Reprinted from The Daily Beast

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How Charter Schools and Testing Regimes Have Helped Re-Segregate Our Schools

"Sure, it’s mostly the courts, but as we approach the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, charter schools and testing regimes are reinforcing segregation.

 

Sixty years ago tomorrow in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public education is unconstitutional, writing that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”


Yet all these years later, our schools remain deeply segregated along lines of race as well as class—with charter schools and high-stakes testing making matters worse.

Schools today are as racially segregated (PDF) as they were in the 1960s. Recently, ProPublica wrote a deep and haunting exposition on the re-segregation of schools in the South, including Tuscaloosa. Post-Brown, schools in the South became the most integrated in the nation. It took a while—until the 1970s, really—but it happened.

Today? In the South and nationwide, most black and brown children attend schools where 90 percent or more of the students look like them. “In Tuscaloosa today, nearly 1 in 3 black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.”

Across the United States, per-student spending (PDF) in public schools with 90 percent or more white students is 18 percent higher—$733 more per student on average—than spending for public schools with 90 percent or more students of color. That can’t be attributed to different geographical tax bases alone; 40 percent of the variation (PDF) in per-pupil spending occurs within school districts. A third of the schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students don’t offer chemistry. A quarter don’t offer Algebra II. Black and Latino students account for 40 percent of enrollment at schools with gifted programs but make up only 26 percent of the students in such programs.  

Meanwhile, we know that disadvantaged students of color end up being over-represented in the prison-industrial complex. Black students in America’s public schools are expelled at three times the rate of white students. This discrepancy starts at a frighteningly young age; black children make up 18 percent of pre-schoolers but almost half of all out-of-school suspensions. One in five girls of color with disabilities has received an out-of-school suspension. These statistics are much higher than for white peers even for the same misbehaviors.

Public schools can work. I went to one. Most everyone I know went to one.

Racial segregation in schools has increased largely because federal courts have allowed cities and states to abandon mandatory busing and other desegregation efforts imposed in the 1960s. And in 2007, a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled that public schools could no longer pursue integration strategies based explicitly on race. Yet the legal sanctioning of segregation also paved the way for white families to justify self-selecting out of what were fast becoming inferior schools in communities of color, an inferiority further fed by white flight. 

Around the same time, charter schools and testing came along and made everything worse. In a key essay in the education magazine Ed Weekly, Dr. Iris C Rotberg of George Washington University wrote in straightforward terms that research makes it clear that “charter schools, on average, don’t have an academic advantage over traditional public schools” and that “they do have a significant risk of leading to increased segregation.”

Rotberg goes on to detail study after study showing a “strong link between school choice programs and an increase in student segregation by race, ethnicity, and income.” Segregation effects are particularly pronounced at charter schools run by private companies or those that target specific racial or ethnic groups. Segregation within charter schools is particularly pronounced for students with disabilities, since charter schools often tend to skim the “best students” from communities and under-enroll those with special needs.

Before Brown was even decided, Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its public schools rather than face integration. White and black students were sent to separate, segregated private academies until the Supreme Court ordered the public schools to reopen and desegregate. Nonetheless, in the wake of Brown, many white students fled to private and parochial options, a trend very much about race but also privatization—that we can give a good education to some select students while lining the pockets of private companies. In our time, school vouchers and charters schools all play into this dynamic.  

This is where testing comes in. To begin with, testing exacerbates—or perhaps rationalizes—inequality and segregation in schools. Charter schools that screen students based on test scores end up including fewer low-income students because study after study shows that standardized test scores correlated directly with family economic status. Yet behind the testing push is the for-profit testing industry, which is less interested in boosting student learning than boosting their bottom line.

“This market-based approach to public education—one where there are winners and losers instead of equal opportunity for all—is failing our kids and driving a deeper divide in our communities,” says Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. “Those peddling this approach try to capitalize on the growing frustration in our neighborhoods—especially African American and Latino neighborhoods—to move their agenda.” This is after all what markets do—decide where they can make a profit and abandon the rest. Some kids are getting a leg up in the charter system and testing regime, but all the other kids are being written off.

