising charter schools. As a public middle-school librarian and parent of teens, I couldn't agree more. But why not make every public school a charter school? Why can't all public schools be smaller and free to innovate?
In "The Tipping Point," Malcomb Gladwell argues that a community grows beyond its ideal size once it exceeds 325 members. That's why most parents are satisfied with their public elementary schools but are less so with the middle- and high-schools their children attend. As students mature we warehouse them in huge often soulless buildings, and have them switching classes to bells, a model left over from the factory whistles of the late 1800s.
If we could break up large secondary schools, create smaller classes or specialized academies within schools, we could replicate the success of charter schools on a grand scale.
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I reached Carolyn Gramstorff, Director of the North Oakland Community Charter School, by phone and I asked her this question. Here's what she had to say:
"I think charter schools play an important role in the mix of school reform. No one thing is the answer, but charter schools play an important role in helping kids move into the next century of public education. One intent of charter education is to serve as a model of innovation. What does a high quality school like? What are principles that are operating within that system that can be scalable and usable at different levels of the larger school system? Charter schools can play that role, to model new approaches. And charter schools that are successful should be held accountable in that question of how to model innovative approaches to education."
An East Bay charter school called FAME serves Alameda County's multi-lingual Asian and Middle Eastern communities, with campuses in Fremont and San Leandro. Their charter is up for renewal. Next week, dozens of parents, teachers, and students plan to make the case for their school at an Alameda County Board of Education public hearing. FAME is planning to become the nation's first Arabic immersion school. Read about it here.
A new study says that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition. This is on top of a Stanford study showing substantial grade improvements in "poor urban children" whose primary education is at charter schools.
Shouldn't everybody just go to a charter school? What do you think?
Here's a letter from today's Wall Street Journal commenting on the "new study" link in my previous post:
Thank you for your editorial...praising charter schools. As a public middle-school librarian and parent of teens, I couldn't agree more. But why not make every public school a charter school? Why can't all public schools be smaller and free to innovate?
In "The Tipping Point," Malcomb Gladwell argues that a community grows beyond its ideal size once it exceeds 325 members. That's why most parents are satisfied with their public elementary schools but are less so with the middle- and high-schools their children attend. As students mature we warehouse them in huge often soulless buildings, and have them switching classes to bells, a model left over from the factory whistles of the late 1800s.
If we could break up large secondary schools, create smaller classes or specialized academies within schools, we could replicate the success of charter schools on a grand scale.
- Sara Steveson, Austin, TX