Charter schools. Two words with associations that twist and turn. Here’s another look.
Teachers unions are most often against the charter school concept because from its first implementation in the early 1980’s, one of the objectives was to get around the obdurate stance of unions about student and teacher time, tenure, and accountability. If you’ve ever read the history of a teacher’s status-put up and shut up– until the time unions became a force, you understand how the ability to join together was a surprising victory. And not one for teachers to give up.
On the other hand, think about the editorial “Lessons From New Orleans” in The New York Times, 10-17-2011. After Hurricane Katrina, the schools in New Orleans, Louisiana, with the state’s Recovery School District legislation, benefitted from the chance to set up schools with longer hours and days of school; reform the teacher cadre into a more capable group of instructors; and bring in programs that were completely different from a failing curriculum that left students far behind children in other parts of the country. Using a charter school formula allowed those changes to occur quickly.
The charter school model set up in New Orleans took the best of the charter school goals to reform a school district. Many school districts use various charter school models to help “at risk” students and the schools have begun to turn around. Some even with teacher’s union collaboration, in Los Angeles for example.
But, the vision behind many schools in the League of Charter Schools is not as laudatory as that of a failing district picking itself up and pursuing change. As has been outlined in other posts on this blog (9/9/09; 1/29/10; 6/23/10), a conservative group who doesn’t want teachers unions to bargain with school boards, who wish to set up an admissions model that drops students and doesn’t accept others, and who still want to get money from the public school district is often the cadre that promotes the model.
For example, Bullis Charter School is located in Los Altos, California, a small, affluent, and supportive community with high-achieving students. The charter began at a time when the school population took a nose-dive and an elementary school had to be closed. Choosing the smallest school in the most affluent area of Los Altos Hills set up a huge confrontation.
Eventually, parents from the closed school applied to the district with a plan for a school at the closed site to be modeled on the charter school premise. The whole idea for the charter was to avoid sending children down the hill to school. After much controversy, the plan was denied and the parents went to the county Board of Education and got approval. The district, however, would not allow the school to form on the closed property and finally gave the coalition some property on a middle school site in the middle of Los Altos. Since then, the site in Los Altos Hills has re-opened as the school-age population rose again.
Just recently the County Board of Education, now with a different set of members with different views on the charter school, had another confrontation about an extension of the charter for an additional five years. The county board members brought up the issues of diversity, outreach, and an unaccountable charter school board, but voted to approve the extension without asking for changes.
The school has set up a different curriculum which the charter school community thinks is more suited to the students, all high-achieving. In fact, there is plenty of room for these students in the regular public schools which all have programs for exceptionally high-achieving students.
In New Orleans and other cities where charter schools are set up to provide an opportunity for low-income neighborhoods to reform when the public school district can’t or won’t, who would be against that attempt? If the charter is designed to use public taxes to provide a closed system for the chosen few, even the original charter school developers might conclude it’s a complicated plan to get away from a public school.