“Just as separate but equal wasn’t possible 60 years ago, it’s not possible today,” says Sabrina Joy Stevens, a former teacher and executive director of Integrity in Education. “We know that concentrated poverty and racial isolation mean unequal access to learning opportunities for traditionally under-served students—especially those who end up in fraud-prone ‘schools’ privately run by people who prey on our most neglected communities.”

Public schools can work. I went to one. Most everyone I know went to one. We had great teachers, who were in unions, who had good salaries and benefits, plenty of school supplies in the classroom and enough training and freedom to teach creatively and innovate in the classroom.  We went on to have rich academic careers because we were equipped with problem-solving skills and comprehension in math and literature and science and so much more. There is nothing wrong with public schools, or public teacher unions, that can’t be fixed—if we have the will to fix them.
On the other hand, the push toward charter schools and the larger private educational industrial complex has no good track record and is only proving worse, re-segregating education and trying to re-enshrine “separate but equal” not only in practice but in principle.  

In Brown, Chief Justice Warren wrote: “To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Yes, and separating children by race or class or test scores into pseudo-private charter schools is affecting not only those students but our communities and our nation in the very ways we once tried to undo."

60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, integration is falling apart

Reprinted from CNN.com - Saturday, May 17, 2014
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Linda Brown, 9, walks past Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1953. Her enrollment in the all-white school was blocked, leading her family to bring a lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education. Four similar cases were combined with the Brown complaint and presented to the U.S. Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education. The court's landmark ruling on the case on May 17, 1954, led to the desegregation of the U.S. education system. 

Editor's note: Donna Brazile, a CNN contributor.

"(CNN) -- On Saturday, we will commemorate the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation. Across the country, people are reflecting on the current state of educational opportunities for children of color.

In Milwaukee, parents, educators, students and community members are coming together to support educational opportunities for young people, and to challenge the increasing segregation and lack of resources facing young people of color today. I will join them in that celebration.

But Milwaukee is among the most racially and economically segregated major metropolitan regions in the country. It registers the largest discrepancy in employment rates between African-Americans and whites. Wisconsin has the widest gap in test scores between black and white students.

Donna Brazile

 

The problems in Milwaukee and Wisconsin are not unique. In cities across the country, students of color increasingly attend schools that do not reflect the diversity of our national community. The biggest metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest have been epicenters of re-segregation. In the 1990s and 2000s, school districts across the South, after being released from Brown-era, court-enforced integration, began gerrymandering school attendance zones, effectively separating black and white students.

Today, black students in the South attend majority-black schools at levels not observed for 40 years. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for example, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks like Brown never even happened.

The result is that the achievement gap, which steadily decreased during integration, is widening as re-segregation occurs.

Integrated schools help students achieve academic success in the present and personal success in the future. Students of color who attended integrated schools in the decades immediately following Brown were more likely to graduate high school, go to college, earn higher wages, live healthier lifestyles and not have a criminal record than their peers in segregated schools. (Diverse schools can also decrease prejudice and teach all students how to navigate an increasingly diverse nation.)

 

Unfortunately, many localities are embracing vouchers and charter schools as silver bullets for addressing persistent achievement gaps. Milwaukee has the largest and oldest voucher school program in the country, which funnels public dollars to private, often sectarian, schools. In 2011, Indiana created the nation's first statewide voucher program, and Louisiana followed suit in 2012. Charter schools have increased dramatically in the past decade; from the 1999-2000 school year to the 2010-2011 one, public charter school enrollment increased from 300,000 to 1.8 million.

