MCS looking to add to central office
Licensed administrator will help with teacher evaluations
BY COURTNEY FLYNN
cflynn@chronicle-tribune.com
Published: Monday, May 3, 2010 1:07 AM EDT
Marion Community Schools is looking to update its central office with three new employees.
The district is looking to hire an assistant principal at Justice Thurgood Marshall Middle School, a business manager and a chief academic advisor. All positions are posted on the Indiana Department of Education Web site, www.idoe.gov.
With the closing of Lincoln Elementary at the end of the school year, the current middle schools, Justice and McCulloch, will be restructured. Grades five and six will be at Justice, with current McCulloch Principal Kelley Bowyer becoming principal. Grades seven and eight will be at McCulloch, with current Justice Principal James Fox becoming principal.
McCulloch will keep its current assistant principal, Jeff Brandes, and Justice will be adding one. Currently, there is an administrative assistant at Justice, Jerry Freshwater, but he is not licensed to for the assistant principal position.
Fox said he thinks a licensed administrator is important so teacher evaluations can be completed. With the current evaluation system, up to 20 teachers may need to be evaluated a year; but with the push for yearly teacher evaluations from Indiana Superintendent of Instruction Tony Bennett, that number may very well climb in the coming years.
Marion Community Schools Superintendent Steve Edwards said he thinks this position is necessary to help with duties to keep the staff and students on track to show what a great middle school, and district, Marion has.
Bowyer also said an assistant principal is needed for these reasons, but not just anyone will be qualified for the position.
"I absolutely want a people person and someone who works well with the community, teachers association and students," she said.
No applicants have been interviewed for the position yet.
Just as Edwards believes the assistant principal position is necessary, he also said he believes the business manager position is important.
The business manager position will require the hired applicant to have knowledge in employee confidentiality practices, all business personnel functions, budget development, human resources and customer service, according to the IDOE Web site.
The district has been looking for someone to fill the position since earlier this year, and while candidates have been interviewed, Edwards said they have yet to find someone with the knowledge and experience fit for the job.
"Marion is in a good financial position currently, but we need a good business director to stay that way," Edwards said.
As of Jan. 31, the district had a cash balance of just above $22 million; however, there are fears from educators across the board that the state will continue to make cuts into school districts’ budgets.
Even if the state does make more cuts, MCS board members and administrators find it necessary to use funds to pay a chief academic advisor in the district; that is, if the state or grants don’t help in paying for the salary.
The chief academic advisor position, which was discussed long before its approval April 14 because of its need to help the ailing schools, will focus on strengthening the curriculum and developing relationships with the teachers so there is no curriculum isolation. Other duties will include grant writing and dealing with graduation requirements and school improvement methods, according to the IDOE Web site.
Edwards has said that as soon as the right candidate is found, that person would be hired, but no interviews have taken place yet.
Edwards said he hopes all positions will be filled before the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Charter Schools
New York Times
May 1, 2010
Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed
By TRIP GABRIEL
In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.
Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers’ unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine “your ideas with our dollars” from the federal government. “What you have created,” he said, “is a real movement.”
That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.
But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”
Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.
Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.
But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition: raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and often expensive.
“I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,” said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes — and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”
Visits to half a dozen charter schools in Cleveland and New York State show that high- and low-performing schools often seem to take pages from the same playbook. They require student uniforms, a longer day and academic year, frequent testing to measure learning, and tutoring for students who fall behind. They imitate one another in superficial ways, too, like hanging inspirational banners: “This Is Where We’re Headed. To College!” say posters in the hall of the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, with campus scenes of a chemistry lab and big-time college sports.
But the differences in how schools are run, the way classes are taught and how school culture is nourished are striking. It is like watching two couples dance a tango, one with poise and precision, the other stumbling to execute the intricate footwork...
May 1, 2010
Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed
By TRIP GABRIEL
In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.
Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers’ unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine “your ideas with our dollars” from the federal government. “What you have created,” he said, “is a real movement.”
That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.
But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”
Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.
Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.
But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition: raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and often expensive.
“I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,” said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes — and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”
Visits to half a dozen charter schools in Cleveland and New York State show that high- and low-performing schools often seem to take pages from the same playbook. They require student uniforms, a longer day and academic year, frequent testing to measure learning, and tutoring for students who fall behind. They imitate one another in superficial ways, too, like hanging inspirational banners: “This Is Where We’re Headed. To College!” say posters in the hall of the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, with campus scenes of a chemistry lab and big-time college sports.
But the differences in how schools are run, the way classes are taught and how school culture is nourished are striking. It is like watching two couples dance a tango, one with poise and precision, the other stumbling to execute the intricate footwork...
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