Charter school enrollment has grown significantly over the past eight years. Student enrollment in public charter schools has increased steadily both statewide and in Portland since 2000-01. PPS charter school enrollment increased from 66 students in 2000-01 to 1,080 students in 2007-08. Statewide charter school enrollment experienced similar increases growing from 622 students to 11,592 students. As of 2007-08, charter school enrollment represents about 2.0 percent of total statewide enrollment and 2.3 percent of total enrollment in Portland.
Portland charter school students on average are less likely to be low-income, minority, or English language learners. Compared to Portland schools district-wide, Portland charter schools have fewer minority students (35% vs. 44%), fewer students that qualify for free or reduced lunch (35% vs. 45%), and fewer students that are classified as Englishlanguage learners (1% vs. 10%). Students with disabilities receiving special education are enrolled in Portland charters at about the same rate as district-wide schools (14%). Charter schools nationally have enrollments that are predominately low-income (52%) and minority (60%), and other charter schools in Oregon have more low income students but fewer minorities.
Success in improving student achievement is mixed. Four of the six Portland public charter schools rated met federal Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) standards. However, overall student academic achievement is mixed. Charter schools with only elementary grades generally perform as well or better than comparable schools on reading and math achievement tests. However, reading and math scores for charter students at the middle and high school levels are generally below the average scores of comparable schools. Only three of seven charters meet or exceed statewide and district averages in writing and only one charter has achieved an increase in writing scores over time. In addition, most charter school students have smaller average annual gains in reading and math achievement than PPS students.
Portland charters have comparable attendance rates, teacher/student ratios, and class sizes. PPS charter schools have generally achieved goals related to enrollment, teacher/student ratio, and class sizes. Most charter schools have stable student populations as evidenced by attendance rates and late enrollee indexes that are comparable to district averages. Charter schools are also achieving the minimum amounts of annual hours of instruction required by state regulations.
Lack of timely financial reports inhibits assessment of charter school financial stability. Three of seven charter schools failed to submit annual audited financial reports as required by charter contracts. Consequently, it is not possible to fully assess the budget performance and financial position of all charter schools for the year ending June 30, 2008. Of the four schools submitting audited financial statements, three had positive ending fund balances and reasonably healthy balance sheets.
Little evidence of innovation transfer from charters to public schools. There is little evidence that PPS charter schools have developed innovative educational practices that have been transferred to other public schools in Portland. While some charter schools have implemented instructional practices and developed student achievement measurement tools that are often different than PPS schools, it is unclear that all the methods used by the charters are either innovative or can be transferred to other public schools.
Charter school parents, staff, and students highly satisfied. Parents, staff, and students that responded to the annual Oregon Department of Education surveys feel very positive about their charter school experience and are generally satisfied with the operations of their charter school. Ninety-six percent of parents feel the charter school met their initial expectations and 84% of teachers believe their charter has a bright future. Both charter parents and staff expressed dissatisfaction with facilities and limited financial resources. Student academic achievement is difficult to fully assess due to lack of specific,
measurable charter contract goals and insufficient annual reporting. PPS charter schools have a myriad of academic goals and expectations that are often not clearly defined, measurable, nor always reflected in charter contracts. Annual reports often provide too little information to assess student achievement. Neither the district nor charter schools seem entirely sure of the academic goals they are accountable for nor the annual reporting requirements related to these goals. As a result, the accountability process for charter schools in Portland is less than optimal.
http://www.board.pps.k12.or.us/.docs/_sid/c98dee686ed85d303eab879b80be3bdf/pg/400/rid/12309/f/2009_Charter_Schools_Audit.pdf
Touch Helps Make The Connection Between Sight And Hearing
The sense of touch allows us to make a better connection between sight and hearing and therefore helps adults to learn to read. This is what has just been shown by the team of Édouard Gentaz, CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition in Grenoble (CNRS/Université Pierre Mendès France de Grenoble/Université de Savoie).
These results, published March 16th in the journal PloS One, should improve learning methods, both for children learning to read and adults learning foreign languages.
To read words that are new to us, we have to learn to associate a visual stimulus (a letter, or grapheme) with its corresponding auditory stimulus (the sound, or phoneme). When visual stimuli can be explored both visually and by touch, adults learn arbitrary associations between auditory and visual stimuli more efficiently. The researchers reached this conclusion from an experiment on thirty French-speaking adults.
They first compared two learning methods with which the adults had to learn 15 new visual stimuli, inspired by Japanese characters, and their 15 corresponding sounds (new auditory stimuli with no associated meaning). The two learning methods differed in the senses used to explore the visual stimuli. The first, "classic", method used only vision. The second, "multisensory", method used touch as well as vision for the perception of the visual stimuli. After the learning phase, the researchers measured the performances of each adult using different tests (1). They found that all the participants had acquired an above-chance ability to recognize the visual and auditory stimuli using the two methods.
The researchers then went on to test the participants by two other methods (2), this time to measure the capacity to learn associations between visual and auditory stimuli. The results showed that the subjects were capable of learning the associations with both learning methods, but that their performances were much better using the "multisensory" learning method. When the subjects were given the same tests a week after the learning phase, the results were the same.
These results support those already found by the same team, in work done with young children. The explication lies in the specific properties of the haptic sense (3) in the hands, which plays a "cementing" role between sight and hearing, favoring the connection between the senses. What goes on in the brain remains to be explored, as does the neuronal mechanism: the researchers plan to develop a protocol that will let them use fMRI (4) to identify the areas of the cortex that are activated during the "multisensory" learning process.
(1) The first two tests respectively measured the learning capacity for visual and auditory stimuli using recognition tests. In a visual test, a visual stimulus had to be recognized among 5 new visual stimuli. In an auditory test, the target had to be recognized among 5 new sounds.
(2) In the "visual-auditory" test, the subject was presented with a visual stimulus and had to recognize its corresponding sound among 5 other sounds. In the "auditory-visual" test, the opposite was done.
(3) Or tactile-kinesthetic. "Haptic" corresponds to the sense of touch, used to feel the letters.
(4) Functional magnetic resonance imaging: the application of magnetic resonance imagery to study the function of the brain.
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