In the Classroom: Technology

In 2002 Google launched it's Google Books project that sought to answer a simple but important question: "how long would it take to digitally scan every book in the world?" Years later they're still working at it, but educators and education administration alike were thrilled by the prospect that so much information can be at our children's fingertips in even the most remote areas.

Digital libraries and technology in general are touted as the wave of the future in education, but the question Matt Richtel of the New York Times asks is will technology really change the classroom? He recently wrote an article titled In Classroom of Future, Stagnat Scores that examined why, in classrooms completely outfitted with the latest technology, are test scores still stuck at the same levels they've always been?

Richtel seems to answer his own question. Innovative and engaging teachers who put that technology to good use produce creative and intelligent kids. The Quick & the Ed explains this well:

"In another vignette a teacher projects a true or false question onto a large screen: “Jefferson Davis was the commander of the Union Army.” Students used clickers to give their answers and, just like on a game show set, a computer instantly compiled the results. It was an electronic show of hands. This is the kind of right-or-wrong question that only calls on students to regurgitate what they know. Whatever the  response methodology, the question wouldn’t lead to a rich discussion in which students had to defend their answers with historical evidence. A better question would be to ask students to discuss why Davis, who was trained at West Point, fought bravely in the Mexican American War, was a U.S. Senator and served as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce, was loyal to the Confederacy. They could research the answer on line—on their own or as a class."

Richard Lee of The Quick & the Ed goes on to ask the followup questions regarding technology in the classroom:

"Q. How does it change the role of the teacher? Q. Does the technology make it easier for teachers to understand students’ thinking? Where they need extra help? Q. Does it make it easier for students to learn from one another, perhaps using social media? Q. Does it help students learn basic material more quickly so that more class time can be devoted to in-depth discussions and applications of knowledge to solve problems? Q. Does it extend learning effectively beyond the classroom?" 

Ultimately, though technology in the classroom is a very exciting prospect, we must not forget the importance of a good teacher to make good use of it.

New Chicago Schools Chief Talks With WBEZ Callers

 The new CPS chief, Jean-Claude Brizard, took calls for an hour last night for the first monthly installment of WBEZ's program Schools on the Line. Students, parents and Chicagoans called in with their questions. Here are a couple of excerpts from his answers:


"Bottom line is that when you look at the school day in Chicago compared to New York, or Houston or Boston, we have the shortest school day, school year of the big systems in the country." 


"We have kept class size constant despite the massive shortfall in the budget that we've experienced for this school year."


Listen to the entire hour on WBEZ's website and tune in the first Thursday of September for the second installment. 

Matt Damon's Take on Teachers

This is a followup to our post The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman which explored the film that offered a rebuttal to Davis Guggenheim's famous documentary, Waiting for Superman. While Guggenheim's film explored perspectives on tenure, ED spending, unions and charter schools through the lens of some of the nation's most powerful figures and institutions, this latest documentary claims it has captured the voice of the people working in the trenches - the parents, teachers, social workers and ed reform advocates.

On July 30th 2011, reason.tv was at the Save Our Schools March, where this film were screened. Michelle Fields spoke with attendees and speakers like actor Matt Damon, author Jonathan Kozol, and historian Diane Ravitch that support the stance this new documentary takes. See what they had to say:

The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman...the movie

There has been much ado about the documentary film Waiting for Superman. In many ways this film has done much good for the education reform movement. It got people motivated. But there are many people, primarily parents, teachers and activists, who voiced that the film was too simplistic and destroyed much of the momentum towards true reform.

SocialistWorker.org states, "[Waiting for Superman] touted corporate reformers as education "experts" and painted teachers, tenure, and the unions that protect them as the enemy. The film completely ignored the effects of broader social problems like poverty and racism, while pointing to charter schools and privatization as magic solutions." (read more about Waiting for Superman on our blog post Join the Conversation: Charter Schools)

A new documentary claims it has captured the true voices of education reform from parents, teachers and community members. It's called The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.

