PHILADELPHIA — The Rev. Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich don't agree on much, but a meeting with a group of inner-city charter school students on Tuesday left them with the same impression: There is hope for improving the U.S. education system.
"We may disagree about other issues, but this is a place where we have a common" goal, Gingrich said outside Mastery Charter School in West Philadelphia. "I take education very, very seriously."
Sharpton, a liberal Democratic, and Gingrich, a conservative Republican, joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the first stop of a "listening and learning" tour to find out what school strategies are working and why.
At Mastery, the trio met with about a dozen 11th graders who attended the school four years earlier when it was under district management. At that time, students said, kids ran wild, expectations were low and teachers didn't care about the students — or even about teaching.
"It was horrible," 17-year-old Donnell Clark said.
But since 2006, the school has been run by Mastery Charter Schools, a nonprofit that now has four campuses in Philadelphia serving 2,100 students. The Shoemaker campus visited Tuesday has outperformed some of its more affluent suburban counterparts on state standardized tests.
Clark and others told the education advocates that new teachers and staff made the difference by raising the academic bar, accepting no excuses and simply caring about their students.
"Teachers actually invest their time," Clark said.
Public education in Philadelphia is a mixture of district-run schools, schools operated by private management companies and charter schools, which are public but operate independently from the district.
It is a high-poverty system where only about half the students can read and write at grade level...Click here to read the rest of the article.
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