Owner: Mark Lerner URL:http://marklerner.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 08:28:02 -0500 Rating:1 Site Description: A blog providing a libertarian perspective on current events. I most often write about education because the issue of school choice is important to libertarians and because I am the Chairman of the Board of Directors of a Washington D.C. Charter School c Site statistics:Click here
Letter To The Editor Published In Washington Post 1970-01-01 00:59:59 4 letters on charter schools appear in today's Close to Home Section of the newspaper. Here's mine:Now that a quarter of all Washington
public school students are enrolled in charters ["The Future of D.C. Public Schools: Traditional or Charter Education?" front page, Aug. 22] and some individuals are questioning whether all schools will eventually be independently run, it is important to keep five things in mind when reflecting on the District's educational landscape.- Charter schools are start-up businesses. Because each has a unique mission and curriculum, they often experience a gigantic learning curve, not dissimilar to that of a new small company. I recently talked to a fellow charter school leader who told me that after five years his institution was still improving its teaching methods. He is not alone. Charters are still young in the history of a reform movement that is striving to innovate and help children catch up academically to grade level and beyond.- Charter schools Read more:Editor
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Edvard Munch Paintings Recovered 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The 2 paintings, one of which is "The Scream," were recovered a couple of years after they were stolen from a museum in Norway. A very good day for the art world. Read more:Edvard Munch
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DCPCSB Responds To Call For Moratorium 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Tom Nida responds to the Superintendent's comment in a press release that reads a lot like my letter to the editor.
NCLB In LA 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In today's Wall Street Journal Clint Bolick details the problems in Los Angeles with the transfer option for students attending schools that fail to meet Adequate Yearly Progress. His solution is to allow these kids to attend private schools.
New York Times Takes Shot At Charter Schools 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Last week while I was in New York
City dropping our youngest daughter off at NYU to start her freshman year and looking at the Edward Hopper paintings at the Whitney, the Times
.htm">New York Times
went on the attack on charter schools.There are so many errors contained in this editorial that I can't even comment. Instead I'll answer with my own letter to the editor in the Washington Post. Keep your eyes this coming Sunday on the Close to Home page in the Outlook section for my response.More importantly, let's go back to the Edward Hopper exhibition. As I have witnessed before (especially a couple of years ago in London) it is never quiet around a showing of his paintings. People love to speculate about the scenes in front of them. They question what those in the paintings are doing. Sometimes arguments break out. The fact that viewers become so connected to the art fascinates me. Read more:Charter
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Woops 1970-01-01 00:59:59 At the same time that the D.C.P.S. Superintendent wants to end the creation of new charter schools he still cannot seem to get textbooks to students by the beginning of the school year.
Washington Post Out To Kill Charter School Movemen... 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Theola Labbe of the Washington
Post has an amazing article today about families scrambling to find new schools for their kids that attended the New School
for Enterprise and Development and Sasha Bruce Public Charter
Schools which were recently closed by the D.C. Public Charter School Board.Any parent caught by surprise by the shuttering of these school with 2 weeks to go before the start of the new school year should not be a parent.The tone of the piece is that closing bad schools is bad. No wonder education in D.C. is in that state that it is.By the way, there are still some spaces for 9th graders at the William E. Doar, Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts. Read more:Washington Post
Washington Post Editors Steal My Words 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In an editorial almost certainly written by Colbert King, The Washington
Post comes down on my side regarding Superintendent Janey's call for a moratorium on new charter schools:The call by D.C. School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey for a moratorium on new charter schools in the District is one part reasonable and one part self-serving. Taking the latter first, it's clear that charter schools have developed into a threat to the traditional school system since they were authorized by Congress 10 years ago. As Post reporter Lori Montgomery has reported, more than 17,500 students enrolled last year in charter schools. Meanwhile, enrollment in the traditional public school system has taken a nose dive, from about 80,000 students to about 58,000. The movement represents the action of parents starved for quality education who are voting on the traditional school system with their feet. If Mr. Janey's schools are unable to compete successfully with charters, whose fault is that? The prop Read more:Editors
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A Letter One Better 1970-01-01 00:59:59 My friend Nelson Smith, who donated a baby grand piano to the William E. Doar, Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts (thank you VERY much), has an excellent letter in the Washington Post today about Mr. Janey's call for a moratorium on new charter schools. I wonder how those of us in the charter school movement are now going to work with the Superintendent. Read more:Letter
The War Is On 1970-01-01 00:59:59 As predicted, now that 25% of all public D.C. attend charter schools and each of the 18,000 students receives about $10,000 for this opportunity many people will begin asking tough questions as to whether this experiment is worth the money.The Washington Post has a long article today asking if the educational landscape will turn to all charters or a combination of charters and traditional schools. What is great to me is that it is truly a libertarian world out there. It is impossible to predict what the future will look like. It will be facinating to see if DCPS joins the competition for students or just gives up. Based upon Superintendent Janey's comments last week I lean toward option B.
