Thursday, November 8, 2012
Initiative 1240 in Seattle
As of Thursday afternoon the results of Initiative 1240 are as follows:
Yes 51.1%
No 48.9%
If this initiative does get passed, many charter schools will open in and around the Seattle area in the next few years. I am so excited about this possibility! Well-run charter schools see tremendous growth from scholars of all different socioeconomic backgrounds. I would be honored to work in one of the first charter schools in the state of Washington.
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019631502_apwacharterschools1stldwritethru.html
Seattle Urban Teacher Residency 2013
I am so excited to announce that Seattle will be starting an Urban Teacher Residency in 2013! The Seattle Urban Teacher Residency will begin accepting applicants in January 2013. Find the Seattle Times article below.
"Starting next summer, Seattle will join a dozen other U.S. cities that train some of its teachers similar to the way hospitals teach medical residents, with significant on-the-job learning alongside experienced mentors.
Seattle Public Schools and three partners — the University of Washington, the nonprofit Alliance for Education and the city's teachers union — will recruit 25 people for the new program, which will include university coursework as well as the classroom apprenticeship.
Many details are still under discussion, but the program likely will focus on preparing participants to teach classes for special-education students and students who are learning English. Those are jobs Seattle Public Schools has difficulty filling.
Teacher residencies in other cities focus on other subjects, but they all tailor their programs to fit the needs of their districts.
Residencies include more on-the-job training than most prospective teachers receive at universities or in programs such as Teach for America, the high-profile national organization that places recent college graduates in classrooms of their own after just five weeks of summer training.
The first teacher residencies opened in 2001 in Chicago, followed by others in Boston and the Denver area. In all three places, the programs grew out of frustration over many new teachers being ill-equipped for the challenges of urban classrooms.
The extra training has helped those districts retain new teachers longer, said Anissa Listak, executive director of Urban Teacher Residency United, a nonprofit network helping the Seattle partners develop their program.
While half of new teachers in urban districts leave within five years, Listak said, the retention rate for urban-residency programs is 85 percent.
The idea behind the residency model, she said, "is that you're learning how to be a teacher in an environment that's safe and can help you nurture your skills."
The Seattle Education Association's role as a full partner in the program is a first, she added.
The union sees the residency program as an opportunity for Seattle teachers to help shape the future of their profession.
"For too long, educators' voice about the profession has been ignored," said Jonathan Knapp, the union's president.
The teacher-residency model, he added, "is the way we believe teacher preparation should go."
Knapp also hopes the program will create a new source of teachers for Seattle schools and help diversify the district's largely white workforce.
The fact that participants will get a stipend during their residency year, he said, may attract people who couldn't otherwise afford to get a teaching degree.
Marni Campbell, an interim assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, also likes the fact that the program's mentors will be well prepared. In many teacher-preparation programs, veterans who work with student teachers are not trained to be mentors.
Teaching residents can be recent college graduates or older career-changers. They will earn an initial teaching certificate, then likely start working as classroom teachers as they finish the coursework they need to teach special-education students or English-language learners. They likely will be required to work in Seattle for several years after their residencies end.
Tom Stritikus dean of the UW College of Education, said the new program is one more way the university is working with school districts to train high-quality teachers.
Students in the UW's regular teacher-training programs also spend a lot of time in schools, he said, but the residency program will go beyond that.
The UW also provides training for the Teach for America program, which has been controversial because its participants start teaching while working to earn a credential.
The Seattle teachers union, among others, opposes that way of training teachers.
The union and the university are working together on this latest project.
The details of who will pay for it, and how much, are still being worked out. The Alliance for Education is working on getting donations to help.
The program expects to start recruiting participants in January, said program director Marisa Bier."
http://seattletimes.com/html/education/2019556628_teacherresidency30m.html
"Starting next summer, Seattle will join a dozen other U.S. cities that train some of its teachers similar to the way hospitals teach medical residents, with significant on-the-job learning alongside experienced mentors.
Seattle Public Schools and three partners — the University of Washington, the nonprofit Alliance for Education and the city's teachers union — will recruit 25 people for the new program, which will include university coursework as well as the classroom apprenticeship.
Many details are still under discussion, but the program likely will focus on preparing participants to teach classes for special-education students and students who are learning English. Those are jobs Seattle Public Schools has difficulty filling.
