post # 2

Dear fellow CSLP attendees,
I am volunteering at the Next Step Charter School in Columbia Heights. The second time I visited the kids at Next Step, the lower level math class that I would normally be helping had standardized testing (woohooo!) that day so I was sent to a high (er) level English class. I had a great time helping the kids construct some sentences in English and although community service should not be about stroking one’s own ego, I must say I was very happy that I was able to explain these concepts to the kids in Spanish as I helped them. This particular charter has a small student body (roughly 75 students) and targets primarily students with a Latino background who have ‘fallen through the cracks’ of the DCPS- so to speak. My paper is a criticism of ‘market-oriented’ charter schools that are controlled or influenced by organizations that seek profit over the improvement of education. Next Step exemplifies a type of charter that would qualify as a ‘mission- oriented’ school, so one that seems to have honorable intentions and effective improvement behavior. Maybe I could talk about Next Step as an example of a charter school that is in fact fulfilling the intended goals for charter schools when they were first introduced to the school system here. Alright, that’s really all I have to say about that. Over and Out.