THERE’S AN EFFORT underway to bring a charter high school to
Portland that caters not to the affluent, but to those often left
behind in the education system—minorities, those in poverty, and
dropouts. To draw them in, organizers have found a hook: hiphop. If it
sounds like a narrow scope, that doesn’t bother the future school’s
proponents.
“We’re not shying away from it,” says Erica Jayasuriya, the educator
who is pushing for the High School for Recording Arts (HSRA) Portland.
“We decided that we’d use hiphop as a lens to look at some of the
thematic threads.”
Like the students Jayasuriya hopes to attract, she says Portland’s
hiphop scene has been largely overlooked by local media, including the
Mercury. That underground scene makes Portland a fertile ground
for the charter school.
“We have the most amazing positive hiphop music scene on the
planet,” Jayasuriya says. “I look at Portland, and say, ‘This is the
school that represents that creative energy and its trailblazing
spirit.'”
HSRA Portland has made its pitch to the Portland Public Schools to
start a charter school, and the board will vote on the idea next month.
While envisioning the Portland school, Jayasuriya modeled her plans on
those of the HSRA in St. Paul, Minnesota, where a very similar charter
high school has been thriving for 12 years.
The school’s approach to learning would start with a single question
that students would take a semester to answer: How is sound
transmitted? That single question can cover several areas of study,
Jayasuriya says. They’d start with the iPod, learn how that technology
works, and work their way back. In doing so, they’d learn the history
of recording technology, the science of sound waves moving through
matter, and the health aspects of listening to music, like stress
management.
Although the students have to meet state standards for graduation,
the classes won’t look the same as those you’d find at a traditional
high school. At the Minnesota school, for example, students are
required to read for set amounts of time and show progress in the
complexity of their reading—rather than reading a set list of
popular titles.
“For us, it’s not ‘Are they reading Huck Finn?’ It’s
‘Are they reading proficiently in order to relate to the modern
world?'” says Tony Simmons, the development director at HSRA Minnesota.
Along with the nontraditional teaching approach, Simmons says there’s a
nontraditional graduation requirement: Students must be accepted to
some sort of post-high school education, like a university, community
college, or vocational school.
But for all the good the Minnesota school can do, it can be an
uphill battle, says Superintendent Wayne Jennings. Many of the students
who come to their school are in poverty, don’t have a stable home life,
or for whatever reason have not made school a priority. The school
typically fares poorly in the federally mandated No Child Left Behind
testing, with students often struggling in math.
“Sometimes we wonder, ‘Did these kids go to school at all before
they came here?'” Jennings says. “We have to do a rebuilding
process.”
But the effort in Portland will be worth it, says Jayasuriya. The
kids who need the most help will get hands-on experience with the tools
they need to succeed in a field that makes them happy: hiphop.
“People are responding as if this is outrageous,” she says. “But
this is 21st century technology.”
This sounds incredible! Finding the interest and motivation to learn and appreciate is, in and of itself, one of the most important learning processes one can undergo. Revolutionary yet feasible. Go HSRA!
LOL @ libtards
LOL AT NAIVE WHITE LIBTARD “PROGRESSIVES”
http://www.oregonlive*com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/09/hip-hop_schools_failure_sealed.html
Hip-hop school’s failure sealed before its debut
Published: Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 7:48 PM
The Oregonian Editorial Board By The Oregonian Editorial Board
Nearly 50 Portland students scrambled for placement in high schools this week following the failure of their hip-hop charter school to open — an unnecessary setback that complicates their academic and social lives while diminishing their dreams of building a life in the recording arts.
But the larger tragedy associated with the doomed REAL Prep Charter Academy is the rampant failure of its leaders to honor the public’s trust and the state’s inability to ensure it. Roughly $500,000 in federal dollars were spent to get us nowhere: a Pearl District building whose renovations are incomplete, classrooms with no desks, teachers without curriculum materials.
This is a wholesale embarrassment for which everyone involved is palms to the sky.
And that won’t do.
Portland Public Schools approved REAL Prep as an alternative for students keen on learning from recording industry professionals while submitting to academics that could take root in hip-hop and other forms of music and performance. REAL Prep was to be modeled in some measure on the High School for the Recording Arts in St. Paul, Minn., which serves an overwhelmingly minority constituency and touts a high graduation rate.
But promise, facing Monday’s deadline, fell apart.
Charter schools are launched by the people who envision them, in this case those who ran a tax-exempt corporation called Freedom Thru Freestyle Inc. For the most part, FTF leaders answered to nobody but themselves, spending startup funds on staff remuneration, student and faculty recruitment, and a curriculum consultancy with a hip-hop band’s brand manager. Little to nothing was spent on textbooks, desks and computers — the belief among sponsors only weeks ago that some phantom donor, inspired by the idea of REAL Prep, would step forward and outfit the place.
It never happened. The Oregonian’s Betsy Hammond reports only a smattering of recording equipment was ever obtained.
PPS did track the management of the group’s small seed grant early on by aligning paperwork with expenses. But when it came time for big federal implementation grants to land — two valued at about $225,000 each — the school’s planners requested they work only with the Oregon Department of Education, which selected FTF for the grants.
And there was very little oversight. Federal regulations, Hammond found, require the state to give charter schools “a high degree of autonomy” over finances. But autonomy killed this dream.
It is not enough that Erica Jayasuriya, a longtime Waldorf School teacher leading the launch, stepped down over the summer and yielded to financial manager Tom Klein and curriculum specialist Keisha Edwards. And it’s not enough that these folks, along with their new chairman, the vocalist and photographer Juan McGruder, found themselves short of money and unready on Monday.
They simply did not or could not do what they said or allowed others to believe they would do. They worked in a vacuum. And now we’re all paying for it, the students with something more valuable than money: their dreams.
The Oregon Department of Education is busy tracking the money and will turn any worrisome findings over to the attorney general for review. But that’s not good enough, either.
The federal government, with a loud shout out from state and PPS officials, needs to revise its rules to insist on basic accountability for the citizen dollars it doles out for charter school development. Citizens deserve it as do the students whose futures are in play.