Weekend Reads

Baltimore City Public Schools Expanding Great Options 2010-11: Recommendations (PDF)
This document lays out the BCPSS current strategy to improve the “portfolio” of great city schools. It discusses closures and other interventions at the city’s worst performing schools. There is little in this document on efforts to improve “traditional” public schools, with a particular absence of discussion of promoting excellence in elementary education.

Maryland Charter Schools Founders’ Manual, Third Edition (PDF)
Everyone who starts a charter school will read some or all of this manual in the early stages of the process. I recommend reading it with an eye for the assumptions the authors make about the socioeconomic status and political values of those who want to start charter schools, the authors’ implicit definition of “community,” and fundraising recommendations that advise founders to use the dysfunction of impoverished urban neighborhoods to fiscal advantage.

“Charters emerge as threats to Catholic schools,” Erica Green, Baltimore Sun, March 16, 2011 (link)
This article reports on the announcement by the Archdiocese that it would not lease any of its 13 recently closed schools to charter schools. Erica Green is the education reporter at the Baltimore Sun and maintains the Sun’s education blog, Inside Ed, with Liz Bowie. She is a 2008 graduate of the School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.