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5/8/2009
If you don't read anything else today, read this
David Brooks is excited about the Harlem Miracle. And well he should be.
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains. Brooks goes on to share results achieved – and problems encountered – by Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools.
What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”
Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.
They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours? It’s time for no excuses from Wisconsin residents, policy-makers, educators, academic researchers, elected officials, union members, business owners and employers.
Jo Egelhoff, FoxPolitics.net
COMMENTS
Sounds a lot like "the Chicago Miracle," and I do not mean BHO. 30 yrs ago, Marva Collins took underachieving black kids, several years behind in achievement, and in 2 yrs had them above grade level. A sad sad day last year, when the academy closed.
Ken Van Doren (Fri May 08 11:33:56 2009)
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