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Posts Tagged ‘education’

International School Opens in New York

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2012| 2 Comments »

I had dinner with friends at Harvard Square’s Casablanca last night.

Hadn’t seen them in ages. Their older son is moving to New York City with his family this summer. A key attraction is an experimental “international” school opening in Chelsea in the fall. My friends’ granddaughter will start in the new middle school and their grandson in the new elementary school.

Avenues School is the brainchild of publishing whiz Chris Whittle, best known for his not-so-successful Edison Schools. He puts that experiment in a positive light on the Avenues website, saying that it helped to spark the charter school movement. My friends say that experienced and inventive educators from all over have rushed in to help with Whittle’s new global approach to education.

“Begin by thinking Avenues Beijing, Avenues London, Avenues São Paulo, Avenues Mumbai,” says the website. “Think of Avenues as one international school with 20 or more campuses. It will not be a collection of 20 different schools all pursuing different educational strategies, but rather one highly-integrated ‘learning community,’ connected and supported by a common vision, a shared curriculum, collective professional development of its faculty, the wonders of modern technology and a highly-talented headquarters team located here in New York City.”

Erik went to an international school in Wales, a United World College, and made lifelong friends from many nations. As Avenues plans to do, United World Colleges has campuses in different countries. The one in Wales is for high school, but other UWC schools are, like Avenues, preschool to 12th grade, even beyond. Kim Jong-Il’s grandson attends the one in Bosnia!

 

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Closing the Opportunity Divide

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 7, 2011| 2 Comments »

I went to a conference today on how industry and higher-education entities can collaborate better to prepare students for the jobs that companies want to fill. There was a big crowd, and among the speakers were U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy.

I was especially pleased to hear panel member Gerald Chertavian and catch up with what his nonprofit has accomplished in the past few years.

Starting in college, Chertavian volunteered as a Big Brother, and the experience had a profound effect on him. After he went to Harvard Business School, launched a company, and sold it, he decided to invest in helping motivated youths aged 18-24 who lacked the money, networks, or opportunity to get a good education or decent job.

So he founded Year Up. He built on his list of corporate contacts to make internships a key part of a training program that ended in jobs.

Interested young people had to have a high school diploma or GED and demonstrate through the application process (which involves getting references) that they are serious. They earn a stipend during a year of training in either financial-industry or tech skills. They learn workplace behavior and business communication. At the same time they get college credits at an affiliated school, which most students decide to put toward a degree after their year in the program. Companies have found the Year Up youths invaluable, and some are changing their HR requirements to allow in more people without a bachelor’s already in hand.

At the conference, Chertavian acknowledged that in spite of having helped 5,000 students over a decade through Year Up programs around the country, the organization was not big enough to achieve its ambition of a major impact on the opportunity divide. To scale up, he said, Year Up is partnering first with a college in Baltimore that will use the approach. It hopes to keep expanding the new model after Baltimore.

There are a lot of great You Tube videos that might interest you — some about the Year Up program, some about Chertavian, some about the students. Here is one.

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Waiting for Superman, cont’d

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 8, 2011|

Having blogged about the troubling documentary “Waiting for Superman” here, I thought you might be interested in hearing about a school district that has found one way to overcome a significant barrier to quality education.

The documentary’s critique of U.S. public education centers on the inadequacy of teacher evaluation and the near impossibility of firing bad teachers.

Montgomery County (MD) doesn’t have that problem. Can you guess why?

Deep, broad collaboration. Critical constituencies are in on the evaluation and the decisions about coaching and firing.

A June 5 NY Times story by Michael Winerip, “Helping Teachers Help Themselves,” explains.

“The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve. The program, Peer Assistance and Review — known as PAR — uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel — made up of eight teachers and eight principals — can vote to fire the teacher. … In the 11 years since PAR began, the panels have voted to fire 200 teachers, and 300 more have left rather than go through the PAR process, said Jerry D. Weast, the superintendent of the Montgomery County system, which enrolls 145,000 students, one-third of them from low-income families. In the 10 years before PAR, he said, five teachers were fired. ‘It took three to five years to build the trust to get PAR in place,’ he explained.”  Read more here.

Having started out my work life as a teacher, I feel pretty strongly that teachers have been given a bad rap lately and that most are experienced, creative, and deeply dedicated (and overworked and underpaid). My daughter-in-law is also a teacher.

But there is no doubt that the bad apples are hard to fire and that every year that they get away with bad teaching turns thousands of children off the whole idea of education, to the lasting detriment of the nation. So I hope everyone will think about the PAR program described in the Times and how they might help influence school policy.

I will post comments sent to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com.

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Waiting for Superman

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2011|

Last night we finally watched the DVD of “Waiting for Superman.” We had to wait until we were up for it. We knew it would be good, but painful to watch. It’s a documentary about the broken public education system in this country.

I see now why people come away from this movie saying, “It’s the unions.” But although we clearly need to find a way to dismiss bad teachers and reward good teachers, to just say, “It’s the unions,” seems too simple to me. Even if it is true, when you consider the context of poverty, unemployment, the highest rates of incarceration in the developed world, the War on Drugs, three other wars, confused approaches to immigration, Wall Street greed at the expense of the poor and middle class, antigovernment bias, and many skewed political priorities, to lay the problems of inequality in public education at any one door seems too simplistic.

Still, as the movie makes clear, we need to get rid of bad teachers immediately and make sure children get high-quality teachers before they give up hope. Lotteries to get into better schools are too cruel to too many. Activists can check out this site.

By the way, the film is very well done. We loved the creative graphics making the data real and the clips of Superman movies and past political speeches and TV shows.

Reader Asakiyune writes: “I very much agree with what you said about unions and teaching and the documentary–it bothers me when a problem as complex as that is reduced to one soundbite.”

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