You know what Shannon Blankenship hates about running a pair of odds-beating urban schools? Choosing next year’s entering classes at the two Hiawatha Academies, Minneapolis charter schools where he is executive director. He’d like to find a spot for everyone.
There are more applicants than seats, so admission is done by lottery, which is fair, and the law of the land for publicly funded charter schools. The losers, Blankenship knows all too well, are likely to end up in schools where a third or fewer will reach grade level.
“We’re trying to find a way to meet the demand,” he said. “I’ve never in the 11 years I’ve been doing this met a parent who didn’t care about their kids. I take promises to kids and parents very seriously.”
And he can’t promise more seats until he can promise the kids in them will have the same quality of education as his current student body.
Right now, the original Hiawatha Academy and its newer sister, Adelante College Prep, serve 453 students in grades K-4 and 5-8, respectively. The student body is 96 percent impoverished and 98 percent minority; 76 percent are learning English.
Strong record of progress
Despite this, Hiawatha’s scholars, as they are called, do twice as well on state standardized tests as kids in neighboring schools and about as well as students statewide. That still doesn’t mean all kids are working at grade level, but so-called growth model tests show they get up to two years’ learning each year, which suggests the gap will continue to narrow.
Hiawatha Academy opened in 2007 and Adelante in 2011. Each has expanded by a grade a year as its students grow up. The plan is for Hiawatha to eventually operate five schools serving 2,500 students in all grades.
There’s reason to think Blankenship will realize his goal of seeing each and every one off to college. His dream of providing this kind of game-changing education to lots more kids is more uncertain. Despite Minnesota’s history as the birthplace of the charter movement, it’s still a very tough place to “scale-up” a successful school model.
Passage of the Quality Charter School Act, a bill being introduced this week at the Legislature, would help a lot. Still, because the legislation would force the closure of failing charters and make it easier to hire teachers with nontraditional credentials, it’s guaranteed to be controversial.
via MinnPost – Charter-school group seeks legislative changes to ease replication, ensure accountability.
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