Schools Round-up: Washburn Wins / Charter Pay / Schools in Legal Trouble / Delicious Eggplant

The Washburn Millers
(Photo: MPS/Washburn High)

• First, a big congratulations to Millers Boys’ Basketball team from Minneapolis’ Washburn High School!  At the Target Center this weekend, they beat out Mankato West, 58-45, to win the state AAA high school basketball tournament.  To get there, they beat out St Paul’s Johnson High School, Grand Rapids High School, and the Academy of Holy Angels, a catholic school in Richfield.  This is their first championship win since 1994.  An interesting tidbit — they were coached by Reggie Perkins, a former Harlem Globetrotter. 

Filed under: Minneapolis, Minnesota, National, St Paul, Charter Schools, Education, Education Funding, Education Reform, Food, Hamas, LGBT, Minneapolis Public Schools, Minnesota, News, Religion, Somali, Stimulating Stimuli, Washburn High School

Friday Round-Up Feeding Frenzy

No recipes this week, but a timely trio of tales from the Utne Reader, In These Times, and the American News Project highlight the politics of school lunches. Congress will be re-authorizing the Child Nutrition and WIC Act this year, financing federal school breakfast and lunch programs, plus the food-stamp program. With children – particularly poorer kids – facing all kinds of child obesity problems these days, lawmakers will (pardon the puns) have their plates full sorting things out. One thing’s for sure, says the American News Project, it’s going to be a feeding frenzy for the agricultural-industrial complex.

More Highlights:

• Now this is what I call inspiring. Particularly the first three students – not to detract from the achievements of student #4, of course. But those first three might as well be poster children for the poor urban students of Minneapolis and St Paul, except they look like they’re going to “make it out.” I’ve got nothing but respect for these kids, and the mentors who helped them out.
• Obama hits out at urban school districts for failing to educate their students – but he wants to help them reform! (Washington Post)
• A propos of this: The legislature tries to answer the question: What do you do if you require students to pass a test, but don’t teach them well enough to pass it? (Pioneer Press, TC Daily Planet)
• A boozin’ substitute teacher in St Paul (Pioneer Press)
• Trying to fight the achievement gap, Minneapolis Public Schools, the Minneapolis Urban League, and Front Street Marketing and Communication are working together to recruit poor kids into a federally-funded tutoring program. (Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder)
• Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis tries advertising to draw families back. Ever since Minneapolis and St Paul school officials started talking about needing to draw students away from charters, I’ve wondered when this would happen. Apparently it’s had an effect, says the report. (KTSP)
• The St Paul Federation of Teachers doesn’t like anyone running for school board this year! (Emily Johns/Star Tribune)
• ”Say you retire from a job that involves traveling long distances to dangerous places in order to focus on children and family. What happens when your old job calls you back? Especially if that job involves serving your country in uniform?” (Tell Me More/National Public Radio)

Filed under: Announcements, Minneapolis, Minnesota, National, St Paul, Achievement Gap, Carlos Mariani, Charter Schools, Early Chilldhood Education, Education, Education Funding, Education Policy, Education Reform, Federal Education Policy, GRAD test, Military Moms, Minneapolis Public Schools, Minnesota, President Obama, School Lunches, St Paul Public Schools

Charter School Reform Bill Advances

Round 1 is over in what’s likely the big charter school issue of the year:  A bill, authored by Rep. Linda Slocumb (DFL — Richfield/Bloomington) and supported by the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools cleared the House Education Oversight Committee on Wednesday, with a recomendation to pass the bill after it has been examined by the House Finance Committee.  The bill is similar to one proposed earlier this year by MACS, and includes clarification of the relationship between charter schools and religious instruction – schools will be allowed to excuse students for up to three hours a week for religious instruction, but those class must not take place on school grounds.  

Photo: Flickr/Caveman 92223

This has been something of a grey area up until now.  Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (better known as TIZA), in Inver Grove Heights, fell afoul of this ambiguity earlier this year when the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the school, aledging the school violated the seperation of church and state.  Under current legislation, churches are not allowed to sponsor charter schools, said Eugene Piccolo, the Executive Director of MCSA, when I interviewd him back in January.  On top of that, religious iconography is barred from charter school buildings.  However, charters are allowed to rent space from churches, creating a decided semblance of impropriety.  When I visited Nova Classical Academy earlier this month, I was taken aback by a HUGE steel cross topping Nova’s building, a rented former parochial school.

As with most pieces of legislation, this one got several amendments in committee.  One of these, sponsored by Rep. Sadra Peterson, proposes a ban on any new or existing charter schools moving in a mile or less from a public school that has been closed for 36 months after the closing, unless the local school board aproves of the move.

“For small towns, loosing a school is like the dying of the town,” Piccolo told me after the first hearing on Tuesday.  ”It’s a sign that you are giving up on the town.”

With an ongoing statewide decline in the number of school-aged children, many districts will have to close schools they don’t have the money to continue operating.  One school district has already folded completely.   

The problem, says both Peterson and Piccolo, is that when angry and grieving parents try to start a charter school to replace the closing public school, no-one benefits.

