- The costs of neighborhood schools
- Rocketship to build charter school on Anacostia hilltop [Rocketship PCS and AppleTree Early Learning PCS mentioned]
- Spoken Latin: A modern remedy for the nation’s age-old reading problems? [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
- The promise, and the limits, of tutoring
- How will charter schools deal with their corruption scandals?
The costs of neighborhood schools
The Washington Post
By Neerav Kingsland
August 8, 2014
The D.C. mayor’s office has recently released proposals for reworking the decades-old neighborhood school enrollment boundary system. The proposal labeled most “radical” would move the school system away from neighborhood zones toward a geographically broader school assignment process.
Though only 25 percent of D.C. public schoolchildren attend their neighborhood school, the potential move away from neighborhood schools has been met with much resistance. Connected to the concerns about District enrollment boundaries is the issue of charter schools — which now serve nearly half of public school students — and whose doors are open to all students and whose seats are allocated by lottery rather than geographic assignment. The District’s broadening of enrollment boundaries and expansion of charter schools could both reduce the number of neighborhood schools.
The desire for neighborhood schools is understandable. The phrase itself conjures up images of tight-knit communities with shared values — communities where teachers bond with students, kids play with their friends from down the street, and there is shared responsibility for the neighborhood’s children.
Advocates, therefore, worry that communities would be weakened if students from across the city enrolled in neighborhood schools. They worry about long early-morning commutes. And they worry about predictability: In severing the connection between property and school enrollment, buying a house would no longer guarantee access to a nearby school.
As one parent said recently in The Post, “Predictability is much greater than choice in terms of importance. That way you can plan.”
These are all reasonable desires. But neighborhood schools also have costs. For much of our nation’s history, neighborhood schools have been bastions of exclusion, not inclusion. And this exclusion persists to this day.
For every child who gets preferred access to a neighborhood school, there are many other children denied access to this same school. What is inclusive for one set of students is exclusive for a much larger set.
Historically, having neighborhood schools kept black students from learning alongside white students; poor students from attending school with wealthy students; immigrant students from studying with native-born students — and the list goes on.
A city of neighborhood schools is a city that says where you live determines which schools you can attend. The implications are clear: Poor families will not have access to the schools of the wealthy. In this sense, predictability is code for “I want school choice based on my ability to buy a house rather than school choice based on an equitable process.”
So how to balance the competing tensions of community and equity? In New Orleans, where I previously worked, we built a citywide enrollment system in which schools serving students in kindergarten through eighth grade can reserve 50 percent of their available seats for students living in an attendance zone. The other 50 percent of seats are open to students across the city. For high schools, all seats are open to all students. Is this a perfect solution? Probably not. But it honors the fact that families value both choice and geographic proximity.
Over the coming years, D.C. residents will have to decide how public they want their public schools to be. Will the public system really be multiple systems — one for Southeast and another for Northwest? Will it be a system where children have equal rights to attend all schools? Or will it be something in between?
How these questions are answered will be related to whether political leaders are vocal about the connection between neighborhood schools and inequity — and whether they are willing to do anything about it.
Rocketship to build charter school on Anacostia hilltop [Rocketship PCS and AppleTree Early Learning PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
August 10, 2014
The next outpost of one of the country’s best-known high-tech charter school chains will be on a wooded hilltop across the street from an aging public housing development in Anacostia.
School officials recently announced plans for Rocketship’s first D.C. school: A 54,000-square-foot, two-story building with a glass entrance, outdoor terrace, multiple play areas and nature trails. It is scheduled to open in the 2015-2016 school year.
“We have the opportunity to build a school unlike any other school anywhere in our network,” said Katy Venskus, the California-based nonprofit’s vice president for policy and growth development. “This will be our anchor in the D.C. region.”
Rocketship, which opened its first school in San Jose in 2007, quickly gained national attention for its low-cost, blended-learning approach and strong test scores for poor and minority students, who face some of the toughest learning challenges. The charter network earned support from many philanthropists and charter advocates, and it set ambitious goals for expansion.
But its model — which combines face-to-face instruction with computer-driven learning — also has stirred debate over using technology as a central aspect of academic curricula.
Last year, Rocketship saw test scores drop amid instructional changes and enrollment growth. Officials announced recently that they are dialing back some of their expansion plans and focusing on four regions, including the District, where the chain already has started to build.
Venskus said the organization has had difficulty navigating varying charter school regulations and environments.
