Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog: A New School Hopes to Learn From the Charters

Let's hope Columbia's Teachers College REALLY adopts the lessons from high-performing charter schools (which will require abandoning much of the foolishness that goes on there; see: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2006/06/newoldschoolteacher-blog-ed-school.html from a former student there):

One of the main arguments for charter schools is that they will improve the school system as a whole by introducing innovations that traditional schools then adopt. But charter school critics charge that this is not happening — and they say that charters on the whole are weakening the schools around them by siphoning off their resources.

A new primary school proposed by Teachers College at Columbia University aims to address this issue head-on. The school's goal, its founders say, is to transfer some of the best charter school features to a school run by the Department of Education, while showing how a primary school can benefit from a close affiliation with a college.

Called the Teachers College Community School, it is likely to open in September 2011 in northern Manhattan

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February 19, 2010, 4:09 pm