Ventures in the News
Given the great work they are doing, our portfolio ventures are regularly featured in local and national news. Click on the links below to read recent articles showcasing their achievements.
Charter Schools To Receive Multimillion-Dollar Boost
NEW YORK - Charter schools that have been struggling to find homes in New York will receive a boost today from the Bush administration, in the form of a multimillion-dollar grant.Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is presenting the award to a local group that finances, constructs, and renovates charter school buildings, Civic Builders, Inc. The money will be used to aid building efforts in New York City and Newark, N.J., charter schools, according to sources familiar with the grant. Both the New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the Newark mayor, Cory Booker, will be on hand at today's announcement. … Civic Builders helps charter schools construct and lease buildings that are separate from public facilities. With the help of private philanthropy, it has transformed a Bronx parking garage into a 43,000-square-foot school and a kosher salami factory in Hunts Point into a school with an arts specialty, and built a 90,000-square-foot school complete with a 10,000-volume library, a climbing wall, and a rooftop athletic area in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The grant is part of a federal program aimed at making it more attractive — and less risky — for philanthropists to invest in charter school construction projects. The Bush administration has already awarded more than $175 million in grants to similar projects across the country, according to Education Department grant lists. (The New York Sun)
Editorial: DPS should cooperate with successful charter schools
DETROIT - The Detroit Public Schools sees charters as its biggest threat and fiercest competitor, vying with the district for the same students and the state per-pupil funding that comes with them. But there's no reason the two can't work together for the good of Detroit's children. The best charters could teach the city's public schools much about how to successfully educate disadvantaged urban students. The newest trend in the charter movement is "coopetition" -- part cooperation, part competition. Los Angeles, New York and other cities leading school reform see it as one of the most important developments in education, with the potential to boost student performance in every kind of school. Detroit, with its public schools rapidly sinking, would be irresponsible not to accept what help the charters have to offer. The district should consider teaming with leading charter schools -- University Prep Academy, Henry Ford Academy and others -- to quickly improve existing schools and open great new ones. That pathway is radically reshaping New York City's educational landscape. Four years ago, NYC Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein attracted a few of the most successful national charter networks -- KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), Achievement First and Uncommon Schools -- to come to the city. He rented schools to the operators for a dollar a year and challenged them to produce better results. They did. Now, New York's schools, both public and charter, are working together to improve teacher training and student performance, and pooling resources to get the best results for their money. The new schools' test scores are hitting the top of the math and reading charts. The model easily could be adapted in Detroit. The district has empty school buildings that could be rented to charters to expand education options in the city. (The Detroit News)
West Valley area students ditch junk food at lunchtime
CALIFORNIA - Back away from the potato chips and put your hands up! Students fear this scenario when they hear that schools are taking fatty fried food off the hot lunch menu. But schools are well aware that some students may boycott hot lunch food altogether - stuffing their backpacks with Twinkies and Hostess Ho Hos - if lunch consists of fresh fruit, salad, tofu and sugarless fat-free-organic yogurt. Tofu, especially, is not so tough in the arena of tasty food. What does it take to convert students to eating fresh food (without force-feeding them and banning the word "yuck" from their vocabulary)? Several public schools know the answer. The Los Gatos Union School District and Saratoga Union School District, as well as Leadership Public School Campbell on the Prospect High School campus in Saratoga, have hired food companies that are making even tasty food healthier. LPS Campbell also converted its menus, with 50 to 75 percent of its food being organic. For a snack, students can grab yogurt and an apple or a granola bar and organic string cheese. The school hired Revolution Foods, a company that strives to provide fresh meals. The company, which was founded in 2006, purchases fresh fruits and veggies from local farmers and changes its menu based on what is in season. … "We know that there's a problem in our community with obesity," said Soozee Park, the operations director at LPS Campbell. "Sometimes nutrition education is lacking in our community. We thought Revolution Foods was an excellent alternative to what is out there. It's a little more expensive because organic food and hormone free food is more expensive. But, the value that we receive from this program is greater than the incremental cost." (San Jose Mercury News - registration required)
Two Teach For America Recruits Share Their Stories