The D.C. school will be the 12th for Rocketship. It runs nine schools in San Jose. It opened a school in Milwaukee a year ago, and it recently opened one in Nashville.
Rocketship’s D.C. campus will be across the street from Woodland Terrace, a public housing development operated by the D.C. Housing Authority. The school will be adjacent to green, hilly parks and around the corner from the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum and a recreation center. It will be the first elementary school in its network to offer preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds, and it might partner with AppleTree Early Learning to provide preschool instruction.
As in Rocketship’s other schools, the students in the District will spend 75 percent of the day in classrooms with licensed teachers and the rest of the day — about two hours — in learning labs with unlicensed tutors. Most of the lab time will be spent working on computers using adaptive software that challenges students at their individual ability levels. Some of the time will be used for physical education, arts or enrichment activities, Venskus said.
The computer-driven approach saves money on personnel and has helped boost scores, according to Rocketship officials.
But some say the reliance on technology instead of teachers is compromising quality. A report published in April from the left-leaning Education Policy Institute criticizes the Rocketship model for spending too little time on subjects beyond math and literacy and for not appealing to multiple learning styles.
Don Soifer, a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said he thinks that Rocketship will make “a valuable addition to the D.C. education market.” He traveled to California to visit Rocketship schools as part of the application process, and he said the “through-the-roof” test scores and the commitment to parental engagement impressed him.
Soifer said the computers give teachers useful information that helps them decide how to work best with each student.
The charter school board unanimously approved Rocketship’s application in early 2013, giving a green light to open two schools with 650 students each. If the schools perform well, Rocketship can continue to grow.
School officials expect to break ground on the new campus in October.
Barry Brinkley, Rocketship’s director of community development, has begun meeting with community organizations and knocking on neighbors’ doors to let them know about the new school and invite them to help design the front entrance of the building.
Juanita Britton, the longtime owner of the Anacostia Art Gallery & Boutique around the corner from the site, sold her property to make way for Rocketship. She said she had been approached multiple times during the past several years to sell.
“I was not just letting a developer come to develop something,” she said.
She changed her mind when she found out the land was going to be used as a Rocketship school. “I found it was going to be a school, a special kind of school. And I was happy to accept the deal.”
Spoken Latin: A modern remedy for the nation’s age-old reading problems? [Washington Latin PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
Frances Stead Sellers
August 8, 2014
There are some basic things to figure out before you agree to join a group of people who all speak a foreign language. Like how to say hello and how to tell them what your name is. A little online research reveals any number of e-phrasebooks to help you navigate those niceties in languages from Arabic to Zapotec.
So, iPhone in hand, you open a door and introduce yourself. “Salve,” you whisper to the first person you see. Emboldened, you speak up: “Nomen mihi est Francisca.” But then, before you can conjugate a deponent verb, a man sitting at a table begins discussing the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. In Latin.
Fluent (that’s from fluere, “to flow”) Latin.
Mellifluous Latin, even. Latin that flows like honey, mel.
“Stupefacta sum,” you mumble.
But that reaction, it turns out, is totally last century. Many forward-thinking educators, including several in Washington, are advocating “active Latin” — learning to converse in Latin, singing Latin songs and playing Latin games with students, and even designing immersion Latin curricula. They think kids should not only be able to read a dead language but also order lunch in it — including kids who are struggling to compose a grammatical sentence in English. Claudia Bezaka, world languages program coordinator for D.C. Public Schools, thinks Latin could “be a game changer, in terms of the literacy of the students.” Bezaka, who believes in integrating classical with contemporary language teaching, calls Latin “the great equalizer,” a tongue that children from diverse backgrounds can tackle on equal footing, ab initio. From the word go.
Think about that: taking an ancient language associated with the academic elite and reviving it as a remedy for the nation’s reading problems.
Richard Trogisch, principal of the School Without Walls in Northwest, has picked up Bezaka’s philosophy and run with it. Trogisch knows all the old arguments for learning Latin — that it helps with logical thinking, getting a better grasp of English grammar and vocabulary, conquering the SATs (and doing well in spelling bees).
Having seen its benefits in Europe and in other American schools, Trogisch made Latin a requirement for every one of the 310 kids — including special ed students — from pre-K through eighth grade at his Title I school. Last year, he hired two instructors to teach those children spoken Latin. (As Bezaka points out, you can’t teach preliterate children a purely written language, anyway. Bene dictum!)
“The kids in the preschool love Latin,” says Trogisch, and “react more positively than to Spanish,” which was taught before.
