Asheville City Schools offers a slideshow look at its students, programs, spending

Posted on by Jeff Fobes

Asheville City Schools recently prepared a slideshow looking at its student population, ethnicity, budget, achievement levels, achievement gap, how poverty correlates with learning levels, the effects of state cutbacks, strategies for improvement, plans for the future, hiring policies and improving digital literacy, including goal of placing a laptop compuiter in the hands of every student.

A couple highlights:
• Research shows that there’s no learning gap at age 1, but by age 3, low-income kids have fallen behind others.

• Low icome kids may out-learn high-income kids during the school year, but during the summer they fall behind. Virtually all the advantage that wealthy kids have over low-income kids is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.

Asheville City Schools Vision/Goals for 21st Century Schools

The presentation was prepared by Asheville City Schools for CIBO, the Council of Independent Business Owners

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About Jeff Fobes
As a long-time proponent of media for social change, my early activities included coordinating the creation of a small community FM radio station to serve a poor section of St. Louis, Mo. In the 1980s I served as the editor of the "futurist" newsletter of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, a professional/academic group with a global focus and a mandate to act locally. During that time, I was impressed by a journalism experiment in Mississippi, in which a newspaper reporter spent a year in a small town covering how global activities impacted local events (e.g., literacy programs in Asia drove up the price of pulpwood; soybean demand in China impacted local soybean prices). Taking a cue from the Mississippi journalism experiment, I offered to help the local Green Party in western North Carolina start its own newspaper, which published under the name Green Line. Eventually the local party turned Green Line over to me, giving Asheville-area readers an independent, locally focused news source that was driven by global concerns. Over the years the monthly grew, until it morphed into the weekly Mountain Xpress in 1994. I've been its publisher since the beginning. Mountain Xpress' mission is to promote grassroots democracy (of any political persuasion) by serving the area's most active, thoughtful readers. Consider Xpress as an experiment to see if such a media operation can promote a healthy, democratic and wise community. In addition to print, today's rapidly evolving Web technosphere offers a grand opportunity to see how an interactive global information network impacts a local community when the network includes a locally focused media outlet whose aim is promote thoughtful citizen activism. Follow me @fobes
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3 thoughts on “Asheville City Schools offers a slideshow look at its students, programs, spending”

  1. Jake

    Thank you for posting this slide show. I was not invited to the CIBO presentation, do not have school-age children, and am generally unfamilair with particulars about Asheville City Schools, so I would not have seen this were it not for your posting it. I found this fairly informative. Thanks!

  2. sharpleycladd

    ACS did an great service to my family. Two kids kindergarten to high school diploma, several great teachers, a scholarship from the ACS foundation, and very, very few hassles overall. I really appreciate what the city schools do.

  3. boatrocker

    This month’s “Smithsonian” has an interesting article about schools in Finland that kick ass. Zero standardized testing, shorter school days, less money spent per student and yet they still crank out smart kids.

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