According to Diane Ravitch (in the film promo above) Waiting for Superman's message demoralized teachers. "It takes a village to raise a child and the corporate reform movement has caused the village to fall into distension and people are fighting each other. At the same time the budget for education is being slashed and corporate taxes are going down." She says, "we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." 

Read the article here. Read more about the documentary here.

Escaping Endless Adolescence. Why are teens growing up so slowly?

I just found an interesting Newsweek article written by Po Bronson reviewing the book Escaping Endless Adolesence. The book's authors, Dr. Joe Allen and Dr. Claudia Worrell Allen, asks the question, "Why are teens growing up so slowly?" In other words, why does it take teens today so long to mature and be ready for the world? Their answer to this question is reflected in the current education reform discussion.

Structural changes in our school system is part of the national conscious when it comes to education reform, whether it's extending the school day, extending the school year, block scheduling, starting the school day later, or any of the other ideas that have been tossed around, it's been part of the mainstream conversation. What these authors have concluded is structural change is needed and should provide real-life, hands on experience that better prepare our children and offer them options to explore their talents, creativity and maturity.

"We place kids in schools together with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one another in age. We equip them with similar gadgets, expose them to the same TV shows, lessons, and sports. We ask them all to take almost the exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own individuality... We don’t give teens enough ways to take risks that are productive.”

At Urban School Foundation we're trying to provide this opportunity through entrepreneurship education. We're creating a program in which students actually start a business and run it. All proceeds from this business are then donated to the school program of their choice.

Read more about our program here.

Back to School for Billionaires

This Newsweek article explores the various methods employed by our nation's concerned billionaires in an effort to reform the US education system. In their efforts to do good they've found that it's not as simple as it seems.

"The business titans entered the education arena convinced that America’s schools would benefit greatly from the tools of the boardroom. They sought to boost incentives for improving performance, deploy new technologies, and back innovators willing to shatter old orthodoxies.

They pressed to close schools that were failing, and sought to launch new, smaller ones. They sent principals to boot camp. Battling the long-term worry that the best and brightest passed up the classroom for more lucrative professions, they opened their checkbooks to boost teacher pay.

It was an impressive amount of industry. And in some places, it has worked out—but with unanticipated complications."

With so much success in the business world it would make sense to run schools in a business-like manner, but what we're all realizing is that education reform is much more complicated.

"...The Walton Family Foundation hoped that its $8 million investment in Milwaukee charters would produce strong schools and a competitive environment to raise the bar across all the city’s schools. But the charters failed to outperform traditional schools. Reading scores were mostly flat over the past five years citywide. In math, elementary- and middle-school gains were stronger than in the rest of Wisconsin, but high-school proficiency dropped 2 points.

This causes pause to the cause. Should education reform be about school or teacher reform, or do we need to be looking at broader issues in society?

Parents spell out detailed school reform blueprint

I found this article on The Washington Post. It's an interesting new twist to the public education reform debate. In it, a national grassroots organization called Parents Across America outlines its own blueprint for the rewriting of No Child Left Behind.

Congress has been considering how to rewrite the No Child Left Behind Act. For those who've heard of it, but may not know what it is, a little history. NCLB was originally proposed by the administration of George W. Bush immediately after he took office. The bill, shepherded through the Senate by co-author Senator Ted Kennedy, received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.

NCLB supports standards-based education reform, which is based on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education. The Act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those states are to receive federal funding for schools. The general consensus today is the NCLB is broken and must be revisited.

Parents Across America believe, "[NCLB] has dramatically harmed our local schools with its overemphasis on high-stakes testing, narrowing of the curriculum, and punitive unfunded mandates that have been especially harmful to schools with high-needs student populations. What it has not done is improve achievement." 

They're against:

· Policies that use standardized test scores as the most important accountability measure for schools, teachers or students, and/or expand the use of standardized testing in our schools.

· Competition for federal funds; a quality education is not a race but a right.

· “Parent trigger” laws, vouchers, charter takeovers or other forms of school privatization that take resources from the schools attended by most students and put them into private hands, with less oversight.

