Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post blasting the state Board of Education for pressuring Denver Public Schools not to close the Life Skills Center, a low-performing charter school. The Denver school board had wanted to close the school, but bowed to the pressure and let it reopen for this school year.

Tonight, the board votes on whether to let Life Skills, and several other low-performing charters, stay open for another year. Having visited Life Skills, I’ve changed my mind on this one, and hope the board will let it keep operating.

My superficial impression of Life Skills is that it’s not a great school. It’s probably not even a particularly good school. Still, I find myself at odds with my own thinking from last August, when I wrote:

DPS did its homework on this one. Life Skills was failing its students. But here’s (state school board member Bob) Schaffer, as quoted in the Rocky Mountain News: “The bigger question is, how does the school compare to the street? Because that is the option being weighed and compared here.”

Of course the street is a lousy option. But if that false dichotomy is played out to its logical extreme, then we should just abandon all quality standards for schools serving at-risk kids. That’s not going to get us very far, and certainly Schaffer knows that.

Why the change of heart? Simple. Life Skills Center is a last-gasp chance for young people who have already dropped out of school to reengage and get a diploma. DPS wrote into the school’s charter contract that it could recruit only those prospective students who had dropped out of school, and had been out of school for at least 60 days.

That’s a tough crowd to engage. So one would expect a high rate of failure, low attendance, and a lot of attrition. And that’s exactly what happens at Life Skills.

But something else happens as well. At least some kids apparently learn a significant amount, and go on to graduate. Some 80 percent of the school’s 260 students are in line to graduate within a year.

And according to Measures of Academic Progress, a national assessment Life Skills uses,  students have been making over a year-and-a-half’s worth of growth in reading for each academic year. Since all Life Skills students read at far below grade level, they have to make these kinds of gains if they are ever to catch up.

Of course in math, students are making less than half a year’s progress each year, and in language just under a year. So the news is decidedly mixed.

Attendance rates of just over 50 percent also are nothing to brag about. But again, given who these kids are, the fact that many hold down multiple jobs, and that the attendance rate two years hovered around 40 percent, 50 percent looks like progress to me.

If DPS had a viable alternative for these kids, one that was being drained by the existence of Life Skills, I’d favor shutting down the school. But these are kids DPS has given up on, and vice-versa. What possible harm is there in giving them another chance, even if it’s less than ideal?

DPS needs to close a low-performing charter or two. After all, the school board has begun closing its own low-performing schools. There’s no reason to treat bad charters differently than bad district schools. But I now believe that Life Skills Center is a special case.

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Alternative pathways, School choice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.