Archive for Urban Issues

Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging chancellor of the Washington, DC, public schools, thinks teacher tenure may be great for adults, those who go into teaching to get summer vacations and great health insurance, for instance. But it hurts children, she says, by making incompetent instructors harder to fire. So Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure.

Policy makers and educators nationwide are watching to see what happens to Rhee’s bold proposal. The 4,000-member Washington Teachers’ Union has divided over whether to embrace it, with many union members calling tenure a crucial protection against arbitrary firing. Read more of this article in The New York Times online.

On the face of it, Ames Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota, has all the ingredients needed to make a failing school. Its families are poor, many students struggle with English and there is a high proportion of students of color. But this year, a year in which richer and whiter schools were being added to the rapidly increasing state list of schools falling behind, Ames was removed from the list entirely.

What the school has done to turn things around can be an interesting case study for other Minnesota schools struggling to educate disadvantaged students. The school has adjusted its curriculum, stepped up efforts to connect with parents, started a Saturday school, instituted uniforms and made a cultural shift to raise children's sights toward graduation and college.

"This school is built on helping the children find what their gift is, what their strong points are," said Rochelle West, who has four children at Ames and is a co-chair of the school's site council. "This school helped them find who they are, and who they can be." Read more in The Star-Tribune online.

The school boards and superintendents of five U.S. urban school districts have been chosen to participate in a two-year national training in school board policy best practices, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has announced. The program, called "Reform Governance in Action," trains the nation's most promising reform-minded school boards and superintendents to become effective, high-performing teams.

Participation in the program is by invitation only and is based on demonstrated strong leadership and willingness to work collectively and rigorously to improve learning opportunities for students. School board members and superintendents from the following school districts were chosen to participate: Antioch Unified School District, California; Elizabeth Public Schools, New Jersey; Houston Independent School District, Texas; Memphis City Schools, Tennessee; and the
School District of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Broad Foundation covers 80 percent of the program costs, including travel expenses for school district leaders. The district covers the remaining 20 percent. For further information, visit the Broad Foundation website.

It was first a flower mill, then an automobile chop-shop, but the two-story brick building at 630 N. Goodman St. in Rochester, New York, will now house a literacy school to help children in distressed neighborhoods excel. After years of fundraising, training, construction and curriculum development, the North East Area Development Children's Defense Fund Freedom School will open today (July 7, 2008).

Located on a block where abandoned houses threaten to overtake well-kept homes, the school will serve as a beacon of hope for the community, said project Director George Moses. The school will offer full-time summer school classes and then an after-school program during the fall and spring.

"There is a current subculture of behavior of drugs and violence, and we feel the best way to get at that is through literacy," said Moses, who, except for five years in the U.S. Navy, has been a lifelong resident of the neighborhood. Read more in The Democrat and Chronicle online.

Six years ago, the Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) School District embarked on what was considered the country's boldest education privatization experiment, putting 38 schools under private management to see if the free market could educate children more efficiently than the government.

If it worked, the plan seemed likely to become a model for other struggling urban school districts, such as Washington, DC's, suffering from a lack of funding, decaying buildings and abysmal student test scores.

This month, the experiment suffered a severe setback, as the state commission overseeing Philadelphia's schools voted to take back control of six of the privatized schools, while warning 20 others that they had a year to show progress or they, too, would revert to district control. Read more about the plan in The Washington Post online.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Arne Duncan joined the Chicago-based Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) to announce an investment of $10.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the turnaround of chronically underperforming district schools. AUSL will use the funds to transform three CPS-selected high schools over the next several years and expand its teacher residency program.

AUSL is the only national program of its kind to combine a teacher training residency with a school turnaround strategy to dramatically improve academic achievement. Read more at News Blaze online.

Fifty years after federal troops escorted Terrence Roberts and eight fellow black students into an all–white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, he says the struggles over race and segregation still are unresolved. “This country has demonstrated over time that it is not prepared to operate as an integrated society,” said Roberts, who is a faculty member in the psychology program at Antioch University. He and the other students known as the Little Rock Nine will help the city observe Central High School’s 50th anniversary this week with a series of events culminating with a ceremony featuring former President Bill Clinton. Read about what happened in 1957 in Little Rock in this article.

  After white parents in the racially mixed city of Tuscaloosa complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black—and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools. Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

 The draft House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s largest teachers unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for Congress to pass the law this fall. At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from an array of civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the National Urban League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve Inc., a group that works with states to raise academic standards. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

When it comes to reading, race can matter. A young black male has a better chance of getting teased for reading books instead of playing sports. Black children are less likely to have parents who read to them at an early age and expose them to books. By 12th grade, black students are scoring significantly lower in reading than white students, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. Add to that the fact that 12th grade boys overall score lower than 12th grade girls. That puts the average black male high school senior at the bottom of all reading groups. Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Long criticized for showing gangsta rap videos and those with scantily clad female dancers, Black Entertainment Television is now taking those images—spiced with profanity and frequent use of the N-word—and remixing them into an audacious animated video promoting literacy and black pride that is drawing both praise and condemnation. Read more about the video in this article from the Los Angeles Times.