· Limiting federally-mandated school improvement models to a narrow set of strategies, including charter schools and privatization, which are favored by corporate reformers but which have had little verified success.

Find this article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/parents-spell-out-detailed-school-reform-blueprint/2011/04/22/AFO7XzOE_blog.html

The Creativity Crisis

Here's an interesting articlethat follows a study done by E. Paul Torrance. The study started in 1958 with group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who took part in a creativity study. The question you might be asking yourself is, how does one measure creativity? Well according to this study you can show the amount of creative potential and thought by judging whether the subjects of the study had "unusual visual perspecitve" and "an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products."

What does that mean exactly? Well, Ted Schwarzrock, a participant in the study, can still remember the task given to him when he was 8.  He was given a fire truck and asked, "How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?" He was able to find 25 ways, like adding a removable ladder, which impressed his evaluators.

Torrance's creativity tasks have since become the gold standard, and "what's shocking is how incredibly well Torrance's creativity index predicted those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers...the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ." Though they differ in content, both the creativity test (CQ) and the IQ tests are very similar in the ways they are administered, the results are very different. "With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect-each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making skids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling."

The researchers speculate on the reasons behind the decline - too many hours in front of the television or video games rather than engaging activities. In 2009 a controversial documentary came out that has another explanation. This review comes from Variety online:

"The War on Kids" contradicts popular wisdom. Studded with news reports of extreme "zero tolerance" incidents (children expelled for possessing Ibuprofen or for pointing a chicken tender and saying "bang"), Cevin Soling's documentary posits that, far from being ridiculous exceptions to the rule as media coverage implies, such examples are endemic to a highly repressive, authoritarian [education] institution whose sole purpose is to control and contain.  ...[The] docu then takes a giant if seamless step forward to suggest that the entire system of compulsory learning is designed, in the words of an award-winning teacher, "to infantilize the mass mind and condition it to take orders in a docile fashion."

Check out the trailer below.

"A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 'leadership competency' of the future." What are your thoughts on the creativity crisis? Does it relate to the education crisis, as War on Kids implies? Respond on our discussion board. You can read more about the creativity test at Newsweek and a full review of the documentary at Variety or the New York Times.

Why does the US need education reform? A nation in crisis.

Throughout history there have been defining periods of human ingenuity and creative thought that have transformed society. Inventions in the 1700's were precursors to the industrial revolution in the 1800's. The 1900's saw the advent of the mass-produced automobile, the telephone, television, radio, computers, internet and more. In the past 20 years we've seen just how the internet and communications technology can change the world. It still amazes this blog writer that just just a few years ago Facebook burst onto the scene, a site that assisted in an Egyptian revolution and most of us generally can't live without. We're all living in a time when the world that's changing at the speed of technology.

This ever-changing world has put our nation in crisis. Today's HS graduate will have on average 8-15 careers in his/her lifetime, even if they stay with the same company. This is paradime-shifting in it's implications for educating our children. Our competitive advantages of the past (natural resources, capital, technology and human captial) have been eroded by globalization. Brain power is now the competitive advantage in the 21st century, making ed the center of  global competition.

If brain power is the new global capital, how is the US measuring up? Let's take a look. ABC's 20/20 host, John Stossel, made a persuasive feature he titled "Stupid in America" arguing that a lack of choice cheats our kids out of a good education. This is clearly a pro-charter feature, which is a topic we've explored in previous blog posts and not why we're referencing it. (See previous posts Join the Conversation: Charter Schools & The Myth of Charter Schools) What was interesting about this report was a comparison between students at an above average Jersey high school and to students at an equivalent level at a school in Belgium. ABC gave parts of an international test to each class. After taking the test each class felt they had done well on the test. How did they fare?

"Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and called them 'stupid.' We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America. Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the American students, told me, 'I'm shocked, because it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.' ...When students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th."

Today, more than 220 of the world's biggest companies have their IT operations in India. Many of these jobs are skilled, high-paying technology jobs. Why are major corporations moving overseas? America is facing the challenge of an increasingly global and constantly changing world with an education system that's entrenched in educating for a world that doesn't exist anymore, and the market is holding this hard fact up to our face.  Intel's Sr. Vice president fears four our competitive future as a nation. Lester Thorough of MIT expressed, "if we do not get a handle on this problem of non-functionals entering the labor market, the US will become a third world labor market by the year 2030."

