Five Perfectly Planned Vacations to Take Before the Summer Ends. By
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7/8/10 4:08:57 PM by Jordan Breal Jordan by SCHOOLS SCHOOLS SCHOOLS SCHOOLS by William Martin Martin William William by by CAN CHARTER CHARTER CAN CAN SAVE OUR KIDS? KIDS? OUR OUR SAVE SAVE SAVE OUR KIDS? OUR SAVE the summer ends. ends. summer the by Nate Blakeslee Nate by DRUG WAR IS IS WAR DRUG Five perfectly planned vacations to take before before take to vacations planned perfectly Five HOW MEXICO’S MEXICO’S HOW CHANGING TEXAS com | $4.95 | com texasmonthly. VACATIONS p . 9 0 | CHARTER SCHOOLS p . 1 0 4 | JOHN GRAVES p . 1 1 6 0 8 . 2 0 1 0 | V O L U M E 3 8 | I S S U E 8 S 0810_COVER WEALTH_rl1.indd 1 104 | August 2010 T EXASMONTHLY. COM F8C7C4BCB2>A4B3>F=0=3C743A>?>DCA0C4D?4E4AH>=4½B;>>:8=6C>58GC4G0B½ B27>>;B70B0CDA:8B7<DB;8<F7>70B144=8=5;D4=2431HC74C40278=6B>50=>1B2DA4?78;>B>?74A 5>D=30=0=BF4A.9DBC0B:C747D=3A43B>50CA8B:BCD34=CBF7>70E46A03D0C435A><78B 270AC4AB27>>;B of 7403 THE 2;0BB by William Martin photograph by ADAM VOORHES pg. 105 have wide discretion as to how and what they teach. C74148641D8;38=6>=B>DC71A04BF>>31>D;4E0A3 Texas has been particularly hospitable to charters, which began ;>>:BAD=3>F=5>AC74<4H4A;0=3B42C8>=>57>DBC>= to spring up in the mid-nineties. In 1994 Houston teachers Mark Feinberg and David Levin created the Knowledge Is Power Pro- F782774;?B4G?;08=F7HC74741A4F gram (KIPP). In Irving, a group of concerned citizens opened the 02034<H5>A<4A;H7>DB43C74A4;45C5>A14CC4A first Uplift Education school, in 1997. In 1998 Chris Barbic founded YES Prep in Houston, and that same year Teach for America’s Tom quarters. The interior offers little to improve that first impression. Torkelson and JoAnn Gama launched IDEA Academy—its motto Painted in shades of light yellow and green, the narrow hallways, is “No Excuses!”—in Donna. Today, Texas ranks third in the num- though lined with pennants from dozens of colleges, do not inspire. ber of charter schools in the country, with 464 campuses and nearly The library/computer lab is a dark, low-ceilinged room partly lit by 120,000 students. a string of white Christmas lights. The lunchroom area is more like a The Harmony Public Schools are the largest charter school sys- wide hallway, with banks of blue lockers along the walls. To make the tem in the state. Since the opening of the Meyerland campus, in Au- space seem gracious, several large pictures of the sort one sees in a gust 2000, Harmony has grown to include 25 campuses in seventeen grandmother’s house hang high above the lockers: landscapes, sailing Texas cities, most serving economically disadvantaged minority ships, skylines at eventide. The gym is new, but the basketball court children and often housed in big-box buildings reborn as schools— is not regulation size, and the sidelines come within a couple of feet a Walmart in San Antonio, an Albertsons in Waco, a warehouse in of the walls. It is about what one would expect in a school where 70 Laredo. Seven more campuses are slated to open this fall, and ad- percent of the students are economically disadvantaged and 80 per- ministrators hope to have a total of 35 schools up and running by cent are either Hispanic or black. At one 2012, with an enrollment of 24,000 stu- point in the tour, the principal, Dr. Edib dents. The newer schools are already re- Ercetin, smiled and said with a shrug, “It’s ceiving accolades comparable to those at like an old woman. No matter how much Ercetin’s. Of the 19 that were operating in makeup she puts on, you can tell.” 2008 and 2009, 11 received the TEA’s “ex- It was a matter-of-fact acknowledge- emplary” rating, 6 were “recognized,” and ment, not an apology. The truth is that 2 were “academically acceptable.” Ercetin’s school, the Harmony Science The success of the Harmony schools, Academy, is one of the best in the coun- and the other Texas charters, is hard to try. It received an “exemplary” rating from ignore, especially when you consider the the Texas Education Agency for the 2008– crisis in public education. The problems 2009 school year, reflecting its outstand- are not new. In 1983 a comprehensive re- ing test scores and its zero dropout rate, port called A Nation at Risk documented placing it in the top 8 percent of all pub- in depressing detail the shortcomings of lic high schools in the state. This year the elementary and secondary education in HSA received the Silver Medal in U.S. this country. On a series of nineteen tests, News and World Report’s America’s Best U.S. students never placed first or second High Schools, putting it in the top 