In my years of fisking Nick Coleman, it’s easy to pick his worst work.\u00a0 It’s his hackery immediately after the 35W bridge collapse.<\/p>\n
But if I could say anything for the guy over the years, it was this; he may have been a hack who was in bed with the local establishment, but at least he was his own <\/em>hack.<\/p>\n Nowadays?\u00a0 Ew.<\/p>\n His latest “column” at the Strib<\/a> lacks the one thing that distinguished Coleman; he’s apparently turned to slathering his own brand of incoherent, un-fact-checked, prejudicial, and almost-always wrong\u00a0bilge onto other peoples’ press releases.<\/p>\n Coleman attacks charter schools.\u00a0 Or, should we say, his masters at his current gig would seem to have told <\/em>him to attack charter schools.\u00a0 We may never know.<\/p>\n But that’s what he’s doing – and as usual with a Nick Coleman column, he’s full of it.<\/p>\n Back-to-school supplies are on sale and the annual report on schools that are not making adequate progress is due out any day (expect another rise in falling performance), so this is a good time to look at the performance of Minnesota’s charter school movement, which was going to lead us all into a bright 21st century for better, smarter public education.<\/p>\n Oops. Not doing so great there, either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Charter schools give parents a choice – and in the city, it’s a choice we’re taking by the thousands.<\/p>\n Which is, after all, the only reason private-school graduate Coleman cares.<\/p>\n Improving learning outcomes for students of color? Nope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, actually, yep<\/a>.<\/p>\n Outperforming traditional public schools on achievement tests? Nope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Actually, when you compare apples and apples<\/a>, yes.\u00a0 Remember – charter schools…:<\/p>\n But other than that…?<\/p>\n It would be easy to argue that the charter school movement has fallen flat, and I have said as much before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And we all know how reliable Coleman’s predictions have been<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the charter school crusade has grown too large and expensive to dismiss.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which is just absurd.\u00a0 Charter schools cost less per student <\/a>than the public schools.<\/p>\n Coleman is, of course, reading note-for-note for the MN2020 report on charter schools – which a slew of charter school supporters pretty roundly debunked <\/a>two months ago.\u00a0 In other words, he’s using out of date and inaccurate information in pursuit of an agenda<\/a>. That’s bad enough.<\/p>\n Next he swerves into just making things up:<\/p>\n It is eating into severely limited funding for education and has blurred the lines between church and state (and not just at one Muslim school, but among many charters loosely basing their educational approaches on religious values whose adherents think they should get public tax dollars to inculcate them).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Coleman is referring to Bill Cooper’s “Friends of Education” schools, which borrow many aspects of Catholic education without actually teaching Catholicism.\u00a0 Their results are, by the way, uniformly excellent; each and every one of the Friends of Education schools outperforms any public school district in the state (go here <\/a>and look up schools run by “Friends of Education”).<\/p>\n In the meantime, they’ve been in operation for years.\u00a0 If there had <\/em>been any violations of the Establishment Clause at any of them, in a state full of Nothing.<\/p>\n But Coleman Personal history<\/a>, perhaps?<\/p>\n More than that, charter schools have created a huge tax-supported playpen where entrepreneurial start-up schools have been loosely supervised and unscrutinized by education officials who are accountable to the approval or rejection of taxpayers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Leave aside Coleman’s clumsy shot at being a D-list Studs Terkel knockoff.\u00a0 Leave aside the blatant misinformation (charter schools are supervised by the same body that supervises public schools).\u00a0 Let me just ask Coleman, my fellow Saint Paul taxpayer; what “accountability” do you think the Saint Paul district has to you and I?\u00a0\u00a0 And if you say “the school board”, then you are obviously more comfortable with untrammeled, partisan, one-party systems than I am.<\/p>\n Minnesota was the first state to allow charter schools (in 1991), which were designed to overcome the limitations of an education system that had become a sacred cow. Today, you can’t find a holier cow than the charter school movement. Any questions can get you branded as a stooge for unionized teachers, big gummint and mandatory euthanasia for free thinkers. Guilty, guilty, hmmm … maybe!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If only there were a website <\/a>where I could just link to instant descriptions <\/a>of some of Nick Coleman’s lazier flights of rhetorical fancy.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it is clear that Minnesota’s charter schools (almost 150 of them now, with 28,000 students) are as much a part of our educational problem as they were supposed to be a solution. Many charters have been beset by management problems, undertrained staffs and a lack of adequate financial controls. The furor over