Four-year-old Theo Roy is one of the School Without Walls’s young cognoscenti of the classics. He knows that the lightning bolts in Washington’s summer skies come from the god Jupiter and has tips on how to outsmart a Gorgon (use a mirror). He tells his father, Chris Sondreal, the Latin words for farm animals like porcus and vacca (a clue to the critical role that cows played in the development of vaccines).
There are similar Latin language movements afoot in schools around Baltimore and in New York, Bezaka says.
It all goes a long way toward explaining why 35 people, several of them teachers from Washington and Virginia, are paying $300 to spend a week at Latin camp here at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. (or Luguvalium to this crowd, who use the Roman moniker for the British city of the same name). It explains why they have all signed a contract to speak only Latin all week. Why a similar camp about twice the size in Lexington, Ky., was oversubscribed this year. And why Justin Prinzbach, 27, one of the School Without Walls elementary teachers, is so hard to reach:
He has been at a retreat, known as Rusticatio Virginiana, at the Claymont Mansion in West Virginia, from which he sends an e-mail explaining he has spent a week “speaking nothing but Latin and going without any correspondence with family and friends to protect” what he calls “my ‘Latinity.’ ” During a recent tornado watch, Prinzbach says, the entire Claymont Latin-speaking community decamped to the mansion’s basement, where they rode out the storm together singing “A Pirate’s Life” in Latin. (“Io, ho, io, ho, vita piratica!”)
Ecce! On this, their first morning together, the Luguvalium Latin campers are gathering around to introduce themselves. They’re an oddly normal-looking group of men and women ranging in age from 17 (that’s Max, a rising senior at Arlington’s H-B Woodlawn) to, shall we say, senescent (from senex, “old man,” which probably isn’t too offensive to this crowd, since the Romans accorded their elders such respect).
The campers describe how they enjoy the simple pleasures of life. They like to cook (coquere), to garden (laborare in horto) and to sing (cantare). Among them, they have numerous dogs (canes) and several hens (gallinas). At least one is a beekeeper (apiarius); one grows broccoli (brassicam Italicam); and another grows maize (a noun that sends some scholars scrambling for their dictionaries, which shouldn’t be surprising, as corn’s ancient roots lie in the Americas, not Rome).
You can’t help wondering whether they really live such enviably simple, rustic lives or whether it’s just too hard to describe the drudgery of modern existence in Ciceronian prose. Think of all the neologisms needed to describe the innovations of our era, as well as the hours devoted to answering e-mail, the sweaty summer afternoons spent sitting in commuter traffic on an SUV’s leatherette seats, the telephone calls to the dishwasher repair worker, the battles to get kids to turn off their video games. ...
Not that Terence Tunberg, the professor from the University of Kentucky who runs this camp (as well as the one in Lexington), would have any more trouble with that than he would describing what’s for lunch (caro gallinacea panicello obvoluta and ius ex brassica Italica). Tunberg says he speaks Latin as easily as English “and not rarely more easily” — a construction that surely proves his point.
In the college cafeteria, the classicists mingle briefly with campers from the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth before tucking into their chicken wrap sandwiches and broccoli soup. As they eat, talk turns to existential issues.
Like, Why They Are Here.
They’ve signed away their rights to speak English because they believe in some version of the Bezaka-Trogisch philosophy: Speaking Latin will make them better Latin teachers, able to appeal to a wider group of students with a variety of learning styles; kids who learn to speak Latin will internalize the structure rather than seeing its syntax as a code to be deciphered.
And what’s the big deal anyway about the grammar method, which is only about 200 years old, asks Micah Willard, Latin teacher and athletic director at Chelsea Academy in Front Royal, Va. (Remember, these are people who measure time in millennia, not minutes.)
Once you view Latin as the key to understanding both English and the history of Western civilization, as Jan McGlennon, who teaches at Wilson High in the District, puts it, you begin to think we should all speak Latin all the time.
Until you realize that not everyone has bought into this particular pedagogical (that’s Greek, btw) modus operandi (and that, of course, is Latin). Back in Washington, Bill Clausen, head of the classics department at Washington Latin Public Charter School, attributes the success of the active Latin movement to several charismatic gurus (oops, slipping into Sanskrit now) like Tunberg. So while Clausen agrees that speaking Latin puts an extra arrow in a teacher’s quiver, he’s not convinced that teaching students to speak should be the ultimate goal, unless “you’re signing up to be the pope’s Latinist.”
