The morning weather was brisk – cool enough that I could see my breath when I reached the school just after 7 a.m. – but invigorating, too.

You can read more about the walk at Western Village and watch a video about it tomorrow on NewsOK.com.

In the meantime, I’d like to know: Did you walk to school growing up, and do you let your children walk now?

Wendy Kleinman
Education Reporter

But already, the list of nearly 200 Oklahoma students who are semifinalists in the 2009 National Merit Scholarship Program is out.

The 195 students are among 1,600 nationwide who will go on to compete for $35 million in college scholarships. About half will win, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.

I did a few breakdowns of the list of Oklahoma semifinalists:
   143 attend public schools.
   42 attend private schools.
   9 are homeschooled.
   1 goes to a charter school.

Three schools yielded more than 10 semifinalists:
   The Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, with 22.
   Jenks High School, with 14.
   Holland Hall School in Tulsa, with 13.

The students qualified by earning the highest scores among state test-takers on the 2007 Preliminary SAT exam.

The list of seniors will be narrowed down to a list of finalists before the scholarship winners are announced in the coming months.

Click here for a list of all the Sooner semifinalists.

Wendy Kleinman
Education Reporter

It’s also where one graduate of the Knowledge Is Power Program in Oklahoma City will head this month to continue her studies.

Alexis Walker was accepted to the school in Andover, Mass., which happens to be my husband’s hometown. He attended the town’s public high school, but he still showed me the boarding school from the outside during one of my visits.

A few interesting facts he shared with me about the campus: It’s where high-profile people like Presidents George W. Bush and John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick went to school. It’s also where Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe is buried.

Four of Walker’s classmates also were accepted to selective boarding schools, KIPP spokeswoman Mautra Jones said.

From left to right: Annetta O’Leru, Karice King, Kadijah Newton, Christian Walker and Alexis Walker.

They are:
-Annetta O’Leru, St. George’s in Newport, R.I.
-Karice King, Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill.
-Kadijah Newton, Chatham Hall in Chatham, Va.
-Christian Walker, The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn.

The students all received scholarships worth $35,000 or more per year to attend. Jones said 29 students have received almost $2.5 million in scholarships to boarding and private high schools since 2006 when KIPP graduated its first class.

Wendy Kleinman
Education Reporter

But there were still 4,708 students enrolled in charters here last year — more than 4,000 students to whom charters do matter.

That figure is according to the new Annual Survey of America’s Charter Schools by The Center for Education Reform.

Jeanne Allen, the center’s president, calls the results “educational for the uninitiated, solace for the skeptics and fodder for the fans.”

So whether you find this information to be educational, solace or fodder, here are some highlights:

• -There are 1.2 million students in about 4,100 charter schools nationwide. There are about 4,700 students in 15 charters in Oklahoma.
  -Demand is growing, based on the size of wait lists that grew 33 percent over the previous year. However, growth dipped for the first time ever due to caps in some states.
  -Charter schools operate with less public funding than regular schools.
  -About 40 percent of charters serve majority-minority populations.
  -A sampling of state data shows charter schools consistently outperform their conventional counterparts. (Locally, Dove Science Academy, a charter school in Oklahoma City, has the highest API score in the state.)

And while the report did not draw the conclusion that all schools should be able to close the racial achievement gap because charter schools are raising minorities’ performance, others have used this type of data to make that argument.

That thought reminded me of something a presenter said at the Hechinger Institute seminar I attended earlier this month in New York.

Professor Douglas Ready said that there is a selection bias in play, that the low-income, single-parent, minority children in the charter schools are not the same as the low-income, single-parent, minority children in traditional schools.

Their parents are in some way different in that they found reason and time to take a proactive stance in enrolling their children in such a school, Ready said.

Share your thoughts on charter schools in the comment section below.

Wendy Kleinman
Education Reporter