Home

A Parent Proposal to Assist Struggling Schools

h3. Strategies to turn around troubled schools need to address specific local challenges and be owned by the local school and district community h4.
With the recent push to pass a bill on the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) "before the winter 2013 legislative break":http://www.miparentsforschools.org/node/205, it's more important than ever that parents start talking about real alternatives that work. For the last year, MIPFS has worked with parent groups, educational leaders and lawmakers to develop a positive program that will actually help struggling schools. This article outlines our proposal. Existing law does not provide enough assistance to local schools in diagnosing and solving their difficulties. To compound the problem, the law provides for complete state takeover as the only remedy for schools which fail to improve. The parents’ alternative is based on these core ideas: * Any effective school improvement strategy must focus on the particular circumstances of the school or district that is a candidate for intervention, and be tailored to address local needs and shortcomings. * Diagnosis of educational problems is best done by experienced and disinterested specialists, but the solutions to those problems will be most durable if they are hammered out and implemented by all relevant stakeholder groups. * Unilateral state intervention must be a last resort, and must be focused solely on implementing the changes identified as necessary in the independent review. * The goal of state intervention for school improvement is not to take over management of the school but to identify and see implemented educational and organizational changes, which are critical to the long-term growth of student achievement.

Open letter to Sec. Arne Duncan

h4. We released this open letter on the occasion of US Education Secretary Arne Duncan's visit to southeast Michigan. Sec. Duncan visited two schools in Detroit, one of them an EAA school, and the Perry Child Development Center in Ypsilanti. Our letter points out the conflict between the educational values Sec. Duncan has espoused, and which are the foundation of Perry's High/Scope model, and the urgent direction of education policy in Michigan.
Open Letter to US Education Secretary Arne Duncan Dear Secretary Duncan, On behalf of Michigan parents and others concerned about public education here, I would like to welcome you to our state. Michigan is home to some of the best ideas and programs in education as well as some of the most serious challenges our schools, and communities, face. We welcome your effort to learn more about the hopes we cherish and the obstacles we confront in our local efforts to educate our children. Unfortunately, I fear that your tour may leave you with an incorrect impression of what is in fact happening in our state. The current direction of state policy is not to offer an excellent education to all children. Instead, key Michigan policy makers have adopted an extremely narrow and barren notion of "education" and have focused on how to deliver it at the lowest cost possible. These proposals take us in precisely the wrong direction.

Framing: More Powerful Than A Locomotive

Not long ago, I had the good fortune to find a seat at a special screening of the new documentary "Waiting for Superman" in Ann Arbor. The documentary is a skillfully constructed view of how our urban public schools often fail their students, though it is not without some serious faults. (Many of those are discussed better, elsewhere.) But the film overreaches when it tries to claim that because some urban schools are in trouble, the entirety of American public education is in trouble. That claim, for which the film provides no evidence, motivates the film's call for radical reform. But if the problems are not so endemic, and if different schools struggle with different issues, maybe the answer is more complicated, and varied, as well.
Departments: 

Pages

We need your help.

Help keep us running.

Contribute today!

Drupal theme by pixeljets.com D7 ver.1.1