Oprah Winfrey's $40 ( or $50?) million school for girls, The Leadership Academy, opened last week and been receiving a great deal of positive press.

The acting head of this new school is Joan Countryman, formerly a math teacher and an administrator at Germantown Friends School, a Quaker school in Philadelphia. Germantown Friend's assistant head is Nomvuyo Mzamane, a native of South Africa. Ms. Mzamane will be

ABC reports:


Given such circumstances, a high-quality education alone may not be enough. Young adolescents who have faced such hardship often need considerable emotional and psychological support as well.

We're looking forward to reading more about this ambitious and incredibly generous project.

Read more at CNN, here, here, and here.

Bill Gates' foundation awards $6.9M to SF-based charter school
group

SAN FRANCISCO - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has showered a San Francisco-based charter school organization with $6.9 million — on top of $3.8 million granted three years ago — so they can continue to open new high schools that replicate its arts-and- technology model. Envision Schools, an educational nonprofit, opened  up its first charter in Marin County in 2003. In San Francisco, it  has two campuses: one in San Francisco's Ingleside district, City Arts and Technology High School, or CAT, which opened in the fall of 2004, and Metropolitan Arts and Technology High School, which opened its doors in Bernal Heights in the fall of 2005. Envision also opened a high school this year in Oakland. There are plans for four more Bay Area schools, according to Envision CEO Daniel McLaughlin, one in Hayward, one in Oakland and two other locations that have yet to be determined. Five other schools are also on the drawing board for other urban areas in the state, he said. One of the selling points for Envision schools is a focus on arts and technology, which are incorporated into all of the classes. (San Franscico Examiner)

The need is there. The resources have been allocated. But are there enough effective programs to meet the needs of children? This article from CNN reports on the $2.5 billion that is part of No Child Left Behind to support tutoring for children who attend schools that have not made progress for three steady years.   Federal estimate shows that only 233,000 of 1.4 million eligible children took advantage of free tutoring in the 2003-04 school year.