Teacher residencies in other cities focus on other subjects, but they all tailor their programs to fit the needs of their districts.
Residencies include more on-the-job training than most prospective teachers receive at universities or in programs such as Teach for America, the high-profile national organization that places recent college graduates in classrooms of their own after just five weeks of summer training.
The first teacher residencies opened in 2001 in Chicago, followed by others in Boston and the Denver area. In all three places, the programs grew out of frustration over many new teachers being ill-equipped for the challenges of urban classrooms.
The extra training has helped those districts retain new teachers longer, said Anissa Listak, executive director of Urban Teacher Residency United, a nonprofit network helping the Seattle partners develop their program.
While half of new teachers in urban districts leave within five years, Listak said, the retention rate for urban-residency programs is 85 percent.
The idea behind the residency model, she said, "is that you're learning how to be a teacher in an environment that's safe and can help you nurture your skills."
The Seattle Education Association's role as a full partner in the program is a first, she added.
The union sees the residency program as an opportunity for Seattle teachers to help shape the future of their profession.
"For too long, educators' voice about the profession has been ignored," said Jonathan Knapp, the union's president.
The teacher-residency model, he added, "is the way we believe teacher preparation should go."
Knapp also hopes the program will create a new source of teachers for Seattle schools and help diversify the district's largely white workforce.
The fact that participants will get a stipend during their residency year, he said, may attract people who couldn't otherwise afford to get a teaching degree.
Marni Campbell, an interim assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, also likes the fact that the program's mentors will be well prepared. In many teacher-preparation programs, veterans who work with student teachers are not trained to be mentors.
Teaching residents can be recent college graduates or older career-changers. They will earn an initial teaching certificate, then likely start working as classroom teachers as they finish the coursework they need to teach special-education students or English-language learners. They likely will be required to work in Seattle for several years after their residencies end.
Tom Stritikus dean of the UW College of Education, said the new program is one more way the university is working with school districts to train high-quality teachers.
Students in the UW's regular teacher-training programs also spend a lot of time in schools, he said, but the residency program will go beyond that.
The UW also provides training for the Teach for America program, which has been controversial because its participants start teaching while working to earn a credential.
The Seattle teachers union, among others, opposes that way of training teachers.
The union and the university are working together on this latest project.
The details of who will pay for it, and how much, are still being worked out. The Alliance for Education is working on getting donations to help.
The program expects to start recruiting participants in January, said program director Marisa Bier."
http://seattletimes.com/html/education/2019556628_teacherresidency30m.html
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
TAF Academy in Seattle
I have been researching education in Seattle and was very pleased to hear about the TAF Academy in Federal Way. I am praying for more education reform like this in Seattle in the upcoming years.
---------------
"Inside nine portable classrooms clustered on a school field north of Federal Way, students from the TAF Academy have built mini steam engines while studying the role science played in European colonization. They've developed mathematical models for world economic debates, and come up with ideas about how to run cars on wind.
The beige portables are so close to Totem Middle School, another Federal Way public school, that they look like they are part of it, but they're not.
Under a contract signed four years ago, the academy grew out of a partnership between Federal Way Public Schools and the Technology Access Foundation (TAF), a nonprofit that works to prepare and inspire minority students to pursue careers in math, science and technology.
That agreement gives the academy, for students in grades six through 12, some of the freedom and flexibility that would be granted to charter schools if Washington voters approve Initiative 1240 in November.
The TAF Academy controls its own curriculum, its books, its approach to teaching. The foundation has a hand in choosing the school's principal and teachers.
TAF also has been providing about $500,000 a year to supplement the school's budget, which allows the school to hire some teachers and support staff members, and to buy technology such as digital microscopes and enough laptops for every student.
The results so far, based on test scores?
Above average and improving, but not among the state's, or even the district's, top-performing schools.
While supporters of Initiative 1240 often point to the stellar success stories among the 6,000 charters in 41 states, the reality is that most charter schools don't do even as well as the TAF Academy has done.
Some states do a far better job than others of nurturing the higher-performing charters, but one often-cited 2009 study of charters in 15 states and the District of Columbia found that just 17 percent reported academic gains that were significantly better than regular public schools. Nearly half — 46 percent — performed the same, and 37 percent were worse.
"You can find, in every single location, a substantial amount of charter schools that are doing really, really well, but the results are always mixed," said Macke Raymond, the lead author of that study, and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.
