PPSD in-district charter process - the questions

This post is a recap and expansion of the questions I asked yesterday about the in-district charter school process that is now unfolding within PPSD. In subsequent posts, I'll share answers and information as it becomes available.

• What are PPSD's specific motivations for introducing in-district charters?

• Why is this happening so hastily? Teachers found out about this in some (all?) schools with almost no time to consider before voting to move forward. Potential partner organizations had a week to respond to indicate interest in the partnership possibility, which may have limited the capacity for strong potential partners to respond.

• What exactly is required of school communities on October 1? Per RIDE guidelines (online at http://ride.ri.gov/Commissioner/charterschools/applications.aspx) the December 1 application deadline is clear, but the October 1 deadline is not mentioned.

• Are schools submitting applications to become in-district charters in the 2013-2014 school year, or 2014-2015?

• Why is this happening with a lack of clear information from the district? What are PPSD's plans for putting out a FAQ or other document that clearly briefs the public on this process?

• What's the specific plan and timeline for parent/family involvement in terms of finding out more, collaborating with school-based planning teams on the charter applications, and, of course, voting. 

• What are the specific requirements for parent votes? RIDE regulations say that more than 50% majority parent vote is required for a school to convert to charter. What is the mechanism of the vote - is it 50% of parents/family members who show up for a meeting or 50% of all parents/family members? When in the process does the vote occur - before, simultaneous with, or after the faculty vote?

• What happens to the neighborhood status of these schools? Do they become schools that have no neighborhood zone and to which any student in the district can apply?

• What will be the governance structure for these in-district charters? Will they have their own boards or be part of PPSD and the Providence School Board?

• How will the teachers of these in-district charters be represented by the PTU? Will they negotiate individual school-based contracts with the district?

Parent Involvement in School Reform event - March 22, 4:30pm

I am passing on information about an event happening this Thursday afternoon that will be of interest to those of us eager to know more about the impact of parent/community organizing on school improvement efforts. Sadly, due to a conflict with work and MLK Elementary's PTO meeting that evening, I can't make it to this. I hope some of you can!

Click on the flier to the right and/or read on for more:

Superintendent Susan Lusi and the Providence Public Schools invite you to join in a conversation with nationally recognized parent organizers Joanna Brown, Leticia Barrera, and Christina Torres from Chicago’s Logan Square Neighborhood Association.

Date: March 22, 2012

Time: 4:30 - 6:00 pm

Location: Providence Family Resource Center 379 Washington Street, Providence

For more information and to RSVP, please contact Janet Pichardo at janet.pichardo@ppsd.org or (401) 456-0686.

Light refreshments, Spanish translation, and children’s activities for ages 5-12 will be provided. Traducción a Español, refrescos y actividades para niños de 5-12 estarán disponible.

The Logan Square Neighborhood Association, which turns 50 this year, serves the 80,000 population of its Northwest Chicago neighborhood. In the past 15 years LSNA has built a national reputation by transforming schools into 'community schools' with deep parent engagement fostered through its Community Learning Centers and Parent Mentor programs. LSNA's members consist of 44 neighborhood organizations, including 10 public schools with over 7,000 students, most of them from low-income Latino immigrant families. The Parent Mentor program was the subject of A Cord of Three Strands: A New Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools (pub. 2011), by Prof. Soo Hong of Wellesley. LSNA also has a Grow Your Own Teacher program which has expanded into a statewide program with 16 sites around Illinois.

Speakers:

Leticia Barrera, LSNA Education Organizer, began at LSNA as a Parent Mentor in 1997 and is now a Lead Parent Trainer. Since 2000, she has been on full-time staff at LSNA, mentoring at least 600 parents and building relationships with school staff. Formerly a teacher in Mexico, she is studying to receive her teaching credentials in Chicago through LSNA’s Grow Your Own project. She is bilingual in Spanish and English. She is part of the new Parent Engagement Institute which is developing new parent mentor programs in 13 new schools outside the Logan Square neighborhood.

Joanna Brown is Lead Education Organizer at the Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago, where she has worked since 1993. She has 30 years of experience in community organizing, community journalism and public relations; urban affairs and politics. She was professionally and personally involved in Chicago’s first school reform elections, serving two terms (1989-93) as a Local School Council member. Her two children attended Inter-American, a Chicago public dual-language elementary school.

