Edward M. Kennedy: “I will continue with some examples that were taken in the State of Minnesota, the charter schools, and a couple of…”

“I will continue with some examples that were taken in the State of Minnesota, the charter schools, and a couple of schools in Dade County. A number of efforts that they developed has been reported by Tom Toch in the U.S. News article. I had the opportunity to see these under Superintendent Fernandez, when he was the superintendent in Dade County. He has developed a whole program to promote teacher training and teachers' involvement. He reported that initially when they were hiring teachers, he had a choice of 1 out of 2 teachers to come down into the schools. When he finished the program, in terms of the teacher development, teacher support, and teacher training, he had the choice of 1 out of 7, and he was able to make a judgment and determination toward improving, in a very significant way, the quality of the teachers in the classroom, with all of the attendant implications in terms of students and parents. Once his program really developed, there was an increasing involvement of parents and, obviously, of the students. They participated in an experiment conducted by the teachers themselves, where both parents and students attended Saturday classes. It was made clear that participation was voluntary, and they thought that both parents and students would not want to come if the students had weak academic achievement. But instead, the classrooms were overcrowded.”