private schools and education reform Archives - NextSteps: Step Up For Students

Editor's note: "Blog stars" is our occasional roundup of thoughtful stuff from other ed blogs and sometimes a newspaper or two.

From a Shreveport Times op-ed: Nearly all of us have had an experience where we were stuck in a class in which no matter how many times the teacher explained a concept, we just couldn't grasp it. Our friends around us may have understood, but it just didn't make sense to us. The class whisked along, we fell further behind, and the frustration mounted. What if we had had the chance to take the class online, at our own pace, with concepts explained multiple ways until we grasped it?

Thanks to Act 2, a law that Gov. Bobby Jindal signed into law in the spring of 2012, a student attending one of the state's lowest performing schools — those with a grade of C, D, or F — now has the right and the funding to take courses from any of the 45 state-approved high-quality course providers, so long as the student takes at least one course in her "home" district school. Students at schools graded an A or B will also have the right to take any online course that their local school does not offer, thereby expanding a student's course options, and a district could also decide to allow a student to take any online course through the program. ...

As every parent knows, every child has different learning needs at different times. If we hope to have all children succeed in school and life, then we need a system that can personalize for their different needs. While the world has changed, however, our schools have not. Instead we have an education system that mandates the amount of time students spend in class but does not expect each child to master her learning. The result is that students don't receive the support they need to master each subject before they move on to the next one. This creates gaps in every child's learning — gaps that haunt them later in their schooling. Full op-ed here.

From Jay Mathews' Class Struggle blog: Twelve years ago, I stumbled across a story that seemed too good to be true. A Catholic high school in Chicago ensured its financial survival by having students help pay their tuition by working one day a week in clerical jobs at downtown offices.

This was a new idea in U.S. secondary education. New ideas are not necessarily a good thing, because they often fail. But the creator of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School was an educational missionary named John P. Foley who had spent much of his life helping poor people in Latin America. I was not going to dump on an idea from a man like that without seeing how it worked out.

More than 90 percent of the students at the original Cristo Rey school were from low-income families. Few had been subjected to the pressures of big-city offices. But they received proper training for their clerical assignments. As the experiment proceeded, they realized the writing, reading and math skills they were learning in school were relevant to their new jobs — and their work experience would help them find jobs to pay their way through college. Full column here.

From Thomas L. Friedman at the New York Times: LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. (more…)

Faith-based schools will be more effective in expanding school choice – and in getting Americans to see their value - if they work together across traditional lines, suggests the chairman of a new national commission that aims to foster that kind of coalition.

“We want to encourage the leaders of faith-based schools to become more engaged, to make sure that together, across lines, across sectarian and religious lines, they join forces to advocate for the families and for their institutions,” said Michael Guerra, who chairs the Commission on Faith-based Schools, in the podcast below.

The 14-member commission, which met for the first time last month, was launched by the American Center for School Choice. Guerra is a founding director of the center (which co-hosts redefinED) and past president of the National Catholic Educational Association.

It’s no coincidence the commission is emerging now, he said. Publicly funded school choice is rising in acceptance and yet, at the same time, there is enormous flux among faith-based schools. Catholic schools, for example, have been dwindling in urban areas where they long anchored neighborhoods and served low-income families. “These are assets too precious to be lost,” Guerra said. (more…)

If schools want parents and caregivers to chaperone field trips and cook hot dogs at the fall carnival, then a parental involvement plan should be their course of action. However, if schools want those same parents and caregivers to actively participate in decisions regarding their child’s success in school, then their best bet is a parental engagement plan.

Involvement vs. engagement. I have often been asked, “What’s the difference? Aren’t these two terms interchangeable?” To draw a comparison that resonates with many of my colleagues, I point to the time in our lives where a personal relationship moved from “being involved with a significant other” to becoming engaged. Being involved in a relationship usually meant we did things together, but steered away from “counting on each other” or the promise to share the ups and downs of life. With engagement came the commitment to making the relationship a success, with listening to each other critical and compromise inevitable.

So it is with parents in our schools. Schools with parent involvement plans direct their parents; they tell them what to do. Schools engaging their parents, on the other hand, establish two-way communication and believe compromise is essential.

Over the last year, we’ve worked with 10 partner private schools, providing tools and strategies to help them better understand their responsibility for creating a culture that establishes and sustains parent-school partnerships. We know engaging families in all aspects of their children’s education yields positive results. So the staffs at these schools are actively engaged in learning with and from each other, sharing and reflecting as they identify and establish processes, conditions and structures needed to meet their goals.

Now in the second year of our work, we are supporting teachers and administrators as they learn how to engage in intentional study of their relationships. Educators identify significant elements of the partnership with parents, frame questions they want to study, consult relevant research, implement changes, collect and analyze both quantitate and qualitative data – and then codify their study to share with other educators. We’ve also expanded the effort this year and now have 28 schools on board.

The difference between “involvement” and “engagement” isn’t hair splitting. Quite simply, involvement is more of a “doing to” the parent while engagement is a “doing with.” Engagement establishes the need to listen first, asking thoughtful questions to better understand the assets and strengths of the family. (more…)