Amistad's 12 Lessons about School Reform

I was on the Achievement First (Amistad) web site and really enjoyed this section on "12 Lessons about School Reform". It begins:

How did Amistad Academy close the Achievement Gap? What Have we Learned?
There are two ways to react to the stark statistics about the achievement gap: despair and excuses or hope and action. Unfortunately, until recently, many have chosen the former. In fact, most of the educational community relied on the most famous piece of educational research in history, James Coleman's famous 1966 report, to let themselves off the hook. Coleman found a correlation between socioeconomic status and student achievement: poor, minority kids did worse than affluent, white kids. The dominant educational paradigm became, therefore, that "these kids" can't learn.

In campaign speeches, politicians routinely make excuses for their city's low test scores, repeatedly saying that one just can't expect the scores in New Haven, Brooklyn, or Albany to be as good as those in affluent Greenwich or the Upper East Side - or even middle-class Hamden or Long Island. In an issue of Forbes this year, the editor wrote that we can't expect the sons and daughters of dishwashers and janitors to have the same academic achievement as the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers because intelligence is "largely inherited."

Achievement First rejects this line of thinking. Instead of making excuses for why urban students can't learn, America must simply do a better job teaching urban students. In running Amistad Academy and working on school reform issues for the past five years, the leaders of Achievement First have learned a great deal about how to close the achievement gap. These core beliefs inform our business plan and suggest clear actions for Achievement First. The "top twelve" are summarized below:

To read the rest of it, you can go to: http://www.achievementfirst.org/about.lessons.html