Take a stand with CES! Commentary on this statement, links to more resources, and an action kit of advocacy tools, including an online petition, sample press releases, Op/Ed, letter to the editor, and methods for communicating with lawmakers can be found on our website. We urge you to sign the petition, alert your colleagues and friends, and join the CES
Maureen Benson, principal of the Fremont Federation’s Youth Empowerment School (YES), talked with Laura Flaxman and Horace editor Jill Davidson about YES’s early successes and challenges as a small, autonomous, interconnected school. On Professional Development and Staffing Academically and instructionally, we are nowhere near where I would like us to be. But creating a cohesive staff takes time, patience, resilience
Schools Clover Park High School Public school serving grades 9-12 11023 Gravelly Lake Drive SW Lakewood, WA 98499-1391 253/583-5500 http://cpsd.cloverpark.k12.wa.us/Schools/HighSchools/CloverPark/CloverPark.asp College Preparatory and Architecture Academy Public school serving grades 9-12 4610 Foothill Blvd. Oakland, CA 94601 510/879-1131 Fremont in Transition High School Public school serving grades 9-12 4610 Foothill Blvd. Oakland, CA 94601 510/879-1137 Leominster High School
Edited by Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford (Beacon Press, 224 pages, $15.00), BUY NOW! reviewed by Jill Davidson Three cheers for summer! The weather’s great, but the best part is more time to read. Those of us who are daily threatened by the height and heft of our must-read book stack will be enthralled by Great Books for High School
Anna Le, a graduate of Life Academy, actively participated on the school’s design team during its transition to an autonomous small school. In conversation with Laura Flaxman, Le shares her insights about small school design from the student perspective. Laura Flaxman: What should students be aware of when they’re moving from a large high school to a small one? Anna
In the summer of 2000, I moved to Oakland to get involved in the city’s small schools initiative. For two years, I led Life Academy, the city’s first new small autonomous high school, born in 2001 from an academy program within Oakland’s 2,000-plus student Fremont High School. Having spent many years working with new school start-ups across the country, I
While we understand that a schools’ intellectual focus and instructional practice should drive design, how can that understanding be integrated into an effective school design and professional development program? The KnowledgeWorks Foundation has spearheaded a professional learning process that led to the opening of seventy-six small autonomous schools converted from twenty urban comprehensive high schools across Ohio. KnowledgeWorks spends its
Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools BayCES’s website provides a substantial range of tools, ideas, inspirations, and resources for creating small schools from large schools and for establishing new small schools. Throughout, BayCES keeps a close focus on equity, emphasizing professional development that creates opportunities for all students to learn. The BayCES newsletter, Schools by Design, is available on the
By David Tyack (Harvard University Press, 237 pages, $22.95), BUY NOW! reviewed by Frank Honts In Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society, historian David Tyack writes with present-day educational debates in mind, studying how schools have tried to achieve consensus of purpose while dealing with diverse populations. Faith in democratic principles and practices, according to Tyack, has
The movement to create small schools is driven by the desire for equity. Research and experience prove that small, autonomous schools serve students more effectively than large, comprehensive schools. While the creation of schools that are small is not in itself sufficient, smallness provides the best opportunity to create structures, relationships, and habits that define an environment for success. One
By Sam M. Intrator (Yale University Press, 208 pages; $23.00), BUY NOW! reviewed by Katherine Simon These are tough times for those of us who believe that the core of learning has to do with igniting the imagination, unleashing students’ creativity, and whetting their appetite for knowledge. This kind of rhetoric seems embarrassingly na??ve these days, and ever so far