Vouchers and charter schools just don't live up to the hype. In New Orleans, students using vouchers to attend private schools have not advanced to grade-level work any faster during the first two years of the program than public school students. A recent study found students in voucher schools are performing worse on academic benchmarks than students in Milwaukee Public Schools. And a national study comparing charter and normal public schools of similar demographics found that 29% of charter schools reported academic improvements significantly higher than public schools. Forty percent of charter schools reported no difference in academic performance, and 31% reported a performance worse than their public school counterparts.

Sixty years later, "separate and unequal" is still alive.

To fix the problem, we must recognize the problem. First, privatizing our school systems results in increased segregation, not improved opportunities. Whether in New Orleans or Philadelphia or Detroit or New York, legislative schemes perpetuate separate and unequal by privatizing large swaths of public school districts -- and in some cases, entire districts.

Second, education doesn't take place in a vacuum. Students and their families need access to health care, decent wages and affordable housing in integrated neighborhoods. Thus, Brown's legacy includes economic improvements for children and families.

Third, neither high-quality public schools nor economic improvements can occur when voters are disenfranchised. Only the right to vote protects access to education and movement toward economic improvement. Yet 34 states -- most under Republican control -- have passed laws to make it harder for minorities, the elderly, and young people to vote, including so-called voter ID laws and regulations that limit early voting.

The economic and racial inequities that existed 60 years ago persist in our communities today. They must be addressed. In the spirit of Brown, students, parents and educators are demanding solutions that go beyond the dysfunctional "education reforms" and address a wide range of community concerns, from stopping school privatization to providing universal early childhood education to raising the minimum wage.

School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, it's time for us to take a hard look at the separate and unequal conditions that still exist in our schools and our communities, and rededicate ourselves to fulfilling the promise of equal opportunity for all."

Commit Executive Director Todd Williams - former Dallas ISD principal and executive director Eddie Conger opens charter school to teach in Chinese

Dallas ISD Trustees received the communication below from Commit Executive Director Todd Willlliams and Education Advisor to  Mayor Mike Rawlings regarding the opening of a new charter school headed by former Dallas ISD employee Eddie Conger.

The purpose is obviously to promote expanding charter schools.

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From: Commit! - Todd Williams [mailto:todd.williams@commit2dallas.org]
Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 3:59 PM
Subject: New Dallas-area charter school to teach in Chinese

Eddie Conger, former DISD Thomas Jefferson High School principal and Exec. Director over the TJ feeder pattern for first few months of 2012-13 school year, opened a new charter school network with focus on language exposure.  Per attached article, they accepted 2,900 students out of 6,000 applications in first year. Certainly highlights strong parental demand for this feature given enrollment for a brand new concept; this network is the same size as Harmony's footprint in Dallas County after multiple years and 4-5x larger than KIPP (which also expanded in Fall 2014).  As superintendents think about potentially growing schools of choice within districts across the area, this is a concept that certainly seemed to resonate with certain parents and students.

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/texas/article/New-Dallas-area-charter-school-to-teach-in-Chinese-4755506.php

New Dallas-area charter school to teach in Chinese

GARLAND, Texas (AP) — Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams was so impressed with plans for students at a new Dallas-area charter school to be taught in English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese that he traveled from his Austin office to offer best wishes.

Williams attended an open house Thursday for International Leadership of Texas school, which opens charter school campuses Monday in Garland and Arlington, The Dallas Morning News (http://dallasne.ws/12uy2OW ) reported.

"I came to praise the good in advance of you doing it," Williams told the audience that filled an auditorium. He saluted school leaders for their plans to make students multilingual and prepare them "for a world that might be a tad bit bigger than Garland, Texas."

International Leadership was one of eight charters approved by the State Board of Education last year. The charter school accepted about 2,900 students in kindergarten through 10th grade; it received about 6,000 applications.

Superintendent Eddie Conger, a retired Marine and former high school principal in the Dallas Independent School District, thanked current and former state board members for or supporting his school's proposal.

"If they had not voted for the merits of it, we would not be here today," Conger said.

Denise Toliver of Rowlett, a parent, said she was impressed by the school's diversity and mission.