Their movement, the active Latinists acknowledge, is small but “robust.” (That’s from robur, meaning “hard timber,” “strength” or “a kind of oak.” See how addictive the derivation game becomes?)
And their movement is growing, the Latin campers insist. Paul Perrot, who teaches at Potomac Falls High School, says that in Loudoun County, for example, schools have continued to offer Latin as the population expands.
Making teaching Latin a growth industry!
“If you are looking for a Latin job, one of the biggest questions now is, ‘Are you speaking it?’ ” Prinzbach says. “Four years ago, when I applied for a job, they didn’t even ask me.”
With 60 percent of English derived from Latin, the language echoes throughout our lives, emphasize two high school Latin teachers, Jane Brinley, from the School Without Walls, and Nora Kelley, Max’s mom, who has come from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington.
As if on cue, a counselor from the Hopkins camp, eager to make sure a morning lesson is remembered, leans across a lunch table, and calls out to a student.
And this is what he says, verbatim:
“Iterate,” he begins. “And reiterate,” he says again. At the risk of flogging an equum mortuum, that’s from iterare, the Latin verb for “to repeat.”
The promise, and the limits, of tutoring
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
August 7, 2014
Tutoring can be an effective way to bring a struggling reader up to grade level. But, as I discovered when I volunteered with one highly regarded tutoring program, it isn't always easy. And it may not be the whole solution to a problem that is at the root of the achievement gap.
If a child isn't reading on grade level by 3rd grade, chances are she'll never catch up. And in DC, only 23% of 4th-graders were reading on grade level according to national tests given in 2013.
One method that has been shown to work with at-risk readers is one-on-one tutoring. But it's expensive to have professional tutors work with all the students who need help. What about using volunteers?
According to a recent rigorous study, at least one program that uses volunteers actually works. Students got the equivalent of one-and-a-half to two months of additional growth in sight-word reading over the course of a school year, as compared to a control group. The study also found statistically significant results for comprehension and fluency.
The program, called Reading Partners, is active in 7 states and DC. It works with about 600 students in kindergarten through 5th grade in the District, and deploys about the same number of volunteers. This past school year I was one of them.
I decided to volunteer for two reasons. First and most obvious, I wanted to help a child in need. Second, I had learned from a previous tutoring experience how important it is to spend time in schools if you're interested in education, and especially if you're writing about it.
The challenge of Keisha
I suppose I imagined getting an adorable, bright-eyed child who would be grateful for the attention I was showering on her, and whose progress would be gratifyingly obvious.
I know there are many such kids, but instead I got a 4th-grader I'll call Keisha. When I first met Keisha in January, she sat as far from me as possible at the small table in the school's reading center where we met for 45 minutes every Tuesday, turning her chair to face away from me. She was quiet to the point of being unresponsive.
I thought she would warm up as she got to know me, but her behavior was unpredictable. One week she'd be bouncing off the wall and the next she'd be back inside her shell, refusing to answer my questions.
Thanks to a goal-setting system I devised with the help of the Reading Partners site administrator, things eventually got better. But the difficulty of reaching Keisha gave me some idea of what classroom teachers are up against.
I did everything I could think of to establish a rapport, including bringing her a small damp bag of moss to illustrate a vocabulary word that had stumped her. But nothing seemed to work.
I confess there were busy weeks when I was less than eager to make the 90-minute round-trip journey to Keisha's school. But I reminded myself that all kids deserve to learn, regardless of their level of cuteness. (And to be fair, there were times when even Keisha was pretty cute.)
A focus on skills, not content
The other problem, though, was that it wasn't always clear to me that Keisha was learning. To be sure, there were some aspects of the highly structured program that seemed valuable. I liked the fact that Keisha was writing, at least a little, about what she was reading. And reviewing vocabulary words several times over a period of weeks seemed like a good way to reinforce them.
But the Reading Partners approach, like much of education today, is focused on teaching discrete skills rather than fostering an appreciation for literature or conveying a particular body of knowledge. Over the course of about 6 months, we covered only 3 skills: Sequencing in Informational Text, Making Inferences, and Summarizing.
At each session, I would explain or review the relevant term and make sure Keisha understood it. When it was time for her to read, the protocol required me to interrupt her every page or two to ask her about Sequencing, or get her to Make an Inference, or Summarize.
That approach tends to take the joy out of reading, and I couldn't really blame Keisha when she seemed annoyed by my questions. I found myself wondering why we couldn't read a book all the way through and then go back and talk about it in a more natural way.
