Another approach to Charters and facilities
Thursday, November 20, 2008Written by: Alexander Ooms
News of a school board moving beyond an initial adversarial approach to facilities and charter schools:
The district sponsored few charters and refused to lease empty schools to them even as many of its buildings stood empty. Still, other city charter schools thrived.
On Tuesday night, [city name] school board members heard a plan to sell three of the 12 schools the district has shuttered in recent years to charter schools. The district also intends to partner with the schools. Board members are expected to approve the agreements next week.
“For too long we said we would partner with charter schools, but it wasn’t real,” said board member Pam Costain.
The city above is not the New Orleans, Washington DC or New York, but (similar to Denver) a smaller district also in fly-over country: Minneapolis, MN, with 91 schools and 33,000 students. If a charter facility partnership can make it there, perhaps it can make it anywhere. Full article here.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:22 am
It sounds to me like Minneapolis is just about to start the same journey DPS will start. It remains to be seen if either will make it, here or there.
There seems to be little data showing that academic performance is enhanced by school sharing. There is still smaller data about the effect on students from a social perspective. It appears that all collocation really solves is a District’s need to manage cost, which is necessary in any organization. However, it is silly to act like collocation is any part of the solution to our education problems — unless you are a charter looking for better space in the community. It is nothing more than putting butts in chairs.
If we really wanted an education solution to butts in chairs, wouldn’t we look at creating quality schools that serve the needs of a wide distribution of our student population? Isn’t this DPS’s policy: a standardized curriculum based on differentiated teaching?
Of course, no parent wants to send children to under performing schools. The question that DPS seems afraid to ask is, why do many schools only serve under-performing students? I think it is a self fulfilling prophesy: the poorer a school performs, the more the better achieving students flee. This reduces student population at a school causing resources dry up, in turn driving out more students. Next DPS proposes a collocation plan to make greater use of the school’s space, driving more students from the school.
I know no one in Minneapolis. I have no idea what their situation is and really don’t care. What I care about is saving schools like Richel where students and teachers clearly care about their school, where some 30 students attended the school board meeting to fight for their school. No matter — DPS closed it anyway. Of course, these kids will get to finish in the Richel building, but the school will be gone next year, its culture washed away by a Math and Sciences academy and KIPP. It will only die a slower death.
So crow if you like, but collocation served no one, except a few charters, most of whom are run by white people “saving” brown kids. Michelle Moss knows what is best for our kids. The charters know what is best for our kids. The only people who do not know what is best for their kids is the parents, or so it would seem by Ms. Moss’ comments and the charter’s behavior. All of this may be well meaning, perhaps, but why were no parents standing up and crying out, “Give us more choice! We don’t want to drive, so put a charter in my neighborhood!” NIMBYism only exists when governments want to put a prison, landfill, rail bed, or transmission line in a neighborhood. This now seems to extend to charters, which should be telling us something very interesting about demand for these schools.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
There is a lot to touch on here. I certainly agree that facilities do little to influence academic performance (there are some great schools in really lousy buildings), but it is frankly very hard to find buildings that can serve as schools, and the financial and educational impact cannot be separated.
I do not defend the DPS process in closing Richel - the mistakes there are too numerous to list and I blame no one for anger at how that decision was made. However, I also do not defend the academic quality at far too many of our urban schools. Richel’s proficiency levels for 8th grade in 2008 were: Math 10%, Writing 16%, Reading 26%. That all of these are increases over previous years is more alarming (8th grade math proficiency was 3% in 2004) than reason to continue. In my view we are far too complacent with schools that consistently fail to prepare our kids. There is simply not enough anger over the hundreds of kids who have gone through Richel and whom have either dropped out of school or have graduated with barely enough skills to adapt to the modern workforce. The best measurement of any school is their graduates — absent from the supporters were number of graduates for whom Richel had been a success.
What colocation serves is the ability of parents to make their own choices about schools. This does “create quality schools that serve the needs of a wide distribution of our student population.” Next year parents will have several more choices of where to send their kids - it is exactly this option that Charters and co-location allow, and this frees parents from being told by anyone that they have to go to a school based on where they live. I agree that the decision to close a school should be divorced from the co-location process, but I don’t think one can (or should) argue that Richel is the best that its community deserves. Co-location is a good idea precisely because it lets parents make the decisions.
I would argue that true parent commitment is not standing up and shouting at a DPS meeting, it is voting with your feet, and most of the Charters looking for space-sharing have more kids who want to attend then they can accommodate. Richel was less than half-full — many of its parents have already expressed their opinion by their choices. It is precisely because so many parents believe that the limited choice of a failing neighborhood is insufficient that DPS has lost so many students.
The forgotten voice in this debate is not the family choosing between different flavors of public education, is it the kids whom public education has already failed. DPS has lots of these, and I commend them for recognizing that it is time for this to change.