"Leadership for a global world is exactly what we're looking for," Toliver said.

Charter schools in Texas are publicly funded but privately managed.

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Information from: The Dallas Morning News, http://www.dallasnews.com

Confessions of a black school reformer

This book of fiction - "The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City" is about the radical changes in New Orleans K-12 education after hurricane Katrina devastated the city. 

New Orleans is now charter school heaven - one of the most radical charter school experiments in educational history - made possible by politicians and reformers taking advantage of the hurricane Katrina natural disaster.
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Posted by Valerie Strauss on March 18, 2013 at 3:00 pm

 

"Here’s a post about a new book on school reform — “The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City — by Andre Perry — that smacks opposing sides of the debate. This was written by Natalie Hopkinson. a contributing editor to The Root DC. E-mail her at NHopkinson@hotmail.com.  This appeared on The Root D.C."

Click Here

“We needed good ideas, but we also needed people to bring them to fruition and stay the course afterward,” he writes. “Change without community input spells danger and failure.”
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The Promise of Vouchers

Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005

"Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system."

Click Here  

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The Shock Doctrine: An Excerpt From the Introduction

"In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools."
  
Click Here 

UT study shows black high school students in Texas are three times more likely to drop out from a charter system - black males in KIPP

From Education Week - April 30, 2012 - Click Here
Study finds high dropout rates for black males in KIPP schools

Researcher Gary J. Miron of Western Michigan University says attrition rates for black males in the KIPP charter middle schools he studied were "shockingly high." But other researchers say it's unclear whether the high numbers of those students disappearing from KIPP's grade rolls are dropping out or repeating a grade.

—Charles Borst/Education Week 

By Mary Ann Zehr 

 

"KIPP charter middle schools enroll a significantly higher proportion of African-American students than the local school districts they draw from, but 40 percent of the black males they enroll leave between grades 6 and 8, says a new nationwide study by researchers at Western Michigan University.

“The dropout rate for African-American males is really shocking,” said Gary J. Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement, and research at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, and the lead researcher for the study. “KIPP is doing a great job of educating students who persist, but not all who come.”


MORE HERE

KIPP Study - Click Here

What Makes KIPP Work? A Study of Student Characteristics, Attrition, and School Finance

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From The Austin Chronicle

Study: Dropout rates for blacks higher in charters - Click Here

  

A new UT study shows black high school students in Texas are three times more likely to drop out from a charter system

By Richard Whittaker, Fri., April 27, 2012

"Think charter schools help minority students? Think again. A new University of Texas study shows that the state's African-American high school students are three times more likely to drop out from a charter system than from a regular public school. Unsurprisingly, charter groups are not happy about this research.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, assistant professor in the UT College of Education's Department of Educational Administration, sought to answer two very simple questions: Are these schools serving African-American kids, and are they effective at it? While many studies have looked at academic achievement, Heilig wanted to examine a different conundrum: Do these students stay? Do they feel welcome, relative to public schools? The resulting paper, titled "Is Choice a Panacea?: An Analysis of Black Secondary School Attrition from KIPP, Other Privately Operated Charters, and Urban Districts," was presented April 15 at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference in Vancouver. Its findings about African-American high school students are alarming. Compared to large urban districts in Texas, said Heilig, "on average, charter schools have triple the dropout rates."

The study compares Texas charter districts with the state's large urban school districts – Austin, Houston, and Dallas – from 1998 to 2008. On average, a regular public school in Texas records a worrying 4% dropout rate for black high school students, but that soars to 13% for charter districts. There are similar patterns for leavers (students who transfer to another state, start homeschooling, or are expelled): 5% for large urban districts becomes 15% for charters. Those numbers are much worse for charter districts with fewer than 100 black students: 22% dropped out and 18% left. In some charter districts, 90% of all African-Amer­ican students have dropped out."

Teachers deserve our trust

"As former United States Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch pointed out recently in the New York Review of Books, "The 'no excuses' reformers maintain that all children can attain academic proficiency without regard to poverty, disability, or other conditions, and that someone must be held accountable if they do not.

