|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
April 2008 Issue
Indiana Charter Schools Demonstrate Performance, Progress
INDIANAPOLIS-- Indiana PL 221 Categories for 2007 were released on April 2nd, yielding mixed results for the state as a whole. Although nearly 429 public schools throughout the state had a “worse” rating than the previous year (2006), the number of schools in the top three categories actually increased a percentage point, from 56% to 57%. For anyone not familiar, since 1999 PL 221 has been Indiana’s K12 accountability system, which labels schools with one of five categories based upon performance and improvement on the state’s annual assessment (ISTEP+). Many prefer this rating system over the federal Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) raking, because it does account for improvement over time. As you might imagine, Indiana charter schools seem to fare well with PL 221 results, as many are relatively new schools and often enroll students that come in well below grade level. This year’s results are no different. Although charter schools only made up about 2% of all Indiana public schools rated, they make up over 3.4% of public schools with EXEMPLARY ratings under PL 221. In fact, out of the 37 charter schools with data, 15 of them (over 40%) received an EXEMPLARY rating. Not only are they Charter schools are continually demonstrating gains, each year that they are in existence. The longer they’re around, the more impact they will likely make on Indiana’s students. “When I see these kinds of results,” says Vicki Snyder, Principal of EXEMPLARY rated Signature School (Evansville), “it speaks to the dedication and the commitment on the part of our teachers. They work very hard to make these kinds of things happen. They really do – along with the students – deserve all the recognition.
2008 Teacher Recruitment Fairs- Last Chance! Ball State University: April 30-May 1st , the event begins at 4 pm and concludes on the 1st at 3 PM at Worthen Arena. Your $75 registration fee includes dinner on the 2nd, continental breakfast, buffet lunch, and refreshments on the 3rd, as well as parking and advertising. Additional recruiters will be $50/each. Logon and register at Indiana State University and St. Mary of the Woods College Teacher Recruitment Fair: April 18th (8:30-3:30). Deadline to register is April 4th. Will be held at the ISU Health and Human Performance Building’s North Gym. Contact Student Academic Services Center at 812-237-2482 or email mheaton1@isugw.indstate.edu, no registration fee expect for Gold Sponsorship, which is $300. For more details please visit http://isu1.indstate.edu/careercenter/career_fairs/trf_main.asp. Purdue University Teacher Recruitment Fair: April 29th at the Stewart Center (2nd and 3rd floors) of Purdue University. Contact Mary Beth at marybethwood@purdue.edu. Your $45 registration includes parking and refreshments. Visit www.cco.purdue.edu for more information. Teacher Candidate Interview Day, Career College Consortium: This event will be held at a new location this year- the Hendricks Power Exposition Hall of the Hendricks County Fairgrounds in Danville, Indiana. Participating colleges include Butler, IUPUI, U. Indy, Franklin College, DePauw and more. The event will be held on April 16th 8-3, $75 registration fee. Register at http://www.franklincollege.edu/careers/cccc/TCIDEmployerinfo.html. University of Evansville Teacher Recruitment Day: April 15 (Tuesday), Registration information will soon be available at http://careerservices.evansville.edu. University of Southern Indiana Regional Teacher Fair: April 17th, 8:30 am-3 pm, CENTRAL, at the University Center’s Carter Hall. Registration now available until March 18th at http://www.usi.edu/careersv/TRF01/TRF_Reg_Form.asp. 2008 Indiana Charter School Conference Photos Available Thanks to everyone who attended the 2008 Conference. Visit the conference web site at www.cssc-web/2008conference to view photos from February’s event. Also, a congratulations goes to Marilyn Behney from Rural Community Academy who was the recipient of an iPod Nano as winner of the Service Center’s vendor drawing at the Conference. Congrats! Finally, stay tuned for a save the date for next year’s conference. We need your feedback! CSSC Announces Website Enhancement BE! AGGRESSIVE! BE, BE AGGRESSIVE! By Jeff Schafer I can still see my wife cheering at our high school basketball games. Back then, I was a geeky brainiac with thick glasses and way too much curly hair. She was a cute, browneyed brunette whom everyone wanted to be around. But hearing her chant “Be! Aggressive! Be, be aggressive!” gave me the impetus to join the school choir (like her) and arrange my schedule to be like hers. (Today, we call that “stalking,” but that is entirely beside the point.) For my shy, fifteen-year-old