Word: charter
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...frontier. The school operates out of a handful of trailers at the edge of a cookie-cutter housing complex in Mesa, Ariz., a rugged desert city that sprouted into a Phoenix suburb two decades ago. But the academy sits on an ideological edge as well: Paramount is a charter school, a publicly funded enterprise that's privately run--in this case, primarily by a former shoe-repair-shop owner who never graduated from college--and free of the bureaucracy that bogs down so much of public education...
...subjective process. Our Schools of the Year are not the nation's best as measured by test scores. They are instead the schools we judged to have found the most promising approaches to the most pressing challenges in education: using wisely the freedom now granted to charter schools; educating the children of the poor; consolidating schools in rural areas; making effective use of technology in teaching; and getting parents and communities involved in the education of their kids. While the prospects for meaningful reform at the federal level look slim, schools like those we feature here are quietly constructing solutions...
...find many inner-city schools with the academic results produced at Accelerated, which serves Grades K through 8--and, as a charter school, is free of much of the red tape that often chokes other institutions. While some states have begun to question whether most charter schools outperform regular public schools, the Stanford Achievement Test scores at Accelerated have jumped 93% since 1997, with increases of 35% in reading and 28% in math last year alone...
...Williams was a leader of their local union who teamed with Sved in a failed attempt to initiate reforms at another South Central school. But when their efforts were stymied by bureaucrats, the duo submitted to the Los Angeles Unified School District an application to start their own charter school under a new state law permitting a limited number of public schools to operate free of many district and state regulations. Skeptical administrators gave Sved and Williams just six months to round up $200,000 in start-up money and find a site for the school. After securing funding...
...parents, teachers and administrators of all 11 million children in Title I schools--those that serve the nation's poorest students--are required to sign "compacts" that typically stipulate, among other things, how many hours parents will read with their children each week. At the KIPP Academies, two successful charter schools in Houston and New York City, parents, teachers and students sign contracts pledging everything from adherence to the dress code (teachers and students) to checking homework (parents). If students repeatedly slip up, the academies can send them back to a regular public school...