Young Principals as Rock Stars; Equity within Reach; City's Schools Are Among America's Most Segregated; Busting Busing Myths

1) Jay Matthews with an AWESOME article about young principals (who ARE rock stars in my book!) and KIPP:

Levin and Feinberg started KIPP as an experimental fifth grade in 1994 when Levin was 24 and Feinberg 25. Each started his own KIPP school the next year, Feinberg remaining in Houston and native New Yorker Levin going to the Bronx. Eight years later, there are 47 KIPP schools in 15 states and the District, nearly every one of them run by principals in their twenties and thirties who often get astonished looks when they tell strangers what they do.

This surge of young principals is not only at KIPP. New Leaders for New Schools, a non-profit group, is training mostly young principals (average age 35) in the District, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Memphis and Oakland, Calif. I watched D.C. school officials celebrate principalships for three of the group's brand-new graduates as their classmates cheered at a ceremony last spring. Hundreds of charter schools -- public schools that run independently of the school districts they are in -- have installed principals under 40. Educational philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates are creating hundreds of smaller high schools run by bright and ambitious young people who would otherwise have to spend a decade or so as assistant principals before they got a chance to run their own schools. They also are among the founders of New Leaders for New Schools.

This youth movement is too new and too small to inspire any useful research on how many there are or how they are doing. But as I watched the principals of what are now four KIPP fifth-to-eighth-grade middle schools in New York City last week -- all of them younger than my oldest child -- it occurred to me the energy and optimism of that age group might be just what our schools need.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110100534.html)

 

2) This is an important study by Teach For America (attached).  The corps members are EXACTLY right that:

teachers, school leadership, and expectations of students as the most important causes of and solutions to the achievement gap. This is significant because it is not the commonly held view. The annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup survey released in September reveals the public's belief that lack of parental involvement, home life and upbringing, and lack of interest on the part of students themselves are the three most important factors responsible for the achievement gap.

I am SICK of the thinly-veiled-racism nonsense that poor kids from broken families can't achieve!

 

3) In his new book, "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," (see review at http://www.nysun.com/article/22083) Jonathan Kozol is getting a lot of mileage out of the term "apartheid", but the comparison is ludicrous to anyone who knows the first thing about what the reality of apartheid was.  That being said, it is unfortunate that our public schools are so segregated and it is indeed an outrage how pathetically bad so many schools serving low-income minority students are.

 

4) The Thernstroms correctly make two key points:

a) The segregation that exists today isn't likely to change, barring draconian measures that aren't going to happen; and

b) The segregation issue is a diversion:

the abundant social science literature produced since 1954 shows that, in the context of minority concentrations reflecting demographic reality, the racial composition of a school affects student performance very little if at all.

    Mr. Kozol, in looking at the South Bronx, sees a picture no different than that in the South in 1954. “We have, it seems, been traveling a long way to a place of ultimate surrender that does not look very different from the place where some of us began,” he writes. Maybe he and his supporters across the political spectrum should try looking at the academic results of the all-minority KIPP Academy Charter School in the South Bronx — just for starters. Were the segregated schools in Mississippi a half century ago really no different?

(http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2005/11/01&ID=Ar00901)

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Friends and Supporters,

I wanted to send along "Equity within Reach: Insights from the Front Lines of America's Achievement Gap," a report on Teach For America corps members' beliefs about the causes of and solutions to the academic achievement gap that persists along socio-economic and racial lines in our country.

The report finds that corps members cite teachers, school leadership, and expectations of students as the most important causes of and solutions to the achievement gap. This is significant because it is not the commonly held view. The annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup survey released in September reveals the public's belief that lack of parental involvement, home life and upbringing, and lack of interest on the part of students themselves are the three most important factors responsible for the achievement gap.

For years in our country, there has been a debate about whether schools can impact student achievement levels in low-income communities in the face of the effects of poverty. What corps members are telling us is that their experience working on the front lines in urban and rural communities has led them to believe that is within the control of our school systems and our country to develop educational environments that enable economically disadvantaged children to achieve academically -- that, in fact, a commitment to expanding educational opportunity has the potential to break the cycle of poverty.

Here's the link: http://www.teachforamerica.org/documents/equitywithinreach.pdf.  I hope this report will help influence the public discussion about educational excellence and equity.

Best regards,

Wendy Kopp

One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.
Learn more at: www.teachforamerica.org.