I was planning on throwing some more statistics at you demonstrating rising dropout rates and talk about how they'll affect our economy and our ability as a nation to govern, but instead I think I'll just show you these clips from Jay Leno's late night comedy show:

1. Jay Walking: Geographically Challenged. Jay quizzes high school students on geography because he couldn't believe that 11% of American students between the ages of 18 and 24 couldn't locate the United States on a map  (that's 1 in 10 students)

Note: one of the comments below this video reads, "Man americans are stupid! I thought war was the only way for them to learn geography, but they don't even know where they're fighting."

1. Jay Walking: Citizenship Test. Jay asks passersby to answer questions from the American citizenship test and deports those who fail.

So, the question remains, how do we prepare our children to live in an ever-changing world? We need to find a better way to instill in our students the agility to learn and relearn, to think and re-think creatively and connect ideas, solve problems and think for themselves.  It's clear we're not doing that now, so what are we going to do about it?

Learn how entrepreneurship education can help.

Entrepreneur in Focus: Geoffrey Canada

In the spirit of expanding our blog to spotlight a successful entrepreneur, it's fitting that our first Entrepreneur in Focus be one who has been the subject of our previous blog posts on education reform. His name is Geoffry Canada. As the CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone he's helped to revolutionize the way a nonprofit enterprise can "change the trajectory of a poor child's future in an inner-city neighborhood."

YOUNG GEOFFRY CANADA

Geoffry Canada was raised by his mother, Mary,  in Harlem, New York.  Finances were tight. In the early years Mary struggled to support her four sons, and as a result Canada's early life was marked by poverty. She loved and cared for her boys, working hard to raise them with values.  Limiting their television intake, tutoring them herself and taking them to civil rights rallies, she instilled in them the importance of education and concepts of social equality.  Living in a poor, unsafe neighborhood Canada had to learn street smarts to stay safe.

In his teens he went to live with his grandparents in Freeport, Long Island where he excelled in school and won a scholarship. He continued his education at Bowdoin College where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and sociology in 1974.  He also holds a Master's degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

EARLY CAREER

After graduation Canada joined the faculty of Robert White School, an alternative school for troubled youth in Boston, Massachusettes. His ability reaching these students, especially the most violent ones, was a reason for his quick rise to the director position of Robert White.

In 1983 he returned to Harlem determined to make a difference in his old neighborhood. He wanted to help others succeed as he had. He got a job working for the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families as a program director in the Truancy Prevention Program, and by 1990 had risen to President of the organization. Canada was unsatisfied with the scope of Rheedlen, and he began to make changes. The Rheedlen Center was renamed the Harlem Children's Zone and Canada shifted the entire makeup of the organization.

ENTREPRENEUR IN "THE GREAT SOCIAL EXPERIMENT": HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE BEGINNINGS

In an interview for the documentary film, Waiting for Superman, Geoffry Canada explains that he decided to go study what was wrong with the public education system so he "could fix it.” After earning a master’s degree from Harvard, he figured this would take “two, maybe three years.” That was over  35 years ago. NPR's This American Life did a segment on him for their "Going Big" show. Going big was what Canada realized needed to be done to reform education.

The idea came to him when he and his wife had a son. As the narrator on "Going Big" explains, Canada was in his 40's and things had changed for him. "He was no longer trying to make ends meet. He was now a well-educated, upper middle class guy living in a big home in the suburbs surrounded by trees and lawns and golf courses."  As a dad he found out there was a ton of new research on the benefits of stimulating your child's brain at a young age, and it surprised him that everyone in the suburbs seemed to know about it. "They were obsessed with preparing their children," he explains. People in the suburbs were buying up every Baby Einstein product  or other brain building toys for kids in sight. 


