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redefinED roundup: School choice in Arkansas, charter schools in Maine and more

By redefinED staff on June 18, 2012

Arkansas: A federal judge’s ruling on the state’s school choice law opens the door for legislative action on choice. (Arkansas News)

Maine: Gov. Paul LePage and the newly formed Maine Charter School Commission are at odds over the pace of the commission’s work. (Bangor Daily News)

Louisiana: More financial concerns surface about a private school that has drawn an unflattering spotlight to the state’s new voucher program. (Monroe News Star) Meanwhile, state education officials are still considering how best to assess private schools that accept voucher students. (New Orleans Times Picayune.) And lawsuits over the voucher program begin to pile up. (Shreveport Times)

Pennsylvania: Lawmakers get set to consider school choice expansion in the form of more tax credit scholarships. (Harrisburg Patriot News) The Pittsburgh schools system is considering its own virtual school to win back students lost to cyber charter schools. (Pittsburgh Post Gazette)

Michigan: Black students in charter schools outperform their peers in traditional public schools, a study by a charter school support group finds. (MLive.com) Continue Reading →

Jeb Bush: It will take leadership to transition to digital age in education

By Jeb Bush on June 15, 2012

With the creation of The Jetsons in the 1960s, Hanna-Barbera projected what 100 years into the future could look like. Set in 2062, The Jetsons lived in an automated, push-button world. Long distance conversations took place face to face through a television screen, groceries were ordered on-line and delivered to your doorstep, and household chores are performed with the click of a button. What Hanna-Barbera missed was the time horizon. It wouldn’t take 100 years for these changes to occur, it would happen in half of that time.

Little did they know, at the beginning of the 21st century soldiers across the ocean would be able to read their kids a bedtime story via Skype or Facetime. Questions would be answered with a simple Google search. Music would be downloaded straight to your phone with the click of a button. And kids in rural Nebraska would learn physics from engineers in Japan without leaving their 11th grade classroom.

Most schools around the nation operate the same way today as they did a century ago. They have the same schedule, the same classrooms, the same grade levels, the same teachers, and the same courses. With the ring of a bell, students move to the next subject, and the cycle starts all over again.

What if we were to channel our inner Hanna-Barbera, and visualize what public education should look like in the digital age?

I submit we would have an education system focused on student learning. No arbitrary schedules or seat-time requirements. Just learning. Each student at his or her own pace, according to their learning style.

Interactive and adaptive learning technologies can allow students to learn in their own style and at their own pace. This means no student gets bored and no student gets left behind. Teachers are no longer forced to use textbooks that become outdated the moment they leave the printer.

Digital learning can provide real-time data so teachers can differentiate instruction with laser-like precision. Data brings a level of efficiency to both teaching and learning that will improve both the experience of education as well as the outcome.

Imagine with me an education system where a student’s homework is listening to their teacher’s lecture, and class time is spent working through the military genius of Napoleon by using the latest GPS mapping software.

Or it might be a 10th-grader in his backyard, at the picnic table, diving into his chemistry lesson via his mobile tablet. He gets so caught up in what he is learning that two hours go by before he even looks up.

It could be a fifth-grader whose classroom consists of students from several grade levels engaging in an interactive learning environment where grammar skills and concepts are practiced through gaming. After providing an overview lesson on sentence structure and basic concepts, her teacher works with each student individually, based on their specific needs.

This modernized education system cares less about HOW she learns sentence structure as long as she learns it. Continue Reading →

What an NAACP president is telling us all

By Jon East on June 14, 2012

Rev. Manuel Sykes is a long-respected church and community leader in St. Petersburg, Florida, an increasingly diverse city at the mouth of Tampa Bay. That he also is now the president of an NAACP chapter that helped change the face of Pinellas public schools is all the more reason his commentary today in the Tampa Bay Times speaks volumes about educational change.

Sykes reacted to an editorial in the Times that branded tax credit scholarships for low-income students as a Republican plot to “starve” public schools “to death.” He in turn called the newspaper “stubbornly out of touch with modern reality.”