“When that happens,” said Peterson after Tuesday’s hearing, “you’ve just defeated the whole purpose of closing a school – the pulic school district looses studends [and therefore per-pupil funding from the state] to the charter school, and they’ll probably have to close another school” to make up for it.  The cost of the first school, she said, gets shifted to the state in the form of state lease aid to the new charter school. 

“Has this happened in the past? Sure.  But it will happen more in the future,” Peterson predicted.

Piccolo said he and MCSA opposes the proposed ban because the current approval process for charter schools should suffice.  ”That’s where the authorizer [currently called the sponsor] and the Department of Education need to do their due diligence,” he said, to make sure the charter school isn’t being started to take advantage of parents’ grief.

“This amendment gives veto power over new charter schools to local school boards,” Piccolo said.  These school boards, he said, would be tempted to oppose new charter schools in order to protect their enrollment numbers, and thus their state funding.

Filed under: Minnesota, St Paul, Charter Schools, Education, Education Reform, MCSA, Minnesota, Nova Classical Academy, TIZA

“Friends” show one path for charter school sponsors

 

Photo: Flickr/user "Wappas"

“There’s only one bully in the school – that’s me!” Leon Cooper jabbed a thick finger at his chest. “We don’t have any gangs, or drugs, or fighting. The kids know they have to leave that at the door…If you don’t have discipline and order, you can’t have a great school.”

Cooper is the principal and superintendent of Minneapolis Academy, a South Minneapolis charter middle school. The Academy is sponsored by Friends of Education (formerly Friends of Ascension), a non-profit that has, by many accounts, succeeded well in sponsoring a range of high-performing charter schools while many Minnesota charters struggle to perform better than the school districts they were originally founded to compete against..

(Originally published in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, 3/4/09)

Filed under: Minneapolis, Minnesota, St Paul, Achievement Gap, Charter Schools, Classical Curriculum, Core Knowledge, Friends of Ascension, Friends of Education, Minneapolis Academy, Minnesota, Nova Classical Academy

Meet the new school, same as the old school?

 

Photo: Flickr/Chuckumentary

In between 60-plus charter schools, several private schools, and two school districts, I’ll bet you didn’t think we had enough choices for schools.  A group of education reformers including Robert Wedl of Education Evolving, a Hamline University education reform think-tank, says we don’t. 

Along with Representative David Bly (DFL – Northfield), they’ve proposed a bill that would essentially allow school boards to start “charter-like” schools that would still be within a district framework.  Because the schools would still be part of the district, Wedl says, school boards could try out new ideas without worrying that they’d lose funding as pupils switch to these new schools.  In case you’ve forgotten, each child in a traditional public or a charter public school is worth a certain amount of money every year to the school (and district) enrolls them.  This is supposed to set up a competition between school districts and charter schools to offer the best education or the coolest programs to win parents and their students. 

Filed under: Minnesota, St Paul, Charter Schools, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, Minnesota

Charter school association proposes changes in governing laws

(Originally published in the Twin Cities Daily Planet 1/28/09)

It’s like clockwork: last Wednesday, a Twin Cities charter school was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Minnesota chapter for allegedly violating the separation of church and state. last Thursday, the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools announced the details of their proposed reforms to the framework legislation that regulates charter schools.
At the press conference announcing the proposed legislation, the Executive Director of the Association, Eugene Piccolo, said the timing of the two events – and a section of the legislation that bans “organizations with church status” from sponsoring a charter school – was just a coincidence. The bulk of the MACS proposal is focused on clarifying, overhauling, and regulating several aspects of charter school governance, including the relationship of a charter school to its sponsor.

Filed under: Minnesota, St Paul, Achievement Gap, Charter Schools, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, TIZA

Bombshell — MN ACLU sues TIZA charter school and MDE

Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy — better known to readers of former Star Tribune writer Katherin Kersten’s column  as TIZA — and its parent organization, Islamic Relief USA, are being hauled into federal court by the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for violating the constitutional seperation of church and state.

Due to their oversight role of charter schools, the Minnesota Department of Education is also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit that alleges TIZA funneled state money to organizations explicitly dedicated to promoting Islam.

“TIZA, its Board of Directors, and its sponsor Islamic Relief have set school policies that endorse and promote a single religion, Islam. They have used tax funds to sponsor and establish a school that is pervasively sectarian,” says the MN ACLU’s complaint, linked to from their press release.   (h/t Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Independent)

Filed under: Minnesota, St Paul, Achievement Gap, ACLU, Charter Schools, Education, Education Funding, Immigant education, Islam, Minnesota, multicultural education, TIZA

Big news for education this legislative session

 

(Originally published in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, 1/19/09)

 

State Rep. Carlos Mariani

Charter schools, the mathGRAD test, and No Child Left Behind were among the topics when Daily Planet reporter James Sanna sat down with State Representative Carlos Mariani (DFL – St Paul) Tuesday to talk about some of the issues in public education facing the legislature this year. Rep. Mariani chairs the House of Representatives’ E-12 Education Policy and Oversight Committee.

TCDP: In your committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Jim Abler mentioned a proposed law to regulate charter schools – among other things, it gets more specific about a sponsor’s responsibilities or about their religious affiliation – Could you tell us a little more about that?

Filed under: Minnesota, St Paul, Carlos Mariani, Charter Schools, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, Minnesota, NCLB, Testing