Canada said he felt "overwhelmed" by all this new information and wondered how the parents they were working with in his organization were fairing in the "parenting revolution." He asked his staff to canvass the neighborhood and what they found was there was nothing. Abolutely no one was teaching anything - no best practices, no parental education, nothing - for moms and dads of 0-3 year olds. It dawned on him that places like Harlem "are often left out of the science of developmental education."

At the same time Canada began rethinking his approach to social work. After so many years of frustration saving one child and having 10 more slip through the cracks he wondered if there was a tipping point, a point at which the the entire culture, the cycle of teen pregnancy and dropping out of high school could be altered. Could he reach 40 or 50% of these kids? He went to his board with these thoughts and the conclusion: we've been going about this the wrong way.

It was this revelation that led to the complete re-thinking of how they were approaching urban poverty and education reform. The two were intertwined. Middle class and upper middle class families had access to this information and talked about it openly. It completely passed over lower-income families. Kids in middle to upper middle class families have opportunities to continue to grow and develop after school with programs, clubs, sports and more. Kids from lower-income families are too often left unsupervised, because their parents, or parent, are working. Single parents in the neighborhood had little access, or knowledge, of support systems. What Harlem Children's zone aimed to do was provide a quality education for the children of Harlem as well as design a support network that is "designed to mimic the often-invisible cocoon of support and nurturance that follows middle class and upper middle class kids through their childhood" until they graduate college.

HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE PROGRESS AND PROGRAMS

Quoting from the HCZ Project web page: "The HCZ Project began as a one-block pilot in the 1990s, then following a 10-year business plan, it expanded to 24 blocks and then 60 blocks. The goal is to serve 15,000 children and 7,000 adults by 2011. The budget for the HCZ Project for fiscal year 2009 is over $40 million, costing an average of $3,500 per child."

The ambitious Harlem Children's Zone Project has expanded the comprehensive system of programs to nearly 100 blocks of Central Harlem and aims to keep children on track through and beyond college, as former students enter the job market. So, what programs and services are included in HCZ?

• Baby College, a series of workshops for parents of children ages 0-3
• Gems, an all-day pre-kindergarten program
• Harlem Peacemakers, reducing violence through negotiation skills and self defense classes
• Promise Academy, extended-day charter schools from kinder to 12th grade
• TRUCE Arts & Media, fostering career readiness through media literacy and artistic ability
• Employment & Technology, teaching computer and job-related skills to teens and adults
• College Success, an office that supports HCZ graduates throughout the college admission experience and during their college education
• Community Pride, organizes tenant and block associations
• Family Support, provides crisis intervention services, advocacy, groups on parenting and anger management training
• Asthma & Obesity Initiatives, educating families and providing management counciling

And there are many more. Read more about these programs and their success.This is significant because HCZ is now helping $1,200 students, 90% of which go on to attend college. The odds are in favor of college grads for breaking that cycle of poverty.

INSPIRATIONAL

Geoffry Canada's Harlem Children's Zone has been extraordinarily inspirational. president Obama launching promise neighborhoods program, 20 cities across US to mimic HCZ. Read more about promis neighborhoods here.

The United States' Shocking Education Statistics

While it's debatable whether or not Davis Guggenheim's documentary film, Waiting for Superman, offers the right solution to the problems affecting the US public education system, it definitely has raised awareness of the statistics presented throughout the movie:

The tables and graphs above shed light on our broken education system. Though we've increased spending per student, math and reading scores are abysmal. According to the PISA test, a international test that measures proficiency in core subject matter every three years, only 23% of United States high schoolers graduate at their expected level in math. That's less than 1 in 4 students. Reading proficiency is better but not by much at 35%, or a little over 1 in 3 students.

How do these figures measure up on a global scale? In comparison with 30 other developed countries, the US is nowhere close to the top:

If we're not serving our students and they're not prepared for college or the workforce, how will this affect poverty in America? In turn, how will it affect government-supported social services? Our nation's future in general? Let us know your thoughts on our discussion forum.