Common Sense On September 11th 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The best article today comes from Cathy Young, Boston Globe and Reason Magazine columnist. Here's an excerpt:Perhaps this polarization is itself a legacy of Sept. 11. Perhaps, after the horror and destruction of that day, we are still looking for black-and-white moral clarity, only different people see black and white on different sides. For some, "evildoers" include not only foreign enemies but liberals and leftists at home; for others, absolute evil resides in the White House itself. Ironically, today's more diverse -- and more fractured -- media contribute to the polarized discourse, allowing people to stay in comfortable ideological niches.Some of the tensions and dichotomies we confront today may be tragic paradoxes with no good answers. Yet in many cases, solutions that transcend the either/or and address both sides of the issue are possible -- as long as one is willing to look at both sides. Read more:Common
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Harvard Desides To End Early Admission 1970-01-01 00:59:59 And the school did so for the same reason that we did not allow Amy to apply for early admission for NYU. When you take this route you usually have to commit to the college that accepts you and therefore there is no time to compare financial aid offers from various schools. Harvard
officials feels this is a disadvantage for lower income students and they are exactly correct. Read more:Admission
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Is NCLB Increasing The Minority Achievement Gap? 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Fascinating editorial in today's Washington Post by Jennifer Booher-Jennings, a doctoral student at Columbia University which argues that NCLB is actually increasing the gap between whites and minorities:The stakes for schools are enormous. So it isn't surprising that many educators game the system by reaching first for the low-hanging fruit, the students closest to passing. Dubbed the "bubble kids," because their scores put them on the bubble of the passing mark, these students give schools the biggest bang for the buck. In response to this incentive, many schools have rationed out practically all of their resources to these students. Meanwhile, the lowest-performing students, the "hopeless cases," languish. So do their high-performing classmates, who are relegated to the waiting room while the bubble kids are cured.Is she correct? The author states that Charles Murray and the Harvard University Civil Rights Project have come to the same conclusion. Read more:Achievement
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Ayn Rand On YouTube 1970-01-01 00:59:59 With the Iraq war going poorly, a new sex scandel on Capitol Hill and North Korea setting off a nuclear bomb let's listen to someone who knew that mankind has the potential for greatness. Read more:YouTube
Electric Competition And Women's Clothes 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The New York Times today claims that electricity deregulation has not lowered prices as expected. I read the piece by David Cay Johnston to see if he sought comments from any libetarian groups since many have been pushing the idea for years. I was glad to see that he had contacted the Cato Institute for a reaction by was surprised to see that when you click on the hyperlink to the think tank you are brought to the web page of the New York Time's research on a women's clothing store. This makes me wonder whether we can believe anything in the article. Read more:Clothes
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The Values Of BB&T 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The recent grant of the bank to Rockford College led me to view the organization's values on-line. Any reader of Ayn Rand will recognize that they come directly from her. Read more:Values
Janey Proposes To Get Involved In Charter Schools 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Dion Haynes reports today the D.C. Superintendent Janey is asserting that he has the right to mandate teacher training in charter schools and their accountability to him as a result of recent standardized test scores.I guess he wants to make charters more closely resemble the crap that is DCPS.If he is successful in his plan I will lobby Congress to increase the Washington Opportunity Scholarship program so that all charters can convert to private schools and accept their students through vouchers. Read more:Charter
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The New Mayor 1970-01-01 00:59:59 The Fenty watch begins on what he says about charters and school vouchers. Stay tuned. Read more:Mayor
Blah, Blah, Blah 1970-01-01 00:59:59 In today's Washington Post former U.S. Department of Education secretaries Rod Paige and William Bennett call for a national exam to test kids under NCLB. Their editorial includes this unbelievable observation:We're aware that many Republicans are skeptical. After all, the Constitution says nothing about education, and for over two centuries states have been responsible for meeting the nation's education needs.No kidding. Libertarians point out that it is federal involvement has made public education the joke that it is today.Diane Ravitch from NYU has made the same argument. But what these individuals don't bother to point out is that are associated with organizations that could earn a pretty penny from such a national exam. Bill Bennett founded K12 which provides curriculum consulting, Rod Paige is the Chairman of Chartwell Education Group which provides curriculum consulting, and Diane Ravitch is on the board of Core Knowledge that provides . . . well you get the idea.
