What Educators Are Learning From Money Managers

One of our regular bloggers sent us the link below to a recent article in Forbes magazine. The article highlights the achievements of the charter schools in New York and elsewhere. The system that seems to work best is the one that that is very business-like. It tracks the minutia of individual student's progress, reports those details to the teachers immediately so that the teachers can make individual adjustments. Competition and accountability rule this kind of high tech teaching system. Below are a few points I have bulleted from the article:

• Innovative schools collect data, look for small changes, intervene quickly and move resources to the formulas that work.
• In the past four decades spending per pupil (adjusted for inflation) has gone up 2.6 times, but sat scores have not budged.
• Despite the $661 billion a year this country puts into public K--12 education, we are churning out a nation of mediocre graduates ill equipped to meet global competitors.
• Roughly 10% to 15% of its teachers quit each year; another 5% or so are fired for poor performance, compared with 9% attrition and 4.4% dismissal rates for public schools.

DeKalb's list of charter schools is growing each year.  This year, three new charters will open their doors: The Museum School, New Hope Academy and The Leadership Academy. 

In a recent post, titled "North vs Central vs South - what's the deal?", we highlighted DeKalb's variety of "choice" schools, including our charters, and tried to show where students are attending when they leave their neighborhood schools.  Those neighborhood schools in some areas have lost literally hundreds of students to the "choice" schools—charters, magnets and themes. At some point, we will need to decide how to consolidate these schools with dwindling populations or perhaps close them entirely and move toward a system of free-choice for every student.