It’s being called an unprecedented initiative in solving Buffalo’s dire reading problem. The vision of Read to Succeed Buffalo is 100 percent literacy for the city’s children and adults. The campaign, to be launched early next month, is viewed as the city’s first strategic literacy plan. Behind it is a literacy coalition made up of more than 40 local organizations. Read more about the coalition’s goals in this article from The Buffalo News.

For 18 years, White Plains, NY—a city of 55,000—has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn. But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one in White Plains, are also based explicitly on race. And there are fears that should a court turn down White Plains’s plan in the future, white families may abandon some of the neighborhood schools. That is not a fear restricted to White Plains, as dozens of other cities are having to reconsider similar plans. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

Deleon Fuller is learning how to serve aces on the tennis court while sharpening his reading skills so he can ace his classes this coming school year. Fuller, 11, is among the 4,000 or so Boston kids, ages seven to 15, who are taking part in Tenacity’s two-month Summer Tennis and Reading Program. Read more about the program in this article from the Boston Herald.

  Taxpayer-funded tutoring for poor children is paying off in some city schools, a federal study has found. Students who received the tutoring under the federal No Child Left Behind law improved on reading and math tests, according to the study conducted by independent researchers for the Department of Education and released Wednesday. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

When Drexter White II attended the MLK ChildCare Group Center in preschool, he had no idea that he would be returning only a few years later to do some teaching of his own. Drexter, 8, along with several other graduates, returned to the preschool Tuesday to lead students in a Juneteenth celebration. The graduates emphasized the importance of literacy by reading African-American poetry and stories to nearly 100 children ages 3–5. Read more of this article from The Dallas Morning News.

Byron Pitts was chatting with students at a Harlem charter school the day before a recent visit by President Bush when the CBS correspondent had a realization: They viewed him as just another empty suit who couldn’t possibly understand their problems. Little did they know. “When I was your age,” he told them, “I couldn’t read.” Read more about Pitts’ struggles, and eventual success, in this article from The Washington Post.

The federally sponsored National Assessment of Adult Illiteracy, in its last survey in 2003, estimated that 14 percent of adults are functionally illiterate: unable to read job applications, bus schedules, labels on the drugs they take. Some are immigrants who will master English eventually. But many have learning disabilities, and though they may have received diplomas, seldom had teachers along the way who could knowledgeably help them overcome their handicaps. Read about the effort being made to teach adults at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Fisher Landau Center for the Treatment of Learning Disabilities in this article from The New York Times.

On a pile of bricks, someone had left a pink plastic flower, a pair of glasses and a book with crisp, white pages. They glowed in the black debris of Mutanabi Street in Baghdad, Iraq, which last week became a graveyard of memories. Iraqis continued to drift to Mutanabi Street, days after a car bomb took the lives of at least 26 people and injured dozens more. Some came to hunt for the remains of loved ones. Others came to mourn a street that represented the intellectual soul of a nation known for its love affair with books. Read the article in The Washington Post.

It is difficult to find books in the Somali capital these days, but one place with a dozen shelves of them is the Mogadishu Public Library—a single room behind a solid steel gate in a neighborhood of goats, mosques and electronics shops. The Somali capital has been caught up in the country’s civil war for most of the past 16 years, locked in an edgy standoff involving clan militias, Ethiopian troops and Islamic fighters. But outside the library, at a table under some trees, seven men sit reading, mostly technical business books such as “Making Groups Effective” or “The Multinational Construction Industry.” Read more at washingtonpost.com.

For a group of Philadelphia inner-city middle school students, watching the movie Freedom Writers was like reliving the past year’s unusual odyssey, in which they wrote about their personal lives in journals and found the courage to read them to classmates. Their teacher was among the first in the country to try the approach with middle school students. As the students revealed thoughts that they had never shared, even with family, their attitudes toward school improved. Some belligerent students settled down, becoming mopre tolerant of one another. Career goals shifted. Some who at first barely wrote ended the year penning poetry and long entries. Read more about this successful program in this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Leaders of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers said teachers in high-poverty schools deserve extra pay because they generally work longer hours and serve more challenging students than other teachers. If Massachusetts adopts the proposal, it would join nine states, including Florida and California, that offer financial incentives to teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools, according to the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based organization that researches education policy. Union leaders said, however, that they still oppose merit pay, which links teacher pay to student test scores. Read the article at the Boston Globe website.

Many were dissatisfied with New Orleans schools even before the water came, and now the new school year is seen as a chance to start over.

For inner-city kids, early education and health programs not only boost performance in grade school, they also lead to healthier, wealthier lives in adulthood, a groundbreaking study of local children shows.

Students in 65 cities across the United States continued to earn higher scores in reading and math in 2004, according to a new report from the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) titled Beating the Odds V: A City-By-City Analysis of Student Performance and Achievement Gaps On State Assessments. The report, a press release on it, and city profiles can be found on the CGCS home page at www.cgcs.org.

Researchers Camille L. Z. Blachowicz, Connie Obrochta, and Ellen Fogelberg examine a Chicago school district’s literacy coaching model that boosts teacher effectiveness. Schools interested in developing their own successful literacy coaching models can benefit from six coaching process strategies that effectively support improved teaching and learning. Their report appears in the March 2005 issue of Educational Leadership.