Category: poverty

How Did You Learn to Read?

When you were in kindergarten or first grade, how did you learn to read? Did you spend part of each day listening to your teacher reading to the class and to your parent reading a bedtime story? At some point, you were handed a book, and one day, you were reading independently. Just like learning to talk, reading came to you naturally…it just sort of happened! Right? Not likely. You were probably too young to be able to recall it clearly, but you and your classmates didn’t start to read independently after merely learning to sing the Alphabet Song and paying attention during Story Time. It’s far more likely that you learned to read by receiving multiple hours of instruction in letter sounds. After you learned the […]

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Book Review: Hope and Despair in the American City

Review: Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh By Gerald Grant The book’s title is flattering enough, but sociologist Gerald Grant finds plenty of laudatory things to say about Wake County’s public schools in this 2009 study of urban blight and education reform. Grant is a retired professor of Education and Sociology at Syracuse University who grew up in Syracuse, NY and returned to it in 1978. Clearly distressed by the steady decline and uneven recovery of the core sections of Syracuse, Grant has done extensive archival research about both segregation and urban planning in preparation for writing this book, which benefits from his interwoven personal experiences. A scholarly project, Hope and Despair in the American City […]

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Performance of Charter Schools in Wake County

In 2017-18, there were 22 charter schools in Wake County. It’s hard to compare their performance with that of WCPSS district schools for several reasons. For one thing, the district has so many more schools (183), with wide variations in school populations, resources, and programs. For another, both traditional public schools (TPS) and charter schools must report many statistics. They might excel in one area while falling short in another. School Performance Grades (SPGs) are summaries that provide a clue, and most charters and TPS receive these annually. But some education experts believe that North Carolina’s SPGs are too heavily weighted toward test scores, and many argue that growth statistics are more accurate than performance statistics. (More on that later.) When assessing the effectiveness of […]

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