NATIONAL - Each year, around 20,000 of the nation's most promising college graduates enter a highly selective process to compete for the chance to work in some of the country's most troubled environments, earning public servant-level salaries. Since its creation in 1990, the nonprofit Teach for America has assumed the allure of the Rhodes Scholarship program, in essence becoming the postgraduate program of choice for the elite of America's top universities. Perhaps that cachet in part explains the culture shock that TFA's chosen few face when they begin their two-year teaching commitment working in overburdened, low-income public schools. Even though TFA preps its corps members with a rigorous five-week training program before they start teaching, graduate classes to earn their certification along the way, and ongoing support from the organization's staff, there truly is no way to ready these young teachers for the hurdles they will face in the classroom. In Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach For America, journalist Donna Foote follows four TFA corps members through their first year teaching in Locke High School, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District and located in the historically troubled Watts neighborhood. The following excerpt catches up with two of those teachers-Phillip Gedeon and Hrag Hamalian-in November of their first semester, when they've already had ample experience with the promise and challenges of life in an urban public school. (US News and World Report)
LA County School Lunches To Be Revolutionary
LOS ANGELES - The Revolution is coming! K-12 LAUSD kids, look out! Your lunches are about to get a whole hell of a lot better--and better for you. This week it was announced that Revolution Foods, a fairly new company out of the Bay Area, is bringing their goodness southbound, and will be launching a pilot program in three local schools to bring them "fresh and healthy meals on a daily basis," according to their press release. The timing is perfect; March is National Nutrition Month, and the LAUSD is in on the action. With the state of school lunches a dismal array of bland, unhealthy, and possibly questionable, LA's school kids are in desperate need of tasty, healthy options. To add insult to injury, perhaps, kids these days are exercising less and eating more junk food, which is contributing to a nationwide rise in obesity in our youth. … In the next year, Revolution hopes to increase their participation in feeding local school kids in LA County by serving their good eats to 10,000 students. With the LAUSD ranking as the second largest school district in the nation, they certainly have a captive audience. (LAist)
How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?
NATIONAL - For as long as wealthy Americans have given their money away, education has been a leading recipient of their largess. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller: the biggest philanthropists of the 20th century all gave significant portions of their fortunes to schools, teachers and libraries. Today, according to the Foundation Center, about a quarter of all foundation giving goes to education; overall, only religious organizations receive more charitable donations. Since the turn of the millennium, education philanthropy has been undergoing a major transition, as a new generation of donors has emerged. The most prominent giver is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which made its first education donations in 2000 and now directs more than $350 million a year to schools. But Gates is not alone, and the philanthropists who have followed often arrive armed with controversial ideas about education and some very different approaches to giving their money away. Last month, The New York Times Magazine invited five interested parties to lunch to discuss the new world of educational philanthropy. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. [Participants included: Steve Barr is the founder and C.E.O. of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter-school operator based in Los Angeles. Frederick Hess is the director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Vanessa Kirsch is the founder and president of New Profit, Inc., a venture philanthropy fund based in Boston. Joel I. Klein has been the chancellor of the New York City school system since 2002. Tom Vander Ark is the president of the X Prize Foundation. Until 2007, he was the executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Paul Tough is an editor of this magazine. His book about the Harlem Childrens Zone, "Whatever It Takes," will be published in September.] (New York Times Magazine - subscription required)
Find more articles on philanthropy and social entrepreneurship in this special issue of the New York Times Magazine Giving It Away
Commentary: Inner City Kids Benefiting From School Choice (By Dr. Matthew Ladner vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute)
LOS ANGELES - Democratic activist Steve Barr, founder of the Rock the Vote campaign, has dived into school reform in Los Angeles. Predictably, this has run him straight into the teeth of opposition from the education union. Barr has been busily kicking out those teeth. Barr's Green Dot is a group of charter schools with a strong record of accomplishment with very disadvantaged students. Public school teachers in Watts have been using a California law to secede from the dysfunctional Los Angeles district to join Green Dot as charter schools. The education establishment in the city, led by the education unions, has fought Barr every step of the way. But so far, Green Dot is winning. Barr is no union buster; his schools have school-level associations. Barr's take-no-prisoners style, however, includes no patience for urban schools that systematically fail kids. Barr will not tolerate tenure or other impediments to quality learning. (Townhall.com)