 |
CNN LIVE AT DAYBREAK
Just In 'TIME': Top Picks in K-12 Schools
Aired May 14, 2001 - 08:36 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
COLLEEN MCEDWARDS, CNN ANCHOR: Schools and your child's education are in the spotlight in our "Just In 'TIME'" segment today. We're going to take a look at "TIME" magazine's picks for schools of the year.
A quick list for you first. The Accelerated School, in Los Angeles, tops "TIME"'s list of best elementary schools. CAL Elementary School, in Iowa, was the runner-up.
The best middle school honor went to Hand Middle School, in Columbia, South Carolina. Towns County Middle School, in Georgia, was the runner-up in that category.
For high schools, Stonewall Jackson High school, in Virginia, gets the big thumbs up, while Fox Tech High School, in San Antonio, Texas, was the runner-up.
Dan Goodgame is assistant managing editor of "TIME" magazine. He spearheaded the school search, and he joins us now from New York.
Dan, thanks for being here.
DAN GOODGAME, "TIME": My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
MCEDWARDS: How did you choose the schools? I understand test scores didn't play a role here?
GOODGAME: They didn't play much of a role. All of these schools have improved their test scores, and all of them in order to judge their progress. Some of them were doing quite poorly a few years ago. But rather than go nationwide in trying to pick the schools with the most improvement in scores, or the ones that had the best schools in an absolute manner, we were looking for schools that were addressing the challenges that we thought were the most important this year, the most important right now. So in that sense, these were not the best schools in any objective sense, but just in the sense that they were doing the things that were the most newsworthy, the most interesting, things that work.
MCEDWARDS: Tell us a little bit more about this. Really quickly, let's run through the top three, if we can. What did you find at Stonewall Jackson High School?
GOODGAME: Stonewall Jackson High School is a school in Manassas, Virginia, which is sort of an exurb of Washington, D.C. It's a long commute from Washington, although a lot of the parents there make that commute. It's a middle-income to upper-middle income school in an area that used to be rural that's now quite built up.
The parents have a difficult time of getting to school concerts and getting to parent-teacher conferences, and the new principal, who came in about five years ago, felt that that was the biggest problem. The parents did too, when he surveyed them.
They came up with very innovative ways of getting the parents involved in the education of their kids, including a program called ParentLink, where, if a parent's stuck in traffic on Interstate 66 on their way home from work, they can get on their cell phone, call in to the ParentLink system, and find whether their kid arrived at school on time that day, whether he or she was ill, whether they turned in their homework assignments, and most importantly, exactly what was happening in several of the classes, so that they would have talking points to talk to their kids about when they got home. I think every parent has had the experience of asking their kid what they did at school and they reply with "nothing much." Now the school is telling the parents what happened.
MCEDWARDS: I've got to move you on a little bit. What about Hand Middle School?
GOODGAME: Hand Middle School is in Columbia, South Carolina. It's one that really was performing very poorly a few years ago, until they got a new principal, who turned it into a community center. It's open about the same hours as a convenience store. It's open from 6:00 a.m. until very late at night, almost all but, I think, five weekdays of every year. People from the community are coming and using the school for a wide variety of purposes: older folks tutoring younger kids or people taking computer courses. They brought the churches in to try to help the school. They really built it up.
MCEDWARDS: The Accelerated School in Los Angeles. It's in what's considered a pretty tough neighborhood. They're teaching art, poetry, yoga. What did you find there among the staff that you didn't find elsewhere?
GOODGAME: Accelerated School was started by two idealistic, young teachers who became frustrated with the bureaucracy of the school system and started their own charter school, which is a school that is exempt from some of the red tape that other schools have to deal with. You mentioned some of the extracurricular and elective programs that they have. One of the things that was interesting at Accelerated School and at many of these other schools is that, while they have to deal with testing, they have not allowed testing to make them drop the other things that they do that make school interesting for kids and that keep kids coming to school. Those include the dance program, sports, music, art, and that sort of thing.
MCEDWARDS: Dan, can I just ask you to answer this really quickly?
GOODGAME: Sure. MCEDWARDS: Some people are out there watching and saying, my public school just doesn't have the money for this kind of thing. What would you say?
GOODGAME: That is certainly a widespread problem. But almost all of the schools that we've selected here have gone outside of government to try to raise money in other ways. For example, in Latimer, Ohio, we had a school in a very small town that raised $600,000 dollars, in order to complete their consolidation successfully. They've kind of gone outside the box.
MCEDWARDS: Dan Goodgame, we look forward to that article in this week's "TIME." Thanks very much.
GOODGAME: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
|
|
|
|
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
|