3 per- when compared with children from all cent in the entire nation. over the world; when compared with stu- The name may not be familiar to most dents in other industrialized countries, readers, but the Harmony Science Acad- they ranked last on seven of the exami- emy is part of a growing movement in nations. U.S. students did fairly well on FINLAY ROBIN BY STYLING SPREAD: PREVIOUS Texas that may revolutionize our edu- cational system. It is a charter school, which is a public school funded by tax- payer money but run by a nonprofit or- ganization or a for-profit business (Har- mony is the former). In Texas, the State Board of Education grants the charter, and the TEA monitors the school’s academic progress. The charter establishes a new school district, which can have multiple campuses. Each charter receives $450,000 in start-up money and about $6,000 a year for each student enrolled, approximately $1,200 less than the allotment for students in regular public schools. As compensa- tion for lower funding, charter schools have considerable freedom to operate as they see fit. They set their calendar and the length of their school day, and they Opposite: Top, Ashley Agbasoga, at the Harmony Science Academy in Austin, participates in a graduation rehearsal. This fall she will attend the reading tests, but they performed miserably in chemistry, phys- the Top. (Governor Rick Perry chose not Columbia University, in New York. Bottom: ics, and math. Follow-up reports in 1998 and 2006 found little sig- to participate in the program because he A bulletin board nificant improvement. On the benchmark Trends in International believed it had too many strings attached.) shows the range of universities that have Mathematics and Science Study, conducted in 1998, the U.S. ranked As the Harmony schools have become accepted Harmony ahead of only Cyprus and South Africa in math and science literacy. models for other programs across the students. This page: Soner Tarim, the Even our best students ranked at the bottom when compared with state, they are poised to take advantage superintendent of the best in other countries. What’s more, tests of fourth-, eighth-, of this groundswell. Yet there’s an inter- the Harmony Public Schools. and twelfth-grade students showed that U.S. kids fared worse and esting wrinkle in the story of the Harmony worse by comparison as they progressed through the system. Later schools. The organizers, key administra- studies, in 2003 and 2007, concluded that American students had tors, and about half of the math, science, and computer teachers performed poorly at all three levels. are Turkish Muslims, not exactly what one would expect in Texas. To make things even more problematic, our educational system is Many of them have at least some ties to a broad-based movement in also dealing with a rising dropout rate. Major studies indicate that which well-educated, pious Muslims have established hundreds of 25 percent of American students fail to graduate from high school. the highest-performing secular schools in Turkey and the surround- Among blacks and Hispanics, the figure is nearly 40 percent. Closer ing Turkic states. Though this has created some controversy, it ap- to home, Texas has ranked dead last in high school graduation rates pears to be of no concern to the parents, students, and non-Muslim in recent years, with nearly 49 percent of students failing to earn a teachers connected to these schools. What is of concern is whether diploma. Moreover, of those who do manage to finish high school their approach to public education provides a road map for other and enroll in Texas colleges, half need remedial courses and many schools to help improve the quality of education across the state never graduate. This is not the picture of a nation at risk but of a na- or, as critics contend, merely drains resources away from existing tion and state in peril. public schools. Is the answer to our educational crisis to be found Though they are not without their detractors, charter schools have in that run-down building in Meyerland? tried to establish themselves as an answer to this challenge, and they are riding a powerful wave of support. Following the lead of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, President Barack Obama has called for their expansion, urg- C745>D=34A>5C7470A<>=HB27>>;B8B0=8=C4=B4 ing states to lift the cap on the number of charters they will 1DCD=508;8=6;H2>DAC4>DB#"H40A>;3=0<43B>=4AC0A8< authorize—the Texas cap is currently 215, and the TEA has received bids for each spot—to qualify for grants from the who was born and raised in Istanbul.