New Charter School Board beginning to acquire signatures

[jdcarmine]

If you are interested in becoming involved with a new Charter School that is being brought to Penn Hills please respond. We are looking for folks to help acquire signatures, and we are still looking to find additional board members. The school is an Imagine School. Imagine Schools helped create the Environmental Charter School in Regent Square.

[HopefulInPh]

If you are interested in becoming involved with a new Charter School that is being brought to Penn Hills please respond. We are looking for folks to help acquire signatures, and we are still looking to find additional board members. The school is an Imagine School. Imagine Schools helped create the Environmental Charter School in Regent Square.

Hey JCCarmine, Welcome!


What grade configuration are you thinking about for the Charter School? Is the plan to petition Imagine School to open here? Are you interested in other charter schools also? It would be nice for Penn Hills parents to have more options. I personally would like to see more options for 9- 12 grade. Please share all info!! Thanks!

[Rosedale Resident]

Maybe they come to Penn Hills because of the identity of the mother in you previous post.

[jdcarmine]

If you have a genuine interest in joining one of our signature gathering teams and helping us acquire the signatures needed, we anticipate we will need between 1,000 and 1,500 signatures, and becoming part of this Penn Hills initiative here is an excerpt from the actual draft of the School Design Proposal that we will be submitting shortly. We can only bring back school choice to Penn Hills with the help of parents and people, like me and my family, who live here and want to move Penn Hills forward:

"The Imagine School of Entrepreneurship (ISoE) will provide a world-class education for the students in the Penn Hill community- school that will not only prepare students academically but to develop into informed and responsible world citizens, creative problem solvers, and effective communicators. We believe that children of all cultures and abilities can learn and be challenged to reach their highest potential. To achieve this, the school recognizes the importance of collaboration with the entire learning community of students, parents, community members and school staff. Our mission is to ensure that students experience a world-class education in an innovative, community based public school setting, and to create a foundation that will enable students to reach their highest potential.
To achieve our mission, we have contracted with Imagine Schools, an organization comprised mostly of teachers, that operate 71 public school charter schools in 11 states and the District of Columbia. They serve more than 36,000 students nationwide by providing them with a challenging, effective program of study and strong moral development in a safe, nurturing environment. We will also be implementing the MicroSociety program.

The key factors that we believe will help deliver the mission are:

➢ A rigorous academic core curriculum aligned to the state standards, core standards and the Imagine Schools Standards-Based Curriculum supplemented with the MicroSociety Program;
➢ An instructional delivery system that includes differentiated instruction, student empowerment, teaming, and learning centers supplemented with classroom-based technology;
➢ Support entrepreneurial endeavors integrated into the curriculum using the MicroSociety Program
➢ Provide learning opportunities that are embedded in meeting the needs of “real life” situations
➢ A high level of parental and community involvement;
➢ A web-based student information system that allows parents to communicate with the school and track their child’s progress;
➢ A decentralization of services and shared decision making by all professionals within the school that is unique to Imagine Schools; and,
➢ Task forces made up of students, parents, teachers and community members will assess the performance of the school....

We agree with President Obama that teachers are the single most important resource to a child’s learning. ISoE will ensure that teachers are supported as professionals in the classroom, while also holding them more accountable.

The ISoE will assist parents/guardians in educating their children and preparing them for college and future careers through a challenging program of study and strong character development within a nurturing and orderly learning environment. To meet these goals, the School will have highly qualified teachers, standards-based, thematic curricula, positive character development programs and vibrant leadership. In addition, the School will facilitate youth to succeed in and beyond the classroom by providing opportunities for them to develop the habits of mind, dispositions, and skills they need for future success and by installing the structures necessary to support that growth."

email me if you are interested: jdcarmine@carlow.edu

[Rosedale Resident]

Gail Collins / Waiting for somebody: Superman won't save education, nor will charter schools
Friday, October 01, 2010

Let's talk for a minute about education.

Already, I can see readers racing for the doors. This is one of the hardest subjects in the world to write about. Many, many people would rather discuss ... anything else. Sports. Crazy tea party candidates. Crop reports.

