Here’s a great article from this week’s Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder featuring Eric Mahmoud from Minneapolis’ Harvest Prep/Seed Academy and Bill Wilson from St. Paul’s Higher Ground Academy. These two school leaders and their respective schools were among Charter School Partners’ Closing the Gap Schools.
Bill Wilson, Higher Ground Academy
Eric Mahmoud, Harvest Prep-Seed Academy
Check out today’s Star Tribune OpEd by Al Fan regarding Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA) who have again proven that it is the top-performing Minnesota school serving students in poverty and among the nation’s best in closing the achievement gap.
Minneapolis, MN . July 21, 2010. Charter School Partners today announced its first annual Closing the Gap schools list in which eight out of ten of the highest performing public schools in the state serving the neediest children in poverty are charter schools.
“The early results from the 2010 MCA-II scores are in and the headline clearly is this: while the 2010 test scores for Minneapolis and St. Paul were disappointingly flat from 2009, numerous charter schools showed solid and impressive gains in closing Minnesota’s achievement gap,” said Al Fan, Executive Director of Charter School Partners. “These results show great hope that a cadre of high-achieving charter schools are emerging in Minnesota focused on closing the achievement gap. We are developing a new Community of Excellence focused around charter schools”.
“Although we are a charter support organization,” said Fan, “we did not include any subjective or qualitative criteria to skew our list. We are simply looking at the raw numbers in Reading and Math in the state proficiency sores. When we do this, a story emerges and it is this: the highest performing public schools serving a high population of at-risk students are charter schools.”
Unlike other reports, most notable the July 1, 2010 Star Tribune, where seven out of ten Beating the Odds and Biggest Gains schools were charter schools, CSP used slightly different criteria by incorporating both Math and Reading scores to determine the rankings, versus one or the other. “By using both Math and Reading scores, a broader profile emerges”, said Fan.
Fan, noting that ‘high growth’ scores for schools are actually a more important criteria than simply reporting proficiency scores, said that “there are clear reasons why these schools have shown impressive growth gains from 2009 to 2010″. Fan continued: “virtually all of the Closing the Gap schools growth gains are in the double digits, which is really remarkable.”
In addition to the test scores themselves, Fan said that he and his Charter School Partners team have been in and observed many of the individual schools and said that “there is a reason these schools are succeeding. Each of them have begun to implement national best practices including utilizing intense data-driven decision-making products and focusing on improving teacher quality. Most importantly, said Fan, each of these schools have incredibly strong leaders that instill a highly rigorous, whatever it takes, no-excuses culture that sets a high bar for students and teachers.”
Injecting a note of caution, Fan stated that “although these are good scores, they are not yet great scores. National Closing the Gap schools are consistently scoring in the high 80’s in test scores. Reflecting this concern, Mary Donaldson, Principal of the third highest scoring gap-closing school, St. Paul’s Concordia Creative Learning Academy, said “we improved but we are not where we need to be”.
Charter School Partners is a non-profit organization whose mission is to increase the number of high performing charters in Minnesota and increase the number of at-risk students being served by high performing charters schools.
Today’s MinnPost article, In search of the ’secret sauce’: Educators dissect how ‘beat the odds’ schools successfully raise test scores, reports on the July 1, 2010 Star Trib four column inches of coverage of the “eye popping” results of
"The beating-the-odds list shows the potential of the charter model to deliver better results. But we're not satisfied with these results. We know better is possible. 65% is good, but the best of the bests are reaching 80% plus."
some Minnesota schools, which named the top 10 high-poverty metro-area performers in math and reading. Seven of the schools on each list were charters and the remaining three on each were St. Paul public schools. Five schools made both lists. At seven of the schools, most students are learning English.
Meanwhile, three articles in yesterday’s Pioneer Press (here, here and here), one of which is headlined Seven high-poverty schools defying the odds, DOESN’T EVEN MENTION A CHARTER SCHOOL! How bizarre is that?
Another weekend piece was the Star Tribune’s editorial headline A lack of progress in too many schools in which they argued for faster action needed to get more state students to grade level. The success of charter schools was mentioned.
Here is the Star Tribune’s Beating the Odds chart and the schools that showed the The Biggest Gains over 2009.
