Signature Charter IB School Evansville Indiana

On Wednesday we travelled 2 hours by bus to Evansville. The low rolling hills around Bloomington give way to flat landscape that is dryer, warmer and the trees are only just turning orange/red. The town sits right near the border to Kentucky and we saw the Ohio River. The school we visited was a charter school running an IB platform. It was ranked no. 10 school in the USA and number 1 in the Midwest by the Washington Post. It has many other awards. The students were superb and highly motivated. We sat through a TOK (Theory of Knowledge) class (TOK classes are a specific requirement of the international IB programme). Three boys delivered a superb analysis on 'The System is Broken' - an outline of preferential treatment of the rich and or famous when it comes to being judged by all of us, the media and the law. It was all done to rap tune and they didn't miss a beat! All of the students were clearly well informed and discussed education and societal issues of all sorts. They and the staff were a delight to be with.

Charter Schools are as contentious in the USA as in NZL. Examine some of the debate here fromt he New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/schools-that-work.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

The Evansville School is a special charter of the school is all about motivation. They have about 340 students and accept anyone who wants to come to them. If they have an excess of students they run a random lottery system - so any type of student theoretically can be enroll. Its likely, however, that students and families will be pre-selecting themselves in reality to a large degree. The students work incredibly hard, as do the staff, and are extended much more on a continual basis than you might expect in other public schools. However, this comes in a background of less overall breadth of opportunities. For example, sports and ESL and disabilities services would be catered for if students got to enroll, but are not 'givens' or extensive as part of school life. The school students accumulate a lot of community service hours as part of the school's focus and note that this is too a requirement of the IB programme. Funding is a continual issue for the school and they are not as well funded, in fact one of the poorest, as others in the public funding system. I liked the tennis ball idea on the scrapping chairs!