I also noticed Keisha's level of engagement varied with how much she liked what she was reading. Some books clearly grabbed her. But because she was only reading at a 2nd-grade level, she found others babyish.
"I'm in 4th grade!" she said disgustedly about one of them. "This isn't a 4th-grade book." She may have been behind in reading, but she was no dummy.
Tying tutoring to classroom work
More fundamentally, I wondered if it wouldn't have been more helpful for Keisha to spend time with a tutor working on the material she was actually supposed to be learning in class. That's the kind of tutoring affluent kids get, paid for by their parents.
Keisha might have been more responsive to that kind of tutoring, as well. Not only would we have avoided the "babyish" problem, but she might have seen a more direct connection between tutoring and her education. At one point she told me she really ought to be back in class, where she'd be learning something.
But no doubt it would be difficult, if not impossible, to engineer that individualized approach for a large-scale program that relies on volunteers.
But perhaps I accomplished more with Keisha than I thought. At the end of the school year, my Reading Partners site administrator sent me an excited email announcing that Keisha had made over a year of growth in her reading skills in the 6 months that I and another tutor worked with her. She was still about 18 months below her grade level, but she'd narrowed the gap by almost half a year.
I also got a handwritten note from Keisha that read: "Dear Ms. Natalie, I had Fun with you & I Love how you ask me great questions." It was accompanied by a drawing of the two of us.
I'm sure she wrote it because she was instructed to, but still, it made me tear up a bit. I've volunteered to tutor again next year, with Keisha if her schedule permits.
I don't know that tutoring is the whole answer to the problem of struggling readers. I suspect that the kind of tutoring Reading Partners does works best with younger children who are still learning the basics. For older children, I wonder if different classroom teaching methods are also needed.
But I'm not ready to give up on Keisha. And maybe Keisha's not the only one who learned something. It's possible that, with 6 months of experience under my belt, I'll be a better tutor.
How will charter schools deal with their corruption scandals?
The Washington Post
By Mark Palko
August 8, 2014
Charter schools were originally conceived as centers of experimentation and innovation where educators could try new approaches quickly on a small scale with a minimum of paperwork. Many charters have lived up to that promise, but that same openness that allows new ideas to flourish may also have left the sector vulnerable to a dangerous level of corruption.
For decades, Michigan and Florida have been on the cutting edge of shifting public education into the private sector. These policies were based on a deeply held and often explicitly stated belief that choice and market forces could net only solve education’s problems but could also alleviate much of the need for regulation.
Now recent investigations from the Detroit Free Press, South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, and the Florida League of Women Voters have painted a troubling picture of two out-of-control charter school systems.
Starting under the administrations of former governors John Engler and Jeb Bush, both Michigan and Florida have been early and enthusiastic backers of the charter school movement and have been particularly receptive to for-profit management companies. While many states prohibit full-service, for-profit companies from running charters, Michigan, and to a lesser extent Florida, has encouraged the model.
“Michigan has one of the least restrictive environments for charter schools in the entire nation,” said Casandra Ulbrich, vice president of the state Board of Education,” …“We basically opened the door to all types of different charter schools, most of which are run by for-profit management companies, and it’s led to a lot of issues, primarily … financial oversight and transparency.”
With 78.8 percent, Michigan is by far the leader in charter schools run by for-profit management companies (the rest of the top five are Missouri with 36.6 percent, Florida with 34 percent, Ohio with 30.6 percent and Arizona with 20.6 percent). Florida, however, may have gone even farther in opening the gates for would-be educational entrepreneurs.
From the Sun-Sentinel story:
State law requires local school districts to approve or deny new charters based solely on applications that outline their plans in areas including instruction, mission and budget. The statutes don’t address background checks on charter applicants. Because of the lack of guidelines, school officials in South Florida say, they do not conduct criminal screenings or examine candidates’ financial or educational pasts.
That means individuals with a history of failed schools, shaky personal finances or no experience running schools can open or operate charters.
“The law doesn’t limit who can open a charter school. If they can write a good application … it’s supposed to stand alone,” said Jim Pegg, director of the charter schools department for the Palm Beach County school district. “You’re approving an idea.”
This distrust of regulation is often explicitly stated in libertarian terms.
“I remembered Milton Friedman made what I thought then was a pretty bold statement. He said if we want to see meaningful change in public education, we’ve got to privatize it. His reasoning was that only through privatization comes competition, which drives up quality and drives down costs. Those are the two biggest challenges we had – and still have – in public education.”
