College Education Time

Here’s information just released by the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office.

“The Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office is currently searching for 73-year old Cecil Edward Harr.

Harr’s family told the sheriff’s office he left his home on Sycamore Drive in Bluff City, Tennessee to go for a walk around 9a.m. Monday but never returned.

He was last seen wearing a dark blue shirt, a dark colored hat, blue jeans, and tennis shoes.

Harr is 6’1 and 215 pounds.

Anyone with any information should contact the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office at 279-7500 ext. 222

The Avoca Volunteer Fire Department is assisting in the search.”

Former Seagoville basketball standout Devonta Abron has transferred from Arkansas to TCU, the school announced.

Abron (6-8, 255 pounds) averaged 5.7 points and a team-best 4.2 rebounds for Arkansas, despite only seeing about 16 minutes a game in playing time. He received third-team Parade All-America honors after averaging 24.8 points and 9.4 rebounds as a high school senior.

“Devonta is a big addition for our program,” TCU coach Trent Johnson said. “He is a great kid who has been a starter from a program that has played at a high level in a major conference.”

Andre Torres, who spent fives seasons as the University School boys basketbal coach, has been released of his duties.

Suns athletic director Paul Herfurth confirmed Torres was no longer part of the basketball program, but would not comment on the reason for his departure.

Torres finished with a 104-38 record and a Class 4A regional semifinal berth this past season.

According to the Global Report Card, more than a third of the 30 school districts with the highest math achievement in the United States are actually charter schools.  This is particularly impressive considering that charters constitute about 5% of all schools and about 3% of all public school students.  And it is even more amazing considering that some of the highest performing charter schools, like Roxbury Prep in Boston or KIPP Infinity in New York City, serve very disadvantaged students.

As impressive and amazing as these results by charter schools may be, it would be wrong to conclude from this that charter schools improve student achievement.  The only way to know with confidence whether charters cause better outcomes is to look at randomized control trials (RCTs) in which students are assigned by lottery to attending a charter school or a traditional public school.  RCTs are like medical experiments where some subjects by chance get the treatment and others by chance do not.  Since the two groups are on average identical, any difference observed in later outcomes can be attributed to the “treatment,” and not to some pre-existing and uncontrolled difference.  We demand this type of evidence before we approve any drug, but the evidence used to justify how our children are educated is usually nowhere near as rigorous.

Happily, we have four RCTs on the effects of charter schools that allow us to know something about the effects of charter schools with high confidence.  Here is what we know:  students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school.  These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large. 

In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:  “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

A RCT of charter schools in New York City by a Stanford researcher found an even larger effect: “On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”

The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found:  “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading….

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Avon High School senior Luke Briggs recently committed to run track and cross country at Marian University. Briggs has been captain of the track and cross country teams.

Briggs was on the winning 4800 relay team and placed second in the 800 at the Johnson County meet last month.

Briggs advanced to the regional in the 800 as a junior by finishing second in the sectional.