Category: Weekly Updates

Later this week, each of our campuses is hosting its annual curriculum night, an opportunity for parents and caregivers to learn from teachers the skills and knowledge their students will gain in their classes this year.  It’s one of the first and most visible ways we hope to build a strong connection between a student’s…

During gatherings of our full faculty and staff a few times each school year, we get to hear from some ANCS educators give a speech titled “Why I Teach”.  With their permission, I’ve been sharing some of them here in my blog.  This week you can enjoy the speech our Kindergarten-2nd Grade Instructional Coach, Veleta…

The school should demonstrate non-discriminatory and inclusive policies, practices, and pedagogies. It should model democratic practices that involve all who are directly affected by the school. The school should honor diversity and build on the strength of its communities, deliberately and explicitly challenging all forms of inequity. – from the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES)…

The blog posts will be taking a break for the summer.  But I’ll still be making occasional posts on Facebook and Twitter.  And you can read about highlights from ANCS in our spring issue of the “Principles in Practice” newsletter.  Happy summer!

As a parent, you are often told that your involvement in your child’s school will help him or her to have a great education, and schools’ efforts at engaging parents to become involved are usually focused on reading with students at home, helping out with class projects, or attending PTCA meetings.  Similarly, community members are…

Last night we honored the first board members of the Neighborhood Charter School (2002) and Atlanta Charter Middle School (2005), the two schools that merged in 2011 to form ANCS.  As well, we acknowledged the service of one of those founding board members–Margaret Kaiser–for her decade of service in the Georgia General Assembly.  Below are excerpts…

Today the Georgia Department of Education released College and Career Readiness Performance Indicator (CCRPI) scores for the 2014-15 school year (that’s right–last school year).  Below is a message I sent out to our ANCS school community earlier today about our CCRPI scores. Dear ANCS School Community: Today the Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) released last school…

After a little over a week of silent stillness and butcher paper-covered walls, this year’s Georgia Milestones testing period came to an end.  Georgia—like all states—has its public school students take statewide standardized tests as required by the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.  And Georgia—like all states—has seen a rise in the number of…

Recently, I saw a question posted on a local education group page asking “What makes for a ‘good’ middle school?”  There were several interesting, thoughtful answers, and it got me thinking about what I would say in response to that question.  There are plenty of ways–outcomes, what happens during the school day–one could use to…

Earlier this week the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program recognized our middle school campus as a model for its “Mix It Up” project.  The project is designed to get schools to find ways to encourage students of different backgrounds to interact with one another and engage with issues of diversity, equity, and justice.…