I noticed that the Locke High School has reduced class size from 40 to 28 and let the classroom teacher control the curriculum. Further, there appears to be zero tolerance for student misbehavior Is it any wonder that "DROPOUT HIGH" has shown improvement?
If their are problem children in our classes, we are blamed. MY AP holds the teacher responsible, even if the teacher is not in school on the day an incident occurred. He told one teacher that if she trained her kids better, they would not act out when she was absent.
If we must keep every student and can do nothing if they act out, we are not in the same situation as these schools. I am willing to bet if we had the same zero tolerance policy all schools would be good.
I agree with "pissed off", children eventually adjust to rules and consequences and are able to work well with them firmly in place. It's a shame BloomKlein, adminstrators, and all the educational powers that be are so afraid to incorporate a zero tolerance policy. It would only help students.
It's a shame that "accountability," to them, applies only to unionized employees. I can control my classroom but I can't and won't control the halls, particularly when I'm dead certain I'll receive no support for my efforts.
In Fun City, the imperative is to keep incident-reporting down so as to maximize the principal's merit pay, school grade, and Brownie points.
NY Ed-you are better than me. There have been classes that I could not control, no matter what I did. The only time my AP ever removed a kid, he made things much worse. He went to a teacher teaching a parallel class and said "who is your worst student?"and he gave me that kid. That boy is now in jail as an accessory to murder. Calling the parent of a kid like this does not work.
Also, they haven't actually started school yet, right? It's summer school with 700 kids, rather than the full complement.
I just read "Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America" about this very school -- before Green Dot got to take this school over, they opened another school nearish by and cherry-picked a lot of the best teachers from Locke, too.
It will be interesting to see how they do with a large, urban, failing school -- in my district we've been told that those schools can't be fixed, they basically have to be closed and the kids moved to different options. I certainly understand why that's easier, but it'll be interesting to see what they can do over the long term.
Several of the things mentioned as "new" were already there in the book, though often not well supported or planned, such as separating out the 9th graders and "small schools" within the school. The best of those small schools lost half its teachers when the Green Dot charter opened and they went there.
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