Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As we have been reporting, it’s been a very rough go for the Philadelphia public schools this year, for its students, teachers and parents, and even further back.
Now the school superintendent is taking new steps and trying experiments with expanding charter schools to fight back.
The “NewsHour” special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has the first of two reports this week.
JOHN MERROW (NewsHour): Philadelphia public schools are in trouble. Not enough money. Overflowing classrooms. And the unkindest cut of all, more than one-third of its students, 70,000, are in charter schools, which Philadelphia has to pay for, but doesn’t control.
WILLIAM HITE, Superintendent, The School District of Philadelphia: Individuals are choosing away from us, simply because they don’t think that our schools are meeting the needs of our children.
JOHN MERROW: William Hite is superintendent of Philadelphia’s public schools.
WILLIAM HITE: So what we want to do is to become a part of that choice. Our survival depends on our ability to innovate, to think differently about how children are educated.
MAN: You noticed there’s mirrors. Mirrors are, like, fascinating to kids. They, like, look at them and they’re like, who is that kid? What brain development stuff is going on with those kinds of things now?
JOHN MERROW: This is the kind of innovative model superintendent Hite is talking about. These 12th graders at Science Leadership Academy are learning about brain development by designing toys for babies and infants.
WOMAN: Aaron, what do you think? Do you want to do like little infant or do you want to do like 4- to 5-year-olds?
STUDENT: I want to do toddlers 1 to 3.
MAN: You will need to research what’s going on and then think of what you could build, design that would help develop those parts of the brain that are developing during eight to 12 months.
JOHN MERROW: Some teachers might have given a lecture on brain development, but that’s not how things work at Science Leadership Academy. Here, kids learn by finding their own answers and working collaboratively on real-life projects.
"Can innovative schools be all-inclusive in Philadelphia? (2 of 2)" PBS NewsHour 12/2/2014
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Can schools that enroll students of all skill levels use the same methods as more academically selective programs? In the second half of our report on Philadelphia’s public schools, special correspondent for education John Merrow reports on the city’s U School, a neighborhood school that’s copying the project-based learning curriculum of some of the city’s more exclusive charter schools.
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