Join the Conversation: The Myth of Charter Schools

This blog post is a continuation of our previous post, Join the Conversation: Charter Schools, which discussed the documentaries Waiting for Superman and The Lottery. These documentaries suggested charter schools as the answer to America's failing public education system, but not everyone would agree. 

Diane Ravitch, a writer for The New York Review of Books embodies the sentiments of those who feel charter schools can't be a all-in-one solution for education reform. She and others argue that Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman is an oversimplification of what's wrong with the current system.

"At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions."

In Waiting for Superman, charter schools are portrayed as the answer to failing public schools, but is that really true? In 2009 results from a Stanford University study were released that found, when compared to traditional public schools:

• Only 17% of charter schools performed significantly better (less than 1 in 5 charter schools)
• 37% of charters performed worse
• 46% showed no different in their performance

Guggenheim focuses heavily on Geoffry Canada's success with the Harlem Children's Zone as the example of a successful charter school, and rightfully so. That success is clear cut. In almost every respect students at HCZ are performing above state averages. However, Guggenheim chooses to cling to the idea that charter schools like HCZ are successful because they're mostly free from teacher unions and can fire teachers that aren't up to snuff.

Geoffry Canada is an advocate for the ability to fire poor performing teachers. He's not afraid to share his opinion that "some teachers just can't teach" and "when you see a great teacher you're seeing a work of art." Throughout the documentary segments of an interview with Canada are shown that portray these sentiments in support of a charter school's freedom to manage its staff. This narrow focus on whether or not schools can fire bad teachers as the cause for a failing education system is not fair to the viewer. This idea becomes the scapegoat and ignores the many other issues that are part of the cultural fabric of urban areas like Harlem.

Canada expects their teachers to consistently perform at a level of excellence, but he also understands that excellent teachers are just part of the solution. All teachers in inner city classrooms face crime, poverty, substance abuse, and the challenges that come with dysfunctional and single parent families. 

HCZ teachers are teaching kids that face these challenges, too. The difference is Canada's solution wasn't solely to create charter schools where he can fire teachers who aren't up to snuff. What isn't shown in Waiting for Superman is that HCZ created a "project pipeline," charter schools surrounded by an institutional support structure that, according to author of Whatever it Takes, Paul Tough, is "designed to mimic the often-invisible cocoon of support and nurturance that follows middle-class and upper-middle-class kids through their childhood." This cocoon includes services like access to quality family and social services, health and community building programs that provide teacher support.

Let's take a quick look at inner city public schools that have found a way to create a similar support system. Turnaround for Children, Inc. is an organization in New York that works with public schools, as well as the 4 in 5 failing charter schools, to help them reorganize from the inside out and make them productive learning environments. To do this they work with schools in many ways. How?

• Servicesbuilding internal school capacity to address mental health and behavioral challenges and linkages to community social services:
  • School-based counseling and support
  • Pathways to a community-based mental health partner
  • Family engagement ahd education
• Skills providing outcome-driven professional development for all school staff, for example:
  • Strategic classroom organization
  • Proactive classroom management
  • Knowledge of social-emotional and behavioral development in children

By providing social support and counciling, Turnaround for Kids, Inc. has found success. Schools became calmer and safer:

• 51% decrease in police-reported incidences
• 32% decrease in suspensions

Which also had an effect on teacher performance:

• 77% decline in teacher turnover
• 34% decrease in teacher absences

Over a three to four year intervention period ending in 2009, students in Turnaround for Children’s New York City partner schools showed notable academic gains, as shown by the percentage of students demonstrating at or above grade-level proficiency.

• Math:  Students’ math proficiency scores increased from 49 to 82% at the elementary level; and from 24 to 64% at the middle school level.
• English Language Arts:  Students’ ELA proficiency scores increased from 47 to 57% at the elementary level; and from 27 to 49% at the middle school level.

So, reader, what do you think? Is the real question of education reform as simple as saying teachers are the problem, public shcools are inadequate and charters are the answer? Contribute your thoughts to our discussion board.

