Beware, this might be a hoax.
I hope it is true.
If it is true, please share at once with your legislators. Send it to Arne Duncan. Share it with corporate leaders.
A principal of an elementary school in Massachusetts fired the security guards and expanded the school’s arts programs. Everyone and everything got better.
Call Ripley. Tell “Believe It or Not.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I also heard something yesterday that I would love to see confirmed. A NY teacher called NY State Ed to inquire about a state test, and was re-routed to a Pearson office in Michigan? Is this possible? All the new six-figure wunderkinds in Albany and they can’t take a call from a NY teacher? Are they afraid they won’t know the answer (or don’t have an answer)? Is State Ed modeling the wonderful customer service of the banks and cable companies????
Shocking news! Outrageous! Who knew? Someone please alert Arne, Bill and Barack immediately. I’m sure they will change course once they are informed.
Throwing this in here as a question… does anyone know of inquiry or research on lawsuits around country for the disabled and Charter Schools? Wrightslaw, ACLU, along with other organizations or individual’s lawsuits would be good to air and helpful for
advocates. Children are not being identified let alone accommadated. Many parents
are given suggestion that dropping their child’s classification would better help them
get accepted to a Charter school. When they get there and the money is transferred the
children are often in failed education circumstances with no protections or accommodations and are often having to returned or moved to another school. Further pain for the child and family with a disruptive and regressive result.
I can’t speak for Charter Schools, but have issues with advocacy groups in general. “Parent Information Centers” receive the majority of their funding from DOE.
Let’s ask Deborah Meir. She has some understanding of the pilot schools in Boston. According to the video, the school originally opened as an empty promise, and the art and music equipment was left in storage.
That was for the old Orchard Garden Children. After those children were replaced with higher socioeconomic children, somebody finally thought of hiring art teachers.
“The new Orchard Gardens replaced a failed, dysfunctional public housing development with a mixed income community of over 200 units of affordable family housing in an inner city neighborhood. ”
http://www.dhkinc.com/Housing/public_housing/9606A.asp
The moral might be that we need integrated, mixed income communities, or maybe we can just hire art teachers right away. I’m worried about where the old Orchard Park children are, and do they have art and music there?
Heartwarming story. I love it. Is anyone listening? Is it too much to hope that NBC may have woken up and smelled the coffee? Will they resurrect Education Nation and tell the truth this time?
I believe, I believe!!!!!! 🙂 I sent the article to my local asst superintendent and posted on my facebook and group pages I belong to!!! sent to friends to teachers…
I want to believe. . .
As for Departments of Education, Pennsylvania redid their website a few years ago. Now it is impossible to navigate. I used to be able to find whatever I needed, now it is a labyrinth of clicking and returning to the previous page. I don’t think that is an accident. . .
Barack Obama visited this school just last year–although the principal’s decision to bulk up the arts budget was not the lesson that BO was there to promote. Before Principal Bott got rid of the security guards he got rid of 80% of the teachers. And unlike other schools in Massachusetts where slash-and-burn turnaround efforts have produced very little, test scores at the school have risen, making Orchard Gardens what Arne Duncan might call a SIG-sess story.
This is not necessarily a heart-warming story. Please read the link I posted above. The scores rose because they moved out the old, low-scoring population. Firing teachers didn’t raise the scores. The only way corporate reformers know to dramatically raise average scores is to cheat, or to raise average socioeconomic status. Art and music will save children’s lives and souls, and eventually pay off for their community and nation, but it won’t necessarily work standardized-test-score miracles.
My guess is that the school was prepared and equipped specifically for the new affordable housing development, and that’s why the arts and music curriculum wasn’t launched until after the old community was gutted.
“Affordable housing” doesn’t mean low-income.
Chmtchr,
Thanks for noticing that this story is not a simple “arts save poor children” celebration. You’re right that we need to dig deeper and flesh out this miracle story. If the school population, teaching staff, as well as the program were radically changed, the story becomes much more complex. It’s a shame that it was presented this way because it takes away from the power of the arts in education when the details are exposed.
How interesting. Yesterday I was at a hearing with Senator Curren Price and Assemblyman Ian Calderon on Arts in Jails and in depressed communities and how it dramatically improves them. This is the Joint Committee on the Arts, May 3 at the Clive Davis Theatre. It was called “Can the arts Help to Turn this Around?” This morning, Saturday, Congresswoman Karen Bass is having a Town Hall Meeting on “African American Students in Crisis?” in which arts completely applies also in helping students in trouble just like proven in the jails and even maximum security prisons. Next Thursday and Friday in Fresno I will be at a function of Create CA on “Core Reforms Engaging Arts to Educate.” Finally, this subject is gaining some steam in California.
I praise this principal for believing in the future and proper education using stimulus instead of “Sticks and Guns.” L.A. County Sheriff Baca has instituted education and behavioral modification in his jails for now 35% going to 50% of his 18,000 inmates and this dramatically reduces the violence in the jails and reduces coming back for another visit. I am certain he will also be interested in the Arts. I am also helping a friend Antonio Villacis who started “The Community School of the Arts Foundation” and is now in 18 schools where they took out the arts and they are now there again along with Zumba for the students and parents. He is also in a medium to highly disabled school and the psychologist told me that the difference in the students attitude and behavior is very high such as much less truancy and behavioral problems.
How much does it take to figure out that this is a game changer and will save the states massive amounts of money over time and also increase taxes as these students will be higher income earners and therefore higher taxpayers.
THANK YOU PRINCIPAL BOTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think when children find the thing they are passionate about then that helps motivate and drive everything else. That’s why schools that have a wide range of things beyond the three r’s tend to be more successful.
And at the end of the heartwarming story, a commercial for the for profit University of Phoenix. YIKES
Funny–I also read in today’s Chicago Tribune (Page 3–The Talk) an article, “Bright Idea Gets Students Out of Class,” whereby the principal of a Washington State school declared a “‘sun day.'” He “decided to give the 205 kids and almost all of the staff a different kind of day off. As the school’s website explains, ‘”School cancelled due to great weather! Wahoo!”‘ “The idea was to ‘create that same anticipation, joy and fun’ that comes with a snow day,'” according to the principal of Bellingham Christian School, Bob Sampson.
Oh,wait…that’s a PRIVATE school. No Pear$on test preps/days for them!!
Beginning a couple of years ago, we started to see a lot of people coming into the law office with massive debt from online for profit colleges. Student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and these folks had tens of thousands of dollars in debt and 9 dollar an hour jobs. We don’t have any work here for “graphic designers” or “criminal justice” online majors, and we have an inexpensive community college they could have attended, so it was heartbreaking.
Anyway, I started looking into the online schools and NBC really stood out. I felt as if they were promoting online for-profits.
I don’t think they’re a reliable source on education-privatization.
IMO, “school reform” is as much a sophisticated political campaign as it is an educational issue. They’ve been at this a while, they have money to burn, and they’re very good at it.
They passed legislation to regulate online for-profit colleges, but when it got to the “rule writing” stage, where agencies (rather than Congress) write the administrative rules to actually impliment the law, it was weakended dramatically under pressure from lobbyists.
Duncan’s DOE was the weak link. That’s where the regulations were watered down.