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.


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"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.

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"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