self to take that aggressive a step to get to know someone was critical for me. It led to our friendship, courtship, and marriage. Behind all this, though, was a belief that I was worth it; I knew that once she got to know me, she’d see the value in me. That idea – pushing something of value – was reaffirmed to me a couple years later when I took a temporary job leasing apartments. I attended a one-day motivational seminar the company forced all its leasing reps to attend. Our speaker was appropriately motivated and motivational and her thrust was that we should be, in a word, pushy with our prospects because we have a good product. She assured us that our apartments are clean, maintenance is prompt, service at the leasing office is attentive, our amenities top-notch, and rent affordable. Who, then, wouldn’t be happy living there? If all that is true, and she insisted it was, why on earth shouldn’t we be a little pushy with our prospects? All they have to do is sign the lease, move in, and any doubts they may have entertained when we were railroading them into “fine apartment living” (a relative term, to say the least) would be dispelled after their first gentle night’s sleep in the embrace of our middle-class apartment community. I left the seminar feeling like a sugared-up third grader on Halloween night. And I leased apartments. Boy, did I. The same is true of our relationship with our schools and our willingness to market them. One of the positive aspects of working with charter schools is knowing that everyone involved is here because we want to be. Yes, I know how trite that sentiment is. But as trite as it is, especially in the field of education (“Well, I’m certainly not a teacher for the money!” followed by a polite chuckle), we can take a breath, take a step back and recognize that for us, it’s true. It’s true. We want to be here because we believe in what charter schools are all about. Granted, we each have a number one, top-priority reason we like charters. For some, it’s serving the traditionally underserved. Or perhaps your school is the only physically safe school in a ten mile radius. For others the real benefit of charters is greater academic freedom and flexibility. Others love the simple recognition of students as individuals with individual educational needs. Some like charters on principle: choice for choice’s sake. Whatever your reason for embracing your charter school enough to work for it or donate time or funds to it or otherwise support it legislatively or politically, feel comfortable actively selling the school to prospects. For many prospects, the only selling they’re going to need is hearing about your school. As we know, many, many people don’t know charter schools are here and available. And free. Push the academic adaptability of charter schools. Between the project model, computerbased learning, and the simple phenomenon of smaller class sizes and individual attention, charter schools have the flexibility to investigate, discover and implement the teaching method that clicks for any child. Push the fact that it’s a free, public school. The Hoosier tendency to establish charter schools for traditionally underserved students (and not for elitist purposes) means that to the bulk of our families, tuition would be a deal breaker. The fact that our schools are free might be more important to our parents than college credit or tutoring. Push the idea that their child matters to us as an individual, not a number. With smaller class sizes and smaller total enrollment, it’s less likely that children get lost in the shuffle or fall through the cracks (or any number of other clichés) than at large elementary, middle, and especially high schools. Next month, we’ll put our money where our mouth is. Actually, we’ll keep our money in our budgets. We’ll discuss the thousand different ways you can be pushy about your schools without spending any money at all. Um, we won’t actually list all thousand…. Jeff Schafer is the Director of Communications and Marketing for GEO Foundation. He Overcoming Three Fatal Board Errors: Part 3 of 3 By Bryan Carpenter In the previous two months, I explained how boards can use two well-known business ideas to improve governance. In this month's column, I will propose a third, harnessing human physiology. But first, let's recap. A board can eliminate superfluous meetings by recognizing Parkinson's Law—the truism that work expands to fill the time allocated for it. The board can, nonetheless, be more effective in less time by using the 80/20 principle to limit its agenda to what Joseph Juran called the vital few v. the trivial many. A charter school board that meets only as often as is really necessary (Parkinson's Law) by disciplining itself to limit discussion only to those things that are really necessary (the 80/20 principle), is performing at a level that few achieve. Such a board could be said to be at the top of its game. But just as one excels in athletics, peak performance takes practice, discipline, commitment, and desire. It also takes something else—energy. You might be thinking, "Huh? How'd he go from discussing business principles to human physiology?" Stay with me and I'll explain. I recently read, The Power of Full Engagement: Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. The two have trained top athletes to be peak performers in their chosen sports by teaching them to manage their energy. For me, the primary take away from the book was the recognition that as humans, our bodies and minds oscillate, not just when we are asleep, but during waking hours also. Like ocean waves, our energy ebbs and flows throughout the day. Relative to these natural patterns, the authors made two points in particular that struck me as very relevant for boards. Before I share them with you, though, a note of caution is in order. After you read them, you might be tempted to think to yourself that the two points are obvious. Their value to boards lies, however, not in the fact that the points are obvious, but in putting them to work. (Besides which, as obvious as they seem, I hadn't previously realized that science had confirmed them so precisely.) First, our natural rhythms are such that by late afternoon, our bodies and minds are beginning the physiological process of cycling down to prepare for sleep. Hence, of all of our waking hours, evening hours are our least energetic, thus our least effective. This means that after 6:00 p.m. most people are least able to perform to their fullest capability—precisely when most boards meet. Second, our capacity to be effective at any given task oscillates in 90-120 minute cycles. Thus, regardless of how skilled you or I may be at a particular activity (e.g., sitting in a board meeting), our natural wavelengths demand that we rest. When we try to push beyond 120 minutes, we often consume caffeine or sugar to counter the loss of focus. This does little, however, to boost our effectiveness. And of course, within an hour after doing so, our energy declines to an even lower point. (As an example, think of your last three hour board meeting.) So let's pull these ideas together in a way that promotes good governance. First, is it really necessary to meet in the evening? Why not an early morning meeting or perhaps a lunch meeting (if people are centrally located)? In addition to having the most energy for the day, an added bonus to an early morning meeting (in addition to breakfast) is that people's schedules will likely force the board to stay on track. No time for rambling discussions about bake sales—people have to get to work. Second, limit your meeting to 90-120 minutes—tops. This will probably happen automatically if you meet at breakfast time. But if evening is the only time that really will work for your board— limit those meetings to two hours. To summarize, your board can be more effective by combining three simple ideas. Use the 80/20 principle to narrow the scope of the board's discussion to the vital few, thereby eliminating the need to meet every thirty days. When you do meet, limit the time to two hours and try to meet at a time of day when humans are naturally at their best. Would these require your board to do things differently? Perhaps. But the payoff is increased effectiveness with less work. That's a winning combination. Principal Prep Program Peabody Professional Institutes National Charter Schools Week 2008: YouTube and Other Strategies to Get Attention WFYI Let’s Meet Kids in the Park Kaplan K12 Learning Services Kaplan K12 Learning Services partners with schools to provide high quality instructional programs that improve results and help all students achieve. Our solutions are designed to meet your students’ specific needs. Our intensive intervention programs meet the needs of students who are two or more years below grade level. Our supplemental programs provide review and practice lessons for the skills and concepts most commonly tested on state assessments, and our test prep programs will help more of your students to get into college by helping students to prep smarter and score higher. Kaplan inc. is a global education company that has been partnering with schools like yours for nearly 70 years. Please let me know how I can help you to assist your students by contacting Louise.Ragsdale@kaplan.com or calling me at 317-842-6930. SRA McGraw Hill: The most trusted name in educational supplements
Explore all your options at www.SRAonline.com ICST Student Column |
|
|
|
|
333 N. PENNSYLVANIA ST., SUITE 1000 | INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46204 | PHONE: (317) 536-1027 | FAX: (317) 921-9443
VISIT THE GEO FOUNDATION SITE
