St. Louis CofCC Blog

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The city’s first independent charter school opened in a weight-training gym, built on a local motivational after-school program.

A year later, founder Marshall Cohen bought a closed bank on Broadway, turned offices into classrooms, the lobby into a cafeteria and a vault into bathrooms.

Now, almost eight years later, Lift for Life Academy is more than unusual — it’s successful, too.

The school for sixth- through eighth-graders has grown from 60 students to 280 this year. Test scores show consistent, sometimes outstanding gains. And parents are slowly figuring it out.

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Lift for Life began in 2000 in its one-room Cass Avenue gym, among the burned-out brick, razor-wire and empty lots of the St. Louis Place neighborhood. They pushed weight equipment to the side. Bookshelves and filing cabinets separated classes. Cohen still can’t believe anyone agreed to attend.

(snip)

Now, while test scores aren’t nearly high enough to meet state goals, they are rising. The school’s black students — 95 percent of the student body — have surpassed St. Louis Public Schools scores in some areas.

(snip)

The school is far from perfect. An evaluation last year by a team from Southeast Missouri State took the middle school to task for more than a dozen issues — too few computers, no library catalog system, no music education program, no guidance counselor, little student-by-student test score analysis, no regular program evaluations, too few correctly certified teachers.

If you want to take this article on face value (which I don’t), then the P-D has neutered its own “education needs more money to succeed” argument.