Open Society Institute – Baltimore
Open Society Institute (OSI) – Baltimore : Audacious Thinking For Lasting Change
Our study of attendance in City Schools’ early grades resulted in a surprising discovery. Head Start students began kindergarten with better attendance than peers from City Schools pre-kindergarten. Not only that, they maintained a higher level of attendance through the end of third grade! That’s four years after leaving the program.
Expanding learning time and opportunities for students is not about adding something extra to the school day. It’s not about creating a program or one more initiative for a principal to manage. It’s about helping schools develop new ways of doing business by working in partnership with communities to make the most of all the great assets we’ve built up…
If you’ve heard more in the past year than ever before about the role that grit and resiliency play in student achievement, that might be “a response to No Child Left Behind and this narrow focus on standardized testing,” Angela Duckworth suggests.
Maryland’s public schools are among the nation’s finest, ranking at the top in numerous national studies. This is something to celebrate, because it means children are getting a running start to a successful future. Unfortunately, not every child has the same experience.
“Just because one blind hog may occasionally find an acorn does not mean many other blind hogs will,” Rep. Bart Gordon (R-Tenn.) famously observed on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in April 1994. “The same principle applies to giving Federal Pell grants to prisoners.” Gordon and a majority of both Democrats and […]
Baltimore is making progress in our schools with the help of new investment and much-needed reforms. We know, however, that our efforts to improve facilities and teacher performance can only be successful if every student is present and ready to learn.
A young man I have tutored for a few years recently got his GED. He left Baltimore City public schools in the fifth-grade. “Dropout” is not an appropriate description for a fifth-grader. Over a number of years he has spent time in juvenile detention, group homes, and the Baltimore City Detention Center. When I met […]
We lack a basic racial literacy in this country that would give us each a knowledge base to have intelligent and productive conversations with each other about race. We are not practiced in learning from one another across racial lines, or asking each other intelligent and well-informed questions about each others’ race-related experiences.
“So happy all my friends get to go to college!” This is what my daughter, a sophomore at Trinity College, texted me when it became clear, late on election night, that 58 percent of voters had approved the Maryland DREAM Act, which will help thousands of undocumented students access higher education in the state over the next several years. A rush of tears came to my eyes, surprising me. It was a mixture of parental pride, patriotism, and hope.
This August, Writers in Baltimore Schools held its first sleepaway writing camp, the weeklong Baltimore Young Writers Studio. We’ve held two-day writing studios in Baltimore before, but this year, we took fourteen kids between the ages of twelve to sixteen to the woods of western Maryland for an intensive writing experience. It was a homegrown project, staffed by local writers and Teach for America dynamos, and created in the image of the writing camp that perhaps changed the direction of my young life, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.
OSI-Baltimore has permanently closed. It has been our honor and privilege to partner with and serve the Baltimore community for the past 25 years.
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