The backdrop here is relevant. The Times is Florida’s largest newspaper and is nationally acclaimed in journalism circles. It also has a proud liberal tradition editorially. It has never endorsed a Republican candidate for governor or president and was a bulwark in the 1970s and 1980s against politicians who would dare to turn their backs on the court-ordered school desegregation order the NAACP lawsuit produced (Disclosure: I wrote some of those editorials during my years on the editorial board there).

So for Sykes and the newspaper to be at odds on scholarships for poor children mostly of color is indeed striking. When the court order was lifted about a decade ago, many black community leaders such as Rev. Sykes turned their focus directly to the achievement of black students. The Times itself played a crucial role by reporting in-depth on a startling and persistent achievement gap between black and whites in county schools.

This disconnect is not unique to St. Petersburg, certainly. But white liberals who find themselves at odds with powerful figures in the African-American community would be wise to reflect on the sense of urgency that bonded them with black children in the divisive desegregation wars following Brown v. Board of Education. That call to justice is precisely what motivates Rev. Sykes and others like him today. They counsel everyday to black children whose lives are headed in the wrong direction, and they’re not looking for lectures on school governance or fond recollections of neighborhood schools. They see children who need help now, and they want every option on the table. That’s something we white liberals should get.

Digital learning helps students ‘where they are and not where we want them to be’

By Star Kraschinsky on June 14, 2012

Florida Virtual School® (FLVS®) opened its virtual doors in August 1997 as the country’s first Internet-based public high school with seven teachers and 77 students. Today, the statewide, public virtual school serves more than 122,000 public, private, charter and home-schooled students in Kindergarten through 12th grade and provides e-solutions to all 67 Florida school districts, the remaining 49 states and to 57 countries.

Through FLVS and online learning solutions, curriculum and scheduling choices are no longer limited to local school offerings or a student’s zip code. Access is offered 24/7/365 from any place with Internet connection. Fast forward 10, maybe even just five years, and this paradigm shift on how to best serve students – where they are and not where we want them to be – will be almost complete.

The fundamental belief of FLVS that every student is unique and learns at a different pace is as true today as it was 15 years ago. It’s all about personalized learning and instruction.

In the future, when funding completely follows a child, he/she will be able to be zoned to one “home” school, but take courses from various schools. Students and their parents will have educational choices; they will be able to map out their own personalized learning journey.

With funding following the student, the bottom line will not be at the center of all decisions made; the student will be at the center – as he/she should be. Continue Reading →

Florida charter school leader: Shut down problem charter schools

By Cheri Shannon on June 13, 2012

In an effort to transform our public school system, charter schools have provided a breath of fresh air. Free, open-enrollment public schools, charters were established in Florida in 1996 to provide more high-quality educational options for families. With the flexibility to innovate with curriculum, classroom time, technology and much more, charter schools are held to greater standards of accountability for student achievement. This means that charter schools that are effectively improving learning, as most in Florida are, should be celebrated as well as replicated so more students benefit.

However, if a charter school is not living up to its mission of providing a high-quality education for its students, then it should no longer be in operation. All public schools, whether a charter, magnet or district school, must ensure that every child has access to a strong educational program that meets his or her needs.

Since the first charter school opened 20 years ago in Minneapolis, we have learned that, occasionally, opening the door to let in fresh air brings with it some flies. Despite the strong performance of charter schools, there are a few underperformers that fall short of their mission to provide a high-quality education for all students. That is why local school boards and the Department of Education have moved to close at least three charter schools this year – actions we in the larger charter school movement support. The most recent action includes the decision to close Life Force Arts and Technology charter in Pinellas County, which had questionable curriculum and management, and to no one’s surprise, low student achievement. When charter schools like these do not meet their goals, they should no longer have the privilege of serving students and should close.

As we continue to hold charter schools accountable, as we should all public schools, we must not lose sight of the fact that parents of nearly 180,000 students actively chose to send their children there.

