{"id":4903,"date":"2009-06-09T12:25:13","date_gmt":"2009-06-09T17:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4903"},"modified":"2009-08-11T06:14:06","modified_gmt":"2009-08-11T11:14:06","slug":"charter-schools-the-hit-is-out-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4903","title":{"rendered":"Charter Schools: The Hit Is Out (Part III)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Incompetence.<\/p>\n

It’s a big word which, when aimed at someone working in their chosen, professional field, is a big, ugly rhetorical cudgel.<\/p>\n

Basic rules of human behavior – tact, the Golden Rule, karma – bid one to use it sparingly; it should only be used when truly needed.<\/p>\n

Last week, we took an initial look at John Fitzgerald’s pro-forma hit piece on Charter Schools.\u00a0 In part II, I noted that Fitzgerald’s piece cherry-picked its territory, focusing on financials and ignoring the real reason charter schools exist – to provide parents a choice when public schools fail (as they are, more and more) and give students a better education.<\/p>\n

But what about the look at the financials?<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Before we dig into Fitzgerald’s piece, let’s take a walk through a typical charter school. Via my kids, I’ve been involved with three of them, by the way; via friends and their children, five more.<\/p>\n

Check out the building.\u00a0 It’s a rental; charter schools don’t get to float bonds to build buildings.\u00a0 In the inner city, it’s usually cheap office space;\u00a0 the four blocks around University and Fairview in Saint Paul are home to three or four of them in ragtag old office\/light industrial spaces; Skills for Tomorrow caters to inner-city parents; Avalon (featured in an MPR report a while ago) is a non-traditional program; a new German Immersion school started downstairs from Avalon this past year.\u00a0 All have fanatically loyal parents.\u00a0 Other charters are tucked into cheap space all over the place; the H’mong Charter is in a long-abandoned fitness club; one focusing on kids with big emotional problems is stuffed into an annex to a public health clinic on Arcade; an environmental charter and an online charter for the disabled are neighbors in old offices on Energy Park; Yinghua Chinese Immersion school is in an old office on Pierce Butler.\u00a0 None of them stand out like a typical high school, designed as they are for the glorification of the school board that commissioned them; all of them are “cost-effective” at best.<\/p>\n

Walk in the door.\u00a0 There might<\/em> be an Admin Assistant; he or she may or may not be getting paid (parent volunteers fill the role, often as not), or at a bigger school handles the full range of administrative scutwork, from the school’s logistics, administrative support, office management, fielding admissions calls, giving tests, serving as a de-facto school nurse…you name it.<\/p>\n

Ask to see the Principal.\u00a0 At a public school you’d have a choice; my kids’ last public elementary had a principal, a vice-principal who handled discipline and transportation issues, another that handled academics, plus a full-time secretary.\u00a0 Our charter will have one principal, maybe; it might be an on-site principal, who is usually splitting time between principal-ing and teaching; others work for the sponsoring organizations, and so are busy fundraising (because the tax allotment never covers everything that’s needed) and administering.<\/p>\n

Wanna talk to admissions?\u00a0 Leave a message.\u00a0 “Admissions” is often as not a teacher who’s covering the job in addition to teaching classes and running extracurriculars; at bigger schools, the receptionist\/office managewr\/Radar O’Reilly might hand out forms and file applications.\u00a0 Teachers rotate through all kinds of jobs, depending on their expertise or luck of the draw, from managing computer networks to running the library to handling paperwork.<\/p>\n

There are some specialists; special ed teachers (since they take public money, they need to handle special ed at some level or another) are common; “curriculum specialists”, less so.<\/p>\n

Every other adult in the building is a teacher, or an adult who’s volunteering to tutor, lead activities, or lend their own expertise to a class.\u00a0 Sometimes, one of them is an accountant, but that’d be a rarity.<\/p>\n

Compare this to any public school you’ve seen.\u00a0 Forget about comparing it with the headquarters building of a big school district like Saint Paul’s monolithic castle at 360 Colborne, six stories crammed with administrators, bureaucrats, meeting rooms, and people who do everything that school districts need and some things they don’t; logistics, planners, the school board and its staff, accountants, bookkeepers, public relations specialists, union and government\u00a0 relations staff, lawyers, curriculum wonks, a Superintendent and a bevy of assistant superintendents and their support staffs – indeed, people who do everything but<\/em> teach classes; you’ll find nary a student in that building during the work day.<\/p>\n

A charter school is “chartered” to a sponsoring organization by the city’s school board; it is, in essence, a three year contract to perform a service, teaching kids.\u00a0 It might be an organization with a social mission as diverse as the H’Mong, Afrocentric, Moslem or pseudo-Catholic groups that run schools; it might be a\u00a0 university Education department, like Hamline and\u00a0Concordia Universities, which run charter schools\u00a0almost like labs; it could be groups with an educational concept they want to further, as different as Nova (based on the classics) and\u00a0Skills for Tomorrow (focusing on\u00a0educating inner city kids).\u00a0 What they have in common is\u00a0that “teaching kids” is the thing that the school, and the limited staff it can afford once it pays its other bills, focuses on.<\/p>\n

You’ll scour the state’s charters schools long and hard to find a full-time accountant among ’em.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

So I read through\u00a0Fitzgerald’s piece<\/a> to find the “incompetence”\u00a0he cites not merely for individual schools, but for the charter school movement in general.<\/p>\n

Remember; the marquee points in his relase were:<\/p>\n

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