"And what does that tell us? It tells us it's really, really hard to get it right."
Trish Dziko, the Technology Access Foundation's co-founder and executive director, has found that to be true in the TAF Academy's case.
"I had no idea until we got our hands in there how difficult it is to try to accomplish what we are trying to accomplish," she said.
Fourth attempt
Initiative 1240 marks the fourth time that charter-school supporters have tried to persuade Washington voters to allow the independently run public schools here.
The first measure was on the ballot 16 years ago, and the most recent was in 2004.
This latest campaign is being watched nationally to see if Washington voters have finally warmed to charter schools. If the initiative passes, Washington could be the first state where charters would open at the public's behest, not through a bill passed by state lawmakers.
As in past campaigns, supporters include business groups and some of Washington's richest residents, including past donors Bill Gates and Paul Allen, along with Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, and other wealthy charter supporters from other parts of the country.
About a dozen state legislators and a handful of education groups also back the measure, some of which are relatively new to Washington but have emerged as strong advocates for many of the education policies promoted by the Obama administration, including charter schools.
The measure's proponents think charter schools, done right, have proved to be a good way to create innovative public schools and provide an option for students who otherwise would be stuck in failing schools.
Opponents include most of the Washington education establishment — the teachers union, the principals association, the groups that represent superintendents, school board members and parents. The state Democratic Party is against it, too, as are about three dozen state legislators.
They echo what's been said three times before: Washington should spend its time and money improving the schools it has, not creating a separate set of public schools that have yet to show consistently good results.
Charters, they say, also would spread the already inadequate pot of money for public education in this state even more thinly. And if they attract the more motivated students, they could saddle existing schools with a disproportionate share of the harder-to-educate.
Research on schools
The research on charter schools is as contentious as the debates around them, with studies that reach opposite conclusions about whether charters are superior to traditional public schools.
Many of those studies focus on just one state or city, and some of those show that charters, on average, are posting better results in some grades and subjects than other public schools.
But studies that look at a number of states, including the one done at Stanford, conclude that the overall performance of charter schools is mixed.
Some charter-school supporters say such results taught them that state laws matter a lot. States that create strong charter laws and carry them out well tend to see better results, said Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
There is also some evidence that charters, many of which operate in cities, do a better job in urban areas, especially with students from low-income families and those learning to speak English.
Initiative 1240, Ziebarth said, builds on the lessons from the past 20 years, and, if passed, would come closer to his organization's model charter law than any other state.
Washington, for example, would be one of only a few states where charters, if their performance sinks below a certain level, would, barring exceptional circumstances, close automatically.
That's a step toward the strict accountability that charter supporters first envisioned as a trade-off for the flexibility charters typically are given.
Initiative 1240 also outlines how charters would be monitored, which Ziebarth said is also key.
Some people think charter-school laws are like a windup toy that just needs to be cranked up and let go, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Teachers College in New York who has studied charter schools. But he sees them as a garden that requires continual attention.
"If you're not going to weed and water and nurture it," he said. "you're better off going to the supermarket and buying your tomatoes there."
District's partner
If charter schools had existed in Washington state in 2008, Dziko said, the TAF Academy probably would have become one. When she was looking for models of what she wanted to do, they were all charters.
Yet now she's glad the TAF Academy is not a charter, even though charter status would give it even more freedom than it has.
If TAF were a charter, then Dziko's foundation would be running the school. As it stands now, the foundation is the district's partner. And as a charter, the TAF Academy's teachers wouldn't necessarily be covered under the district's teachers contract, as they are now.
Dziko doesn't oppose charter schools, but she's not promoting them either.
She think I-1240 lacks clarity in some important areas, including how people would be nominated to serve on the state charter commission and how existing schools might convert to charters.
She's come to believe that, for TAF, the disadvantages of operating a charter school would outweigh the advantages.
The only way she'd start a charter now, she said, would be in partnership with a school district. She values the cooperative relationship she has with Federal Way, which she thinks raises the chances that good ideas will be shared among many schools.
The biggest challenges for the TAF Academy, she said, have little to do with teacher contracts or other district policies that the school could ignore if it became a charter.
The hardest work is the day-to-day struggle of figuring out how to help all students learn. The word "charter" in a school's name, she said, doesn't mean it automatically will be great."
