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.
Archive for July, 2010
Al Fan: TiZA’s success with students overshadows controversy
Saturday, July 31st, 2010CSP announces it’s first “Closing the Gap” school list: Top 8 of 10 schools are charters
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
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.
Media struggles with how to report charter schools close-the-gap success
Monday, July 12th, 2010Today’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!
Minnesota charter schools score impressive gains in state assessments while overall gains flat
Thursday, July 1st, 2010The 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.