Tuesday, December 02, 2008

In Case You Missed It, Chris

Liz Willen at InsideSchools.org:

For example, if Beacon really is everyone’s first choice for a non-specialty high school, can what they are doing please be replicated and spread out a bit? After all, Beacon received 4,600 applications last year for just 262 spots. New York City parents are willing to do the hard work of finding, touring, ranking and then supporting good public high schools — as long as we are assured of having good choices. Schools that offer a rich program of arts, clubs and sports, along with plenty of advanced courses and an enthusiastic staff will naturally have enormous appeal to both parents and to kids.

Indeed, if we're doing market-based school reform shouldn't there be a flowering of Beacon-style progressive schools?

5 comments:

Joel VerDuin said...

It is hard to have hope for school reform when there is so little agreement on what that really means (let alone having the capacity to carry any of it out).

Tom Hoffman said...

Well... I think it is almost harder to talk about it right now than to do it.

Chris Lehmann said...

I did miss that... and I agree, the dialogue is so weak and so tied to test data on a policy level that people are missing the fact that parents are, indeed, voting with their feet.

I'm really hoping for the same thing happening in Philly. We've scheduled over 1000 interviews for 120 spaces for the Class of 2013. My greatest hope is that will show folks that we need more schools that teach and learn like we do.

Tom Hoffman said...

You know, you'd have to really suck to not be able to make a good school after cherry picking one out of ten applicants. ;-)

Chris Lehmann said...

Tell me about it. ;)