Ladies Home Journal Article on "Amazing Schools"

Innovative ideas are one thing. Implementing them and making them work over several years? That's another. Finding schools that exemplified the latter is what spurred the development of "America's Most Amazing Schools," an article I co-wrote for the September issue of Ladies Home Journal with LHJ's Sonia Harmon.

My first task was to assemble a panel of experts who have visited and read about many schools around the country and who can see through the hype to determine whether a school is actually delivering on its promises. We came up with 10 schools with the help of this group (their names are below) as well as online searches and interviews (Sonia Harmon did the interviews for two schools of the 10 schools on our list -- the MAST Academy in Florida and Clark Montessori in Ohio).

We were looking for schools that 1) were doing some “out of the box” thinking about what public education could be and 2) had data to show that students were thriving under the approach (we looked for signs like waiting lists, sustained achievement and higher than average student test scores.) We also were aiming for geographic diversity.

Of the 10 schools on the list, three include the primary grades (a full text version of the article is here). They are:

1. Dr. William W. Henderson Inclusion Elementary School - Boston, Massachusetts
2. Kipp Dream Prep - Houston, Texas
3. The Odyssey School - Denver, Colorado

I'd love to get your take on the article and the schools we chose. And I have no doubt there are many more than just 10 innovative schools in the country that get results. Keep me posted on others, we should be focusing on, particularly in the pre-kindergarten through third grades.

Our expert panel included:

• Lori Crouch, assistant director, Education Writers Association
• Lucy Gray, education consultant, Lucy Gray Consulting
• Gene Maeroff, senior fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of the forthcoming book, School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy
• Sara Mead, senior associate partner, Bellwether Education Partners, a nationwide non-profit consulting and the Early Education Initiative's former director
• Deborah Moore, executive director and co-founder of the Green Schools Initiative, based in Berkeley, Calif.
• Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at Education Sector, an education think tank in Washington, D.C.