- To everyone except the students and educators who labor to start them, high-performing charter schools must seem like fully formed miracle factories. They sprout from Mark Zuckerberg’s largesse, produce outstanding academic results, and win facilities conflicts with crusading big-city mayors. This week, the Hechinger Report spins the incredible (and incredibly detailed) story of how these places actually come together. In three interlocking narratives focused on a first-time principal, a veteran teacher, and an incoming freshman, the account details the emergence of Brooklyn Ascend High in the daunting Brownsville neighborhood of New York City. The school, organized around an ideal of civic service and employing a nontraditional discipline structure, offers an ideal backdrop against which to examine the challenges of establishing an academic culture and galvanizing a faculty. For readers who wonder why more charter profiles can’t offer the fractured perspectives and compelling mystery of Rashomon, here’s your (regrettably samurai-less) answer.
- The Texas Board of Education rules over the state’s textbooks like a juice-drunk toddler rules over his sandbox: utterly, and hilariously. If they’re not pondering the knotty question of whether to include creationism in science curriculum (guess I thought Spencer Tracy settled that one), they’re helpfully reinserting the true history of how Moses helped write the Constitution. One McGraw-Hill text even did us the favor of outlining the migration patterns of ex-“workers” from the Southern plantations. But it suddenly looks as though there may be a limit to the board’s authority after all. The state’s Republican attorney general announced last week that its members lack the power to compel local districts to accept specific instructional materials. The news represents yet another controversial rim shot in a decades-long curricular joke—one that, because it plays out in one of the country’s largest textbook markets, carries huge academic implications even across other states. While the decision is a big win for Lone Star kids (and anyone who appreciates a depoliticized public school system), this isn’t a totally cheery development: Regrettably, we may now never know whether Sam Houston invented dinosaurs.
- There are certain items it would be difficult to imagine teaching a class without. Non-insane textbooks, sure. Whiteboards, pencils, desks? They’re all pretty important. But what if you were expected to teach a class without a full-time teacher? According to a dispiriting new article in the Washington Post, that’s exactly what many inner-city schools are attempting. Researchers from Brown University have found that urban school districts like Philadelphia and Louisville hire one in six of their teachers after the school year has begun. In classrooms where qualified instructors have either quit or failed to be hired in the first place, their places are typically taken by (often uncredentialed) substitutes. On the one hand, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the folks trying to staff these challenging schools: In the words of one administrator, “I will have great people and train them up, and they’ll transfer and go to a school that’s not quite so complex.” But it’s galling in the extreme to see school districts fail in their central mission—putting young minds in a room with a fully qualified professional. The kids stuck in floundering academic environments are the ones who can least afford the absence of an excellent educator. It’s long past time we made sure they don’t have to.