Congratulations To Stephen Hicks 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Philosopher and professor Dr. StephenHicks
has been awarded a $925,000 grant from the BB&T Foundation to create a new Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College.The CEO of BB&T is an objectivist as is Mr. Hicks. Just like me, we should all be banking at BB&T.As a reminder I lectured Mr. Hicks' class last year and then he took me out to eat. We had a great time catching up on what is going on in the objectivist and libertarian movements.Congratulations
to Stephen.
Charter Schools Bomb On Latest Standardized Test 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Theola Labbe and Dion Haynes report in today's Washington Post that almost all charter schools authorized by the D.C. Public Charter
School Board (including William E. Doar) failed to meet Annual Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.There are a lot of reasons for this result including the fact that this was a new test poorly administered with little student preparation combined with the fact that it is going to take charters years to catch D.C. kids up to grade level after years of neglect by DCPS.But if someone asked me to focus on 1 cause I would love to say that we have spent the last 3 years trying to locate, renovate, and expand our facility. This process has been so difficult that it distracts us from teaching. Read more:Charter Schools
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First Principles 1970-01-01 00:59:59 Today, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post argues that a take over of D.C. schools by Adrian Fenty may not be a great idea.And when times are desperate about just what should be done regarding public education in the nations capital and people are at the end of their rope after the introduction of charter schools, private school vouchers, school choice, NCLB, and a new superintendent, with standardized test scores that seem to show that nothing is working, it is best to stop, take a breath, and go back to first principles.Much of today's reform movement came about due to a book published in 1990 by John Chubb (now with Edison Schools) and Terry Moe when they were both with the Brookings Institution entitled Politics, Markets and America's School. In this book the authors studied 500 schools to see what characteristics made some of them high performing.Their conclusion was that it was not class size, money, teacher training, or curriculums that led to successful schools. It was simply t Read more:First
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Lisa Raymond Wins Post Endorsement But Why 1970-01-01 00:59:59 My friend Lisa Raymond
was endorsed by the editors of the Washington Post yesterday as the school board candidate that should win the District 3 seat which represents Wards 5 and 6 (The Doar School is in Ward 5).I think I know why the Post made this choice. If you go to her web page (lisaraymond06.org) you will see that Lisa's goal, once elected, would be to make "the traditional public school system the first choice for DC families." Now why in the world would she want to do that? Why then did she spend 8 years working with the Cesar Chavez? So that parents would pick their neighborhood school.One of the great things going on in D.C., despite all the negative reports about education here, is that now parents have perhaps the greatest options in the nation as to where they can send their kids. They can pick between 51 charters and, through the voucher program, many quality public schools which their children can attend for free. Let's assume for a second that by some miracle that no Read more:Endorsement
University Parent Weekends 1970-01-01 00:59:59 As the NYU parent weekend approaches Elizabeth Olson and Kate Stone Lombardi of the New York Times chronicle how these events have expanded beyond attending a football game. Read more:Parent
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A Great Day 1970-01-01 00:59:59 I just learned that the Edward Hopper exhibit that I thought I was going to have to go to Boston to see is coming to the National Gallery of Art. Read more:Great
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First Principles II: New Charter School Model 1970-01-01 00:59:59 If the idea is to allow school to innovate as much as possible then I propose a new model for charter schools. Let's call it the private school model. I think that once a charter is awarded then the school is evaluated at one period such as 5 years or 3 years. At the end of this evaluation then the decision is made to allow the school to go on for another 3 or 5 years. But no monthly or quarterly reports, no annual compliance reviews, and no going before the authorizing body for every contract approval.More later. Read more:Charter
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