That someone is invariably their teachers.

"Nothing is said about holding accountable the district leadership or the elected officials who determine such crucial issues as funding, class size, and resource allocation. The reformers say that our economy is in jeopardy, not because of growing poverty or income inequality or the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, but because of bad teachers. These bad teachers must be found and thrown out. Any laws, regulations, or contracts that protect these pedagogical malefactors must be eliminated so that they can be quickly removed without regard to experience, seniority, or due process."

Ravitch should know, being something of a reformed reformer who once believed in the kinds of market-based education policies infecting countries like ours.

Symptoms include standardized testing, charter schools, creeping privatization, test-based accountability, and performance-based pay for teachers.

It all sounds rational and appealing, until you look at Finland."

More Here

What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities

Alfie Kohn - Posted: 09/ 9/10  - HuffPost
 

"The less people know about teaching and learning, the more sympathetic they're likely to be to the kind of "school reform" that's all the rage these days. Look, they say, some teachers (and schools) are lousy, aren't they? And we want kids to receive a better education -- including poor kids, who typically get the short end of the stick, right? So let's rock the boat a little! Clean out the dead wood, close down the places that don't work, slap public ratings on these suckers just like restaurants that have to display the results of their health inspections.

More Here 

"Unfortunately, the people who know the most about the subject tend to work in the field of education, which means their protests can be dismissed. Educational theorists and researchers are just "educationists" with axes to grind, hopelessly out of touch with real classrooms. And the people who spend their days in real classrooms, teaching our children -- well, they're just afraid of being held accountable, aren't they? (Actually, proponents of corporate-style school reform find it tricky to attack teachers, per se, so they train their fire instead on the unions that represent them.) Once the people who do the educating have been excluded from a conversation about how to fix education, we end up hearing mostly from politicians, corporate executives, and journalists.

"This type of reform consists of several interlocking parts, powered by a determination to "test kids until they beg for mercy," as the late Ted Sizer once put it. Test scores are accepted on faith as a proxy for quality, which means we can evaluate teachers on the basis of how much value they've added -- "value" meaning nothing more than higher scores. That, in turn, paves the way for manipulation by rewards and punishments: Dangle more money in front of the good teachers (with some kind of pay-for-performance scheme) and shame or fire the bad ones. Kids, too, can be paid for jumping through hoops. (It's not a coincidence that this incentive-driven model is favored by economists, who have a growing influence on educational matters and who still tend to accept a behaviorist paradigm that most of psychology left behind ages ago.)

"Reform" also means diverting scarce public funds to charter schools, many of them run by for-profit corporations. It means standardizing what's taught (and ultimately tested) from coast to coast, as if uniformity was synonymous with quality. It means reducing job security for teachers, even though tenure just provides due-process protections so people can't be sacked arbitrarily. It means attacking unions at every opportunity, thereby winning plaudits from the folks who, no matter what the question, mutter menacingly about how the damned unions are to blame."

Choice and Charter Schools undermine quality neighborhood schools

The Arizona Republic - April 11, 2012

Work-arounds and alternatives aren’t the answer to ensuring a strong and secure future for our nation and its citizens; they leave too many children behind. So our imperative must be to not allow under performing neighborhood schools to languish, because there will be children in them.

“Choice” is a policy strategy that fails an unacceptable number of students. Some parents — those charged with making “the choice” — are simply unable to transport their child to a school outside their neighborhood or community. Other parents, tragically, are indifferent and unengaged in their child’s education.

These are factors education policy can’t change, and they provide powerful reasons why the conversation must be shifted away from choice to expecting a quality school in every neighborhood for every student. That is unity of purpose.

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We need quality education for all students and that means a renewed commitment to neighborhood public schools — the schools that the vast majority of American children, including 90 percent of Arizona’s school-age children attend.