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019398866_taf11m.html
---------------
"Inside nine portable classrooms clustered on a school field north of Federal Way, students from the TAF Academy have built mini steam engines while studying the role science played in European colonization. They've developed mathematical models for world economic debates, and come up with ideas about how to run cars on wind.
The beige portables are so close to Totem Middle School, another Federal Way public school, that they look like they are part of it, but they're not.
Under a contract signed four years ago, the academy grew out of a partnership between Federal Way Public Schools and the Technology Access Foundation (TAF), a nonprofit that works to prepare and inspire minority students to pursue careers in math, science and technology.
That agreement gives the academy, for students in grades six through 12, some of the freedom and flexibility that would be granted to charter schools if Washington voters approve Initiative 1240 in November.
The TAF Academy controls its own curriculum, its books, its approach to teaching. The foundation has a hand in choosing the school's principal and teachers.
TAF also has been providing about $500,000 a year to supplement the school's budget, which allows the school to hire some teachers and support staff members, and to buy technology such as digital microscopes and enough laptops for every student.
The results so far, based on test scores?
Above average and improving, but not among the state's, or even the district's, top-performing schools.
While supporters of Initiative 1240 often point to the stellar success stories among the 6,000 charters in 41 states, the reality is that most charter schools don't do even as well as the TAF Academy has done.
Some states do a far better job than others of nurturing the higher-performing charters, but one often-cited 2009 study of charters in 15 states and the District of Columbia found that just 17 percent reported academic gains that were significantly better than regular public schools. Nearly half — 46 percent — performed the same, and 37 percent were worse.
"You can find, in every single location, a substantial amount of charter schools that are doing really, really well, but the results are always mixed," said Macke Raymond, the lead author of that study, and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.
"And what does that tell us? It tells us it's really, really hard to get it right."
Trish Dziko, the Technology Access Foundation's co-founder and executive director, has found that to be true in the TAF Academy's case.
"I had no idea until we got our hands in there how difficult it is to try to accomplish what we are trying to accomplish," she said.
Fourth attempt
Initiative 1240 marks the fourth time that charter-school supporters have tried to persuade Washington voters to allow the independently run public schools here.
The first measure was on the ballot 16 years ago, and the most recent was in 2004.
This latest campaign is being watched nationally to see if Washington voters have finally warmed to charter schools. If the initiative passes, Washington could be the first state where charters would open at the public's behest, not through a bill passed by state lawmakers.
As in past campaigns, supporters include business groups and some of Washington's richest residents, including past donors Bill Gates and Paul Allen, along with Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, and other wealthy charter supporters from other parts of the country.
About a dozen state legislators and a handful of education groups also back the measure, some of which are relatively new to Washington but have emerged as strong advocates for many of the education policies promoted by the Obama administration, including charter schools.
The measure's proponents think charter schools, done right, have proved to be a good way to create innovative public schools and provide an option for students who otherwise would be stuck in failing schools.
Opponents include most of the Washington education establishment — the teachers union, the principals association, the groups that represent superintendents, school board members and parents. The state Democratic Party is against it, too, as are about three dozen state legislators.
They echo what's been said three times before: Washington should spend its time and money improving the schools it has, not creating a separate set of public schools that have yet to show consistently good results.
Charters, they say, also would spread the already inadequate pot of money for public education in this state even more thinly. And if they attract the more motivated students, they could saddle existing schools with a disproportionate share of the harder-to-educate.
Research on schools
The research on charter schools is as contentious as the debates around them, with studies that reach opposite conclusions about whether charters are superior to traditional public schools.
Many of those studies focus on just one state or city, and some of those show that charters, on average, are posting better results in some grades and subjects than other public schools.
But studies that look at a number of states, including the one done at Stanford, conclude that the overall performance of charter schools is mixed.
Some charter-school supporters say such results taught them that state laws matter a lot. States that create strong charter laws and carry them out well tend to see better results, said Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
There is also some evidence that charters, many of which operate in cities, do a better job in urban areas, especially with students from low-income families and those learning to speak English.
Initiative 1240, Ziebarth said, builds on the lessons from the past 20 years, and, if passed, would come closer to his organization's model charter law than any other state.
Washington, for example, would be one of only a few states where charters, if their performance sinks below a certain level, would, barring exceptional circumstances, close automatically.