So kudos to the new documentary "Waiting for Superman" for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.

My own particular, narrow wrath was focused on the ritual at the heart of the movie, where parents and kids sit nervously in an auditorium, holding their lottery numbers while somebody pulls out balls and announces the lucky winners of seats in next fall's charter school class. The lucky families jump up and down and scream with joy while the losing parents and kids cry. In some of the lotteries, there are 20 heartbroken children for every happy one.

Charter schools, please, stop. I had no idea you selected your kids with a piece of performance art that makes the losers go home feeling like they're on a Train to Failure at age 6. You can do better. Use the postal system.

On a more sweeping level, the film has sparked a great debate about American education. The United States now ranks near the bottom of the industrialized countries when it comes to reading and math. It's not so much that schools here have gotten worse. It's just that for the last several decades, almost everybody else has gotten better. Finland, what's your secret?

The director of "Waiting for Superman," Davis Guggenheim, says he's not offering an answer: "It's not 'pro' anything or 'anti' anything. It's really: 'Why can't we have enough great schools?' " But plot-wise, the movie seems to suggest that what's needed is more charter schools, which get taxpayer dollars but are run outside the regular system, unencumbered by central bureaucracy or, in most cases, unions. However, about halfway through, the narrator casually mentions that only about a fifth of American charter schools "produce amazing results."

In fact, a study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that only 17 percent did a better job than the comparable local public school, while more than a third did "significantly worse."

I'm still haunted by a debate I stumbled across in the Texas Legislature a decade ago in which conservatives repelled any attempt to impose accountability standards on the state's charter schools, even after only 37 percent of the charter students passed state academic achievement tests, compared with 80 percent of the public schoolchildren. There's something about an unfettered school that lifts the hearts of the Born Free crowd.

Then there's the matter of teachers' unions. Mr. Guggenheim is the man who helped Al Gore get us worried about global warming in "An Inconvenient Truth." In his new film, the American Federation of Teachers, a union, and its president, Randi Weingarten, seem to be playing the role of carbon emissions. The movie's heroes are people like the union-fighting District of Columbia schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, and Geoffrey Canada, the chief of the much-praised, union-free Harlem Children's Zone.

"I want to be able to get rid of teachers that we know aren't able to teach kids," says Mr. Canada.

That's unarguable, and the Obama administration's Race to the Top program has turned out to be a terrific engine for forcing politicians and unions and education experts to create better ways to get rid of inept or lazy teachers.

But there's no evidence that teachers' unions are holding our schools back. Finland, which is currently cleaning our clock in education scores, has teachers who are almost totally unionized. The states with the best student performance on standardized tests tend to be the ones with the strongest teachers' unions.

Older teachers often respond to calls for education reform with cynicism because they've been down this road so many times before. In 1955, a best-seller, "Why Johnny Can't Read," stunned the country with its description of a 12-year-old who suffered from being "exposed to an ordinary American school." Since then, the calls for reform have come as regularly as the locusts. Social promotion has been eliminated repeatedly, schools have been made bigger, then smaller.

But dwelling on that won't get us anywhere. Right now, the public is engaged. The best charter schools are laboratories for new ideas. But the regular public schools are where American education has to be saved. We can do better. Superman hasn't arrived. But we may be ready to fly.

Gail Collins is a syndicated columnist for The New York Times.

[jdcarmine]

The problem is what we are comparing to what. The important comparison is between public charter schools in a particular school district and the traditional public schools in that same district. For example, Penn Hills School district is not meeting it's AYP in reading in any grade level, so would a charter school in Penn Hills, when compared with the traditional public school do better? At the moment we do not know, but if we look at comparable charter schools in our neighborhood the answer is more likely YES than not. Without competition, or even a comparable school, it is, however, VERY unlikely that our traditional public schools will do any better than they have been doing. Why should they? Students who cannot afford a private school have no other choice but what the district now provides. Comparing a public charter school in Wilkinsburg to a traditional public school in Allison Park is meaningless. But if you compare a public charter school to a traditional school in Wilkinsburg.... well you can see what I mean, the public charter school wins by a mile.

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