In the case of some poor performers, it’s perhaps because parents feel their child is safer in a small environment the school may provide, or because the nearby district schools are worse off. But those factors alone are not enough. Charter schools must be able to demonstrate the ability to improve learning, and when bad ones close, we should respect parents’ choices and work to ensure good schools will take their place. Parents will ultimately make good choices – they simply need access to more of them. Continue Reading →

Parents will continue to be the driving force behind Florida charter schools

By Lynn Norman-Teck on June 13, 2012

Many factors have helped nourish and grow the charter school movement. There are forward-thinking legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, who worked together to approve legislation that supported parental choice. There are governors who made quality education a priority of their administrations. There are thousands of teachers and principals who used tried and tested curriculum, and also developed innovative educational programs to meet the specific needs of their students. There are charter school founders who collaborated with mayors, teachers, parents and community leaders to implement educational programs to reach communities and students most in need. And of course, there are school district leaders and board members who provided the necessary feedback and support to create quality choice programs.

However, when you put all these components together, and look at the trajectory of growth and incredible successes charter schools have experienced, there is no denying that parents are the movement’s most powerful, driving force.

Absolutely nothing has impacted charter schools more than parents. Without their buy-in and continued support, charter schools simply would not exist. The early charter school adopters were living in suburban areas where districts hadn’t built schools to meet residential sprawl. These parents sought schools close to home and helped forge the way for some of the state’s first and most accomplished charter schools. Urban families unable to afford private schools, yet searching for quality options, also jumped on board. Soon, charter schools were the hot topic of conversation at playgrounds and on the sidelines of little league games. This quiet, thoughtful revolution happened in every corner of the state. Parents shared information about their experiences, and their testaments fueled others to give charter schools a try.

Ileana Melian helped start Doral Academy, a charter elementary school in Miami, in 1998. She recalls with great affection the overwhelming support parents gave her school. “Our opening was a collaborative effort,” she said. “Parents rallied behind us at community meetings and were there the first day we opened to help in the cafeteria, direct traffic and support staff in a thousand ways. They were very much a part of our birth and our continued success.” Those parents later demanded, and got, a charter middle and high school.

Empowered by choice and the desire to find the best education option for their child, in little over a decade parental support grew charter schools from five in 1997 to more than 500 today. In 2010, parents took a bold step forward in their support of charter schools. Continue Reading →

The right-wing Waldorf conspiracy?

By Jon East on June 12, 2012

Waldorf schools are a splendid example of how the private marketplace can fill a learning niche. Their humanistic approach can work in perfect harmony with some families to produce creative, lifelong learners who become highly successful adults. And as redefinED editor Ron Matus pointed out in this post about the Waldorf Sarasota and an oped in today’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune, they also help make two pertinent points in the world of tax credit scholarships. One, not every school is right for every student; and, two, any education program that includes Waldorf is not easily described as a right-wing conspiracy.

Florida may need more private school options for working-class families

By Doug Tuthill on June 12, 2012

Step Up For Students (SUFS) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help low-income parents access the schools that best meet their children’s needs. We do this, in part, by providing tax-credit funded scholarships to low-income families to help them pay the tuition and fees at qualified private schools.

While our scholarships help disadvantaged families afford private schools, our mission is not to promote private schools over homeschooling, charter schools, virtual schools, neighborhood schools or magnet schools. We just want parents to have a full array of educational choices to them, and having access to private schools — especially faith-based private schools – is important to many low-income families. So we want this option to remain viable. Unfortunately, if we don’t reverse recent trends, this private school choice is threatened.

Enrollment in Florida private schools has declined 20 percent in the past seven years, from 381,346 students in 2003-4 to 305,825 in 2010-11. And as the demand for private schools has declined, so has the supply. From 2004-5 to 2010-11, the number of private schools in Florida went from 2,304 to 2055, a decrease of 11 percent.

We know from Economics 101 that supply and demand are interdependent. A growth cycle occurs when increased demand leads to greater supply, which in turn drives more demand, which in turn generates more supply. And a death cycle happens when the opposite occurs: less demand leads to less supply, which further reduces demand, which causes even less supply. Florida’s private schools today are in a pronounced downward spiral that cannot be explained fully by current economic conditions. If we cannot reverse this trend, private school choice for low-income families will be diminished. I don’t believe demand has decreased – I believe the demand is as great as ever – it’s just that parents can’t afford to make this choice.

One solution is to make private schools more affordable for working-class families. Continue Reading →

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