J.C. Huizenga, chairman of National Heritage Academies, quoted in the Governor John Engler Center for Charter Schools’ commemorative publication: 15 Years of Transforming Public Education.
This faith in the ability of market forces to supplant regulation and oversight was so strong that lawmakers in both Michigan and Florida deliberately chose to forgo conventional oversight. Governor Engler made this point clear when he explained why, despite mounting scandals, the Michigan Department of Education does not need more authority over charters.
“The oversight is ultimately the parent, just like it has always been,” Engler said. “The parent moved if (the traditional school) wasn’t working, but that was limited economically. It’s a question that misses the broader point: What goes on in schools should be the focus. The whole focus should be on education. … The structural questions, frankly, are missing the point.”
This philosophy contributed to extraordinarily opaque systems in both Michigan and Florida. The Detroit Free Press reports:
Management companies insist — without much challenge from the state — that taxpayer money they receive to run a school, hire staff and pay suppliers is private, not subject to public disclosure.
Quisenberry, the president of the Michigan charter schools association, said school expenditures are “appropriately public” while “things that would be related to the company itself and its internal operations are appropriately private.”
Greg Lambert, an NHA representative, spelled out the company’s position to the board of the Detroit Enterprise Academy in 2010 when several members were demanding more transparency.
“Mr. Lambert stated that the public dollars became private when they were received by NHA. He further indicated that because NHA is a private company, the information need not be disclosed.”
The Sun Sentinel reports similar attitudes in Florida including this memorable exchange:
When [Katrina] Lunsford requested documentation for a $625 bank transaction on Sept. 25 from Dorothy Gay, the board president for the Palm Beach County school, Gay provided it — along with an indignant email:
“Let the record reflect the following, which I will make perfectly clear this one time only and never again question me about any ‘funds’ or state to me, ‘show documentation’…”
In Michigan, officials were voicing concerns over conflicts of interest as early as 1996, but it was not until 2012 that a law went into effect barring board members having relatives who work for or have a financial interest in the schools and their management companies. Even now, the law still allows management companies to do business with companies owned by the family of board members and school founders.
Not surprisingly, the Detroit Free Press investigation uncovered a large number of apparent abuses.
In one case, the president of a school’s management company and the husband of its top administrator bought a piece of property for $375,000 and less than a week later sold it to the school for $425,000. This appears to have been completely legal. The two men would also go on to collect millions in contracts from the school. This is not an isolated case. See here and here.
Cozy relations have also led to exorbitant compensation, including one case where a school with less than 500 students spent more than a half million dollars on its top school administrator’s severance package.
Michigan’s largest charter school management company, which also has extensive real estate holdings, charges the state so much in rent that it gets a 16 percent rate of return on its investment, roughly double the return for comparable commercial properties.
As John Chamberlin, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Michigan, said:
“When you say, ‘Line up here and you can scam the state,’ you shouldn’t be surprised if people line up and scam the state.”
In Florida, the League of Women Voters recently released a long list of conflict of interest concerns. Legislators cited included the chair of the Senate Education Committee, the House Budget chairman, the future House speaker and the sponsor of the Parent Trigger Bill.
The financial impact of all of these scandals has been significant, particularly in cash-strapped Michigan. However, the greatest damage done here may lie elsewhere.
Michigan has allowed a number of severely underperforming schools to continue operating for years. At least one school in the first percentile was recently renewed for yet another year.
In Florida, the problem appears to be less about schools that should be closed and more about schools that never should have been opened. Students frequently found themselves enrolled in new schools that lacked essentials ranging from basic supplies like soap and toilet paper, all the way to buildings and electricity. Some schools even started scheduling unauthorized field trips because they had no place to put their students.
Schools were often so badly managed they closed during the school year, disrupting the lives of their students and putting a strain on the public schools that took them.
“This isn’t just a regular business. This isn’t a restaurant that you just open up, you serve your food, people don’t like it, you close it and move on,” said Krystal Castellano, a former teacher at the now-closed Next Generation charter school. “This is education; this is students getting left in the middle of the year without a school to go to.”
The charter school systems of Florida and Michigan were set up under the explicit assumptions that choice and market forces could allow a massive government funded set of private companies to run with only minimal oversight and regulation. With Michigan’s public-policy experiment starting 20 years ago and Florida’s beginning not much later, it is time to start questioning the effectiveness of these policies and their cost to both taxpayers and, more importantly, to students.