That's a step toward the strict accountability that charter supporters first envisioned as a trade-off for the flexibility charters typically are given.
Initiative 1240 also outlines how charters would be monitored, which Ziebarth said is also key.
Some people think charter-school laws are like a windup toy that just needs to be cranked up and let go, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Teachers College in New York who has studied charter schools. But he sees them as a garden that requires continual attention.
"If you're not going to weed and water and nurture it," he said. "you're better off going to the supermarket and buying your tomatoes there."
District's partner
If charter schools had existed in Washington state in 2008, Dziko said, the TAF Academy probably would have become one. When she was looking for models of what she wanted to do, they were all charters.
Yet now she's glad the TAF Academy is not a charter, even though charter status would give it even more freedom than it has.
If TAF were a charter, then Dziko's foundation would be running the school. As it stands now, the foundation is the district's partner. And as a charter, the TAF Academy's teachers wouldn't necessarily be covered under the district's teachers contract, as they are now.
Dziko doesn't oppose charter schools, but she's not promoting them either.
She think I-1240 lacks clarity in some important areas, including how people would be nominated to serve on the state charter commission and how existing schools might convert to charters.
She's come to believe that, for TAF, the disadvantages of operating a charter school would outweigh the advantages.
The only way she'd start a charter now, she said, would be in partnership with a school district. She values the cooperative relationship she has with Federal Way, which she thinks raises the chances that good ideas will be shared among many schools.
The biggest challenges for the TAF Academy, she said, have little to do with teacher contracts or other district policies that the school could ignore if it became a charter.
The hardest work is the day-to-day struggle of figuring out how to help all students learn. The word "charter" in a school's name, she said, doesn't mean it automatically will be great."
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019398866_taf11m.html
Good news for US Education
I just found out about a company that has actually started implementing the successful practices of Charter schools in public schools. I am overjoyed about this news and what it means for American children.
-------------
"The academic star Roland Fryer has been crisscrossing the country preaching his data-based gospel of educational reform.
In Seattle last week, he was asked how he would vote on Initiative 1240, the ballot measure that would allow charter schools in Washington.
He said he couldn't say, but that fighting over charter schools is a distraction. Some do poorly, some have great results, but on average their performance is about the same as it is for traditional public schools. The more relevant question would be how to take what the best of them do and apply it to the other public schools, so that all students could benefit.
That's what he's working on through the Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs) at Harvard University.
As an economist, Fryer, 35, is all about getting to the core of problems using hard data.
He's trying to address the persistent gaps in performance and outcome between black and Latino students and other students, to erase the connection between ZIP code and achievement.
Speaking at Lakeside School in Seattle last week, Fryer said Americans don't score well when compared with students in much of the world. You get a clearer picture of what's going on when you look at separate schools. Students in Concord, Mass., where he lives, score at the top internationally, while students in Harlem score near the bottom. Inequality drags down the country's overall scores.
Fryer started looking for solutions with a project to pay students to do better. Sometimes that works well, but not when students don't have a clue where to start.
So, Fryer took a different course. He looked at successful programs around the country, such as the Harlem Children's Zone, and the KIPP charter schools, that get high performance in some of the country's lowest-income areas.
His teams studied everything they did in detail, gathering data analyzing strategies that could explain their success and allow it to be replicated. Fryer took what they'd learned and distilled it into five keys to success:
• Give teachers frequent feedback.
• Use data-driven instruction. (Test frequently and adjust instruction accordingly.)
• Tutor a lot.
• Maintain high expectations.
• Provide sufficient instructional time.
Then he set out to test his model, but said he was turned down by several districts where students desperately needed help.
Finally, the superintendent of Houston's school system let Fryer's EdLabs remake nine low-performing schools — four high schools and five middle schools. (Last year they added 11 elementary schools.)
EdLabs started by rooting out the culture that allowed failure. Fryer said that when he asks teachers what it would take to have a successful school, and they tell him better students, there's a problem.
The program replaced 53 percent of the teachers and replaced all of the principals. EdLabs added an hour to the school day and 10 days to the school year and hired 400 tutors.
By the end of year one, according to a chart Fryer displayed, there was significant improvement in math performance. The program is in its third year in Houston and is spreading to other districts. Language skills are more of a challenge, not so straightforward as math. The students do better under Fryer's program, but there is much more to accomplish. With language there is, so far, no proven substitute for starting as early as possible in a child's life.