One plug here for one of Charter School Partners most successful Beating the Odds schools that did not make the list. It appears as though the Star Tribune did not report the solid success of the Concordia Creative Learning Academy (CCLA), a k-8 St. Paul charter school serving 84% free and reduced lunch (FRL) population because their cut-off was 85% FRL. If CCLA was included they would have been in the top five for math (68%) and number one in reading proficiency (77%) serving students in poverty. Perhaps most impressive was school leader Mary Donaldson’s response to the test scores: “we improved but not near where we need to be”. Congrats to Mary and her magnificent team at CCLA for their ongoing commitment to achievement!
The early results from the 2010 MCA-II scores are in and the headline clearly is that while test scores for Minneapolis and St. Paul were disappointingly flat from 2009, numerous charter schools showed solid and impressive gains in closing Minnesota’s achievement gap.
A chart in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune shows that 7 of the top 10 urban public schools that are “Beating the Odds” in Reading and 8 of the top 10 that are “Beating the Odds” in Math were charter schools. Similar results are in for those schools that have shown the biggest gains from the 2009 to 2010 school years: 7 out of 10 in Math and 6 out of 10 in Reading were charter schools.
While CSP has never had a charter v. district perspective, we believe that while an achievement focus has been increasingly embraced by both districts and charters, charters, by definition, can simply respond quicker and with more agility to the needs of the traditionally underserved communities in our urban areas. These results reflect this dynamic.
Congratulations particularly to Tarek Ibn Ziyad (TIZA), Global Academy, Hiawatha Leadership Academy, Concordia Creative Learning Academy, Higher Ground, Harvest Prep/Seed Academy, Cedar Riverside Community, New Spirit, Lighthouse Academy of Nations, Partnership Academy and several others.
We will be exploring several different angles of the MCA-II scores in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Urban Prep Academy senior Keith Greer, along with his classmates, celebrates the news they will receive a free prom in Chicago because 100 percent of the graduating class was accepted into 4-year colleges or universities. (Tribune photo by Heather Charles / March 5, 2010)
The entire senior class at Chicago ’s only public all-male, all-African-American high school has been accepted to four-year colleges. At last count, the 107 seniors had earned spots at 72 schools across the nation.
Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman surprised students at an all-school assembly at Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Englewood this morning to congratulate them. It’s the first graduating class at Urban Prep since it opened its doors in 2006.
Huberman applauded the seniors for making CPS shine.
“All of you in the senior class have shown that what matters is perseverance, what matters is focus, what matters is having a dream and following that dream,” Huberman said.
The school enforces a strict uniform of black blazers, khaki pants and red ties — with one exception. After a student receives the news he was accepted into college, he swaps his red tie for a red and gold one at an assembly.
The last 13 students received their college ties today, to thunderous applause.
Ask Rayvaughn Hines what college he was accepted to and he’ll answer with a question.
“Do you want me to name them all?”
For the 18-year-old from Back of the Yards, college was merely a concept–never a goal–growing up. Even within the last three years, he questioned if school, let alone college, was for him. Now, the senior is headed to the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta , Ga. next fall.
Hines remembers the moment he put on his red and gold tie.
“I wanted to take my time because I was just so proud of myself,” he said. “I wanted everyone to see me put it on.”
The achievement might not merit a mayoral visit at one of the city’s elite, selective enrollment high schools. But Urban Prep, a charter school that enrolls using a lottery in one of the city’s more troubled neighborhoods, faced difficult odds. Only 4 percent of this year’s senior class read at grade level as freshmen, according to Tim King, the school’s CEO.
“I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal,” King said. “Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college.”
College is omnipresent at the school. Before the students begin their freshman year, they take a field trip to Northwestern University . Every student is assigned a college counselor the day he steps foot in the school.
The school offers an extended day–170,000 more minutes over four years compared to its counterparts across the city–and more than double the number of English credits usually needed to graduate.
Even the school’s voicemail has a student declaring “I am college bound” before it asks callers to dial an extension.
Normally, it takes senior Jerry Hinds two buses and 45 minutes to get home from school. On Dec. 11, the day University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana was to post his admission decisions online at 5 p.m., he asked a friend to drive him home.
He went into his bedroom, told his well-wishing mother this was something he had to do alone, closed the door and logged in.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” he remembers screaming. His mother, who didn’t dare stray far, burst in and began crying.
That night he made more than 30 phone calls, at times shouting “I got in” on his cell phone and home phone at the same time.
“We’re breaking barriers,” he said. “And that feels great.”
Here’s a Chicago Trib article on Urban Prep.