NYT: The schools are coming back
Source: New York Times
All around the city there is a similar would-be alchemy. Dozens of new charter schools, a flood of idealistic young teachers from elsewhere around the country — now as many as 17 percent of the total here — and a hard-charging reform superintendent from Chicago are all arrayed to rescue one of America’s most needy student bodies, which ranked at the bottom of a bottom-dwelling state even before Hurricane Katrina.
Only in the last year, with the marshaling of new forces, has anything like a coherent poststorm strategy for the shaky schools here emerged. It is too early for results — standardized-test scores are out in May — but educators here insist that there are some promising signs. At the very least, early shortages of teachers and space for students have been overcome.
On one level the transformation has already been total. Even without concurrent transformations in the city’s minimal economy and fragmentary social structure, the schools are being administered with a vigor that would have been unrecognizable here before the storm.
If this experiment succeeds, it will have accomplished something rare in the annals of American schools; academic experts cannot recall any campaign this “radical,” in the words of one. An educational superstructure, assembled in large part from outside brains and muscle, has brought itself in to remake a group of students years behind, overwhelmingly impoverished and often from broken homes. By next year, this will be the largest Teach for America district in the nation, administrators say.
Schools with names that reflect the largely African-American student body (Akili Academy, Sojourner Truth Academy) are now competing with one another for students, clamoring for recruits by way of signs on the grassy medians of this city’s broad avenues. Veteran school principals, used to the slumbering ways of the old system, are removed quickly if they do not measure up.
One question: when do we take this system nationwide?