In the test schools, teen pregnancy has dropped by a factor of five, and the incarceration rate for boys is four times less than before the makeover. The cost is $2,000 more per student, but that's a lot less than jail or other social costs that are being avoided.
Fryer is driven to close the academic gap by his own life story. He was raised shuttling between his father in Texas and his grandmother in Florida, until his father was sent to prison.
Fryer said most of the people he grew up with didn't make it out of a dangerous environment, but Fryer went to college on an athletic scholarship. Once he got there, however, he decided not to play, but to study instead and graduated magnum cum laude in less than three years.
He was made a full professor at Harvard at only 30, and last year was named a MacArthur Fellow.
"People say to me, 'It's great that you beat the odds,' " Fryer said, but "I say, let's change the odds."
We could use more of that attitude."
http://seattletimes.com/html/jerrylarge/2019398652_jdl11m.html
-------------
"The academic star Roland Fryer has been crisscrossing the country preaching his data-based gospel of educational reform.
In Seattle last week, he was asked how he would vote on Initiative 1240, the ballot measure that would allow charter schools in Washington.
He said he couldn't say, but that fighting over charter schools is a distraction. Some do poorly, some have great results, but on average their performance is about the same as it is for traditional public schools. The more relevant question would be how to take what the best of them do and apply it to the other public schools, so that all students could benefit.
That's what he's working on through the Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs) at Harvard University.
As an economist, Fryer, 35, is all about getting to the core of problems using hard data.
He's trying to address the persistent gaps in performance and outcome between black and Latino students and other students, to erase the connection between ZIP code and achievement.
Speaking at Lakeside School in Seattle last week, Fryer said Americans don't score well when compared with students in much of the world. You get a clearer picture of what's going on when you look at separate schools. Students in Concord, Mass., where he lives, score at the top internationally, while students in Harlem score near the bottom. Inequality drags down the country's overall scores.
Fryer started looking for solutions with a project to pay students to do better. Sometimes that works well, but not when students don't have a clue where to start.
So, Fryer took a different course. He looked at successful programs around the country, such as the Harlem Children's Zone, and the KIPP charter schools, that get high performance in some of the country's lowest-income areas.
His teams studied everything they did in detail, gathering data analyzing strategies that could explain their success and allow it to be replicated. Fryer took what they'd learned and distilled it into five keys to success:
• Give teachers frequent feedback.
• Use data-driven instruction. (Test frequently and adjust instruction accordingly.)
• Tutor a lot.
• Maintain high expectations.
• Provide sufficient instructional time.
Then he set out to test his model, but said he was turned down by several districts where students desperately needed help.
Finally, the superintendent of Houston's school system let Fryer's EdLabs remake nine low-performing schools — four high schools and five middle schools. (Last year they added 11 elementary schools.)
EdLabs started by rooting out the culture that allowed failure. Fryer said that when he asks teachers what it would take to have a successful school, and they tell him better students, there's a problem.
The program replaced 53 percent of the teachers and replaced all of the principals. EdLabs added an hour to the school day and 10 days to the school year and hired 400 tutors.
By the end of year one, according to a chart Fryer displayed, there was significant improvement in math performance. The program is in its third year in Houston and is spreading to other districts. Language skills are more of a challenge, not so straightforward as math. The students do better under Fryer's program, but there is much more to accomplish. With language there is, so far, no proven substitute for starting as early as possible in a child's life.
In the test schools, teen pregnancy has dropped by a factor of five, and the incarceration rate for boys is four times less than before the makeover. The cost is $2,000 more per student, but that's a lot less than jail or other social costs that are being avoided.
Fryer is driven to close the academic gap by his own life story. He was raised shuttling between his father in Texas and his grandmother in Florida, until his father was sent to prison.
Fryer said most of the people he grew up with didn't make it out of a dangerous environment, but Fryer went to college on an athletic scholarship. Once he got there, however, he decided not to play, but to study instead and graduated magnum cum laude in less than three years.
He was made a full professor at Harvard at only 30, and last year was named a MacArthur Fellow.
"People say to me, 'It's great that you beat the odds,' " Fryer said, but "I say, let's change the odds."
We could use more of that attitude."
http://seattletimes.com/html/jerrylarge/2019398652_jdl11m.html
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