Join the Conversation: Charter Schools

While we love boasting about the progress Urban School Foundation and its students have made here on our blog, we also feel it's important to get more people involved in the conversation about education's tough issues, to feature the benefits of entrepreneurship education, spotlight great entrepreneurs and their success stories and other topics surrounding the achievement gap in education and the chasm that exists between the opportunities afforded students in affluent neighborhoods compared to those in disadvantaged ones.

Education has been called the magic bullet - a way to solve poverty, grow the economy, improve our nation's health, provide a means to better compete on the global scale and heal many more of society's ills. However, the timeless question remains, "How should we reform education so it's more engaging and effective?"

There are many ideas and challenges to reform that are being discussed, and I hope we'll touch on them all at some point. READER WARNING! Full disclosure: as a former teacher I have opinions on many of the topics we'll be discussing, however I don't think there's a magic bullet to this magic bullet, and with this blog I'm hoping to offer an objective perspective on the ideas that have been floating around. I want your input and thoughts on the subject matter, and I'd like to start with a current hot button issue: public schools versus charter schools.

The idea that Charter schools could be the education system's savior has been around for over two decades, but before we discuss charter schools it would help to clarify what the difference is between a public school and a charter school. Both types of schools receive public funding, but charter schools are not subject to some of the rules and regulations that apply to public schools. For example, charter schools can hire or fire anyone they want, can have a longer school day and other differences that mark them as independent of the public school system. In exchange they have 5 years to prove they can succeed in producing successful students or their charter will not be renewed and is closed. Charters can be founded and managed by parents, community groups, nonprofits, government agencies and even corporations. The most important difference is anyone can attend a charter school if they are accepted, and therefore provide parents an alternative to their public district school.

Last year was called the "year of the Education Documentary." There were many documentaries made that addressed the serious issue of the deteriorating American education system, but Waiting for Superman drew the most attention nation-wide. For those of you who may not be familiar with the documentary, here's a quick overview:

"Documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim explores the tragic ways in which the American public education system is failing our nation's children, and explores the roles that charter schools and education reformers could play in offering hope for the future. ...There was a time when the American public education system was a model admired by the entire world. Today other countries are surpassing us in every respect, and the slogan "No Child Left Behind" has become a cynical punch line."

Both this film and another documentary called The Lottery focus on Harlem and the sharp contrast between abysmal public school performance levels and the success of charters like the Harlem Children's Zone and Harlem Success Academy. These charters are raising the bar in every respect and achieving a standard of excellence in the communities that were written off long ago as impossible to turn around.

The main points that these movies seem to be making is that these charters have been successful for a few reasons; they have the freedom to create their own curriculum and to make necessary changes in the schools without having to wade through the bureaucratic red tape. Another central point, one that I will explore in more depth in future posts, is that charter schools are largely free from union interference. This is something that leaders of both charters have identified as key points to their success, because if they feel their teachers are not meeting their standards for an educator they can replace them with a better teacher.

The question both films ask the audience at one point or another is, if charter schools can produce this kind of educational success why don't we have more charter schools? Even President Obama has addressed the issue, coming down on the side of more charter schools in cities across america. These movies raise this question by showing us how the current public school system is failing our children. Schools are graduating functionally illiterate students, a shocking number of city schools are averaging a 50% dropout rate or higher, giving some schools the name "dropout factories," and many more startling statistics show the ineffectiveness of public education. Waiting for Superman even addresses the failures of schools beyond the inner-city, showing how many suburban, presumably successful, schools are also not meeting the needs of all their students.

As the viewer we're along for the ride as we journey with five promising kids who are trying to get into high achieving charter school. Because there are more of these students than available seats at the successful charters, ambitious children like Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emil, must leave their hopes and dreams for a better education to chance in a public lottery. In the end we're for those students whose names are called, and we're disheartened when the other students were not so lucky. The most disheartening realization is knowing there are many more students and parents attending this lottery who share that disappointing experience - their name wasn't called.

Both movies leave you with a sense of duty towards education reform, and both make the case that charters can be the answer. What do you think? Post your opinion about charter schools vs. public schools in your discussion forum.

This is just our first post on this topic. Keep an eye out for a followup posts on public school solutions and other issues affecting education.