Our neighborhood public schools must be the most powerful and essential training ground for our nation’s future scientists, linguists, inventors and business leaders. If we fail to make them our top priority, we risk creating the kind of unacceptable vulnerability the task force describes.

 Tim Ogle is executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association

Read more

House Pub Ed Discusses Charter Schools

 Texas Association of School Boards Legislative Report

The House Public Education Committee met on Friday to consider its interim charge to evaluate the charter school system in Texas.  

The charge calls for the committee to:

• examine success and failure stories in Texas and other states;
• review the educational outcomes of students in charter school compared to those in traditional schools; and
• identify any best practices and how those practices may be applied statewide. 

Texas Education Agency staff led off by providing an overview of charter schools in Texas, stating that 297 charters have been awarded since 1996 while 91 of them have been revoked, returned, merged or expired.

Currently, the state has awarded 206 open-enrollment charters.

Catherine Maloney, the director of the Texas Center for Education Research (TCER), provided invited testimony that, overall, parents are happy with their choice to enroll their students in an open-enrollment charter school.

Parents cite "smaller classes" and a "safer environments" as the reasons why they are satisfied. However, research shows traditional public school student performance is higher than that of charter school students.

Maloney's findings are a result of several years of TCER research which concluded in a number of evaluations funded by TEA.

TASB provided the committee members with a document that highlights several eye-opening statistics collected from TEA data.

The hearing featured several supporters and skeptics of charter schools. A common theme recurring throughout the hearing was that there exist a handful of very successful charters that overshadow the majority of below-average charter schools.

Rep. Mark Strama (D-Austin) repeatedly reminded those testifying that the original role of charter schools to serve as laboratories of innovation for all public schools is hard to fulfill because students in charter schools tend to have more involved parents than students in lower performing traditional public schools, making the portability of business and teaching models difficult. 

Others noted the ability of charter schools to retain the students they choose and send others back to traditional public schools at any time during the school year if students fail to adhere to a charter school's code of conduct or other requirement.

Committee members will make policy recommendations based on testimony and research that may result in proposed legislation in 2013.

Charter schools help privatize public education

Private charter school choice doesn't help strengthen public education. It helps privatize public education and turn it into a business for entrepreneurs and investors - whether profit or non-profit.

The head of Teach for America is married to one of the top officers of KIPP Charter schools. Would you like to guess the total annual income of this so-called non-profit couple helping poor kids get an education?

Compare their combined incomes to the salary of demoralized public school teachers who serve every day of the front lines of teaching and learning and who are ignored in the discussions about the future of their profession.

Today the big money in education is found in the corporate reform movement funded by large private foundations.  Good education policy should by determined by the public interest - not the private agendas of corporate reform foundations pushing one failed reform after another - all helping to push public education dollars toward private control.

Economist Milton Friedman made it plain before he departed this life. He commented on the opportunity presented by Hurricane Katrina to privatize education in New Orleans:

 "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."

"In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools." (The Shock Doctrine)

Charter schools were rushed into operation in New Orleans to conduct the largest charter school takeover in the nation while the poor citizens were missing and had no say.  The current Superintendent of Schools in New Orleans is a former Teach for America employee.

"What has emerged since Katrina wiped out New Orleans Schools is the quintessential corporate education model, with corporate charter schools now constituting 3 out of every four schools in the Big Easy.  This system based on the "portfolio model" was developed under the leadership of Paul Vallas, who became the highest paid superintendent in Louisiana history (over $400,000 annually) at at time when large numbers of children in New Orleans did not have textbooks and teachers bought their own chalk.

While Vallas and his toadies claimed the new charter system was open to all comers, what quickly emerged was a school caste system, with the poorest and neediest children shut out of schools where their test scores could damage the charter brands that were set up as the urban model for the nation." Schools Matter

What helps public education is public investment of time and resources to improve traditional public schools. There is no miracle. There is no short-cut. There is no simple solution. There is only hard work, dedication and commitment to providing a quality public education for all children.