Christina Torres is a parent activist with the Logan Square Neighborhood Association and a trainer with LSNA's new Parent Engagement Institute. Christina began her involvement in the Logan Square community as a Parent Mentor in her children’s school. She is a leader in her children's school and in Chicago school reform campaigns.

RIDE's SurveyWorks - do it

Public school (district and charter) families, if you haven't already, please take a few minutes to participate in Rhode Island Department of Education's SurveyWorks at http://surveyworks.ride.ri.gov/. Taking the survey allows you to express what's working well and what needs improvement at your children's schools - it's a real way to weigh in about what matters.

You probably already know about the survey from notes home and other communications from your kids' schools - if not, you should know that you need a code for your kid's school to take the survey, which you can find out from the school. Otherwise, you just need about 10 minutes - just click on the Take a Survey link and get started. You can and should take the survey once for each kid you have in school.

If you don't want to or can't take the survey online, the site provides a way to print out a hard copy which you can return to your child's school or you can get a hard copy at your child's school. The survey is available in Spanish and English. The survey closes in a week, on Thursday, February 16, so take it while you can.

What happens to the data that are being collected? That's a real question from me. I think and hope it's shared with the school's principal and teachers so they can know what's working well and what isn't.I hope that if an area of concern emerges for a school, school staff members reach out to parents to learn more.  I hope it's used to inform future planning for parent and family involvement.

Family and community engagement: less is more

Would you like to go to a meeting? Because, man, do we have them this week. Tonight, tomorrow night, and Thursday night are full of meetings and hearings related to the Achievement First Mayoral Academies charter school application that's been submitted to RIDE. Tonight, there's a Providence City Council education subcommittee hearing at 5:30 at City Hall (more info here). Tomorrow and Thursday night, the Rhode Island Board of Regents is holding hearings in Providence, tomorrow at 6pm at Kennedy Elementary School, Thursday at 6pm at Alvarez High School (more info, respectively aligned along some sort of spectrum here, here, and here). And that's just what's happening in Providence related to this one particular topic.

In Providence, it's also Open Schools Week for elementary schools, which means that families interested in public elementary schools are likely taking time off work or away from other responsibilities to visit schools. I'm spending evenings and lunch hours getting ready for and giving tours of MLK Elementary, where my kids go to school. This is great! But again, this week? With everything else? Too much.

Read on for schedule-related bitching and moaning, if that's your pleasure...

While I'd be way crankier if there were no hearings or publicly available information, I am sufficiently cranky with all of this happening immediately, right now, one after the other, especially since there is no actual rush as far as I am aware. As Tom Hoffman points out, the deadline for charter applications is four months away. There's ample time for various public entities to schedule hearings in ways that allow families with kids (or any of you out there who may work evenings or just otherwise have plenty going on) to plan to attend. After a strenuous bout of childcare wrangling, I think I'll be able to attend tomorrow night's Regents' hearing at Kennedy but that's it. And I am blessed with a daytime job, fairly easy kids, a car, and a spouse who supports my desire to participate. 

Generally, I regard myself as a fortunate person, especially when it comes to being able to be involved with the schools in my community. Though I work full time, I have enough control over my time to be able to spend time in schools. I have been able to form meaningful relationships with other family members, staff members, students, and administrators. I feel like I am able to contribute to conversations about what's happening in education in Providence and beyond in a variety of ways - in conversations, in public forums, on this blog, in my East Side Monthly column, and in my professional life. And as a member of the dominant culture who speaks English and feels happy and at home in school settings, I am well aware of my privilege and access, and happy to use some of it to ask that we think about ways to schedule hearings and opportunities for family and community involvement that support that involvement. 

When possible, I hope that the various towns involved with this proposal, along with RIDE, communicate with each other about when hearings are happening, and try to make sure they don't happen on weeks when there are other big district-wide events such as Open Schools Week. I have no expectation that all of us can attend everything, but this week's event pile-up is way beyond possible for most regular folks. 

In order to have consistent, inclusive family and community involvement, we really need better planning. Too many events, while better than too few, create their own frustrations that could be avoided by better planning. Moving forward, let's look at the various demands on folks' time and try to schedule them in ways that are possible for the largest possible group of people. 

Who remembers and why does it matter?

So, I took a week off there - sorry for not sharing that I would! Welcome back.

Last week, on the East Side Public Education Coalition's blog, Dr. Harlan Rich shared "Reflections on Change and 'Institutional Memory'" in response to ProJo coverage of the exodus (some by budget-cutting position elimination, some by retirement/moving on to new opportunities) of nearly all of PPSD's leadership team. Dr. Rich's thoughts on the largely untapped value of parents as key stakeholders and points of continuity/agents of change can and should be successfully expanded to include students, alumni, and community members as we face a down a new school year starting startlingly soon with a new acting superintendent, extremely strained relations between the Mayor's office and the school board, and--with all of the accompanying opportunities and challenges--without the aforementioned departed leadership team (COO Carleton Jones and acting chief academic officer Paula Shannon excepted).

Dr. Rich makes the point that PPSD has a substantial if inconsistent history of involving parents in decisions about school leadership and other planning. The district needs to stay the course on that and go much further, developing policies and a culture that systematically--across neighborhood, language, and other differences--involves and includes parents/family members, students, and neighborhood stakeholders.

Say it, Helen Gym - what parents want must be central to the discourse and action about our kids' schools

Philadelphia parent activist Helen Gym's op ed in CNN today, "Reformers, please listen to what parents what from schools," is making me so happy. Gym clearly defines the mismatch between current reform rhetoric and the qualities and services that matter most to parents. A small part of her piece:

For many parents, the elements of what makes a quality school seem completely at odds with the national buzz about education reform:

-- While parents talk about programs rich in the arts, sciences and history, politicians talk about covering the basics through a one-size-fits-all curricula.

-- While we talk about building critical thinkers and creative problem-solvers for a complicated and dynamic world, they talk about hiring billion-dollar testing companies that infiltrate every aspect of teaching and learning, drilling the notion of knowledge down to a single test score.

-- While we talk about smaller class sizes to help students and teachers build nurturing relationships with one another, they talk about maximizing capacity and "creating efficiencies."

-- While we talk about building an experienced, stable and professional teaching force where teachers are prepared with a depth of knowledge in their subject areas and are committed to the profession, others talk about relying on a temporary teaching force or focusing on education managers.

-- While we talk about sustainable change based upon policies that have been proved to work, politicians and the private sector demand dramatic and disruptive changes that do little to significantly improve children's educational experiences.

And in this lies the critical difference between what many parents see as their hopes for a quality school system and the politicians and billionaire venture philanthropists dominating the education reform landscape. The latter have become so enamored with the structure and management of education that they've forgotten about the substance and practice of it.

Thank you so much, Ms. Gym. I am sharing this with all of the parent activists I know so we can have a bright star to focus on and remind us what our work is really about.

Organizations that Gym mentions in her piece and/or are useful associated resources:

• Philly's Parents United for Responsible Education group
• Parents Across America, which I am going to connect this blog with in a more meaningful way in the coming weeks
• The Notebook, for which Gym writes a weekly blog, is Philadelphia's online and print resource for independent news and views on the city's public schools and is one of my inspirations and aspirations for this blog

Free Minds Free People conference - July 7-10, right here in Providence!

Providence Schools and Beyond readers should check out the upcoming Free Minds Free People conference, which is happening in Providence, July 7-10. The conference is designed as a highly interactive way to bring together young people, educators, family and community members, and others to share ideas about how to create meaning and value in education.

As a parent, I am really looking forward to learning ways to be involved with my kids' schools and school system in ways that help them and all kids in Providence develop habits of mind and heart, and solid academic skills, that will carry them through all of the learning they'll do in their lives. And I'm bringing them, because the conference offers sessions for kids and childcare (yay!).

I'll also be there representing the Coalition of Essential Schools, making connections between what we're doing, especially our Fall Forum in November (also in Providence!) and the energy of the networks that Free Minds Free People is bringing together. I'm excited.

Early Bird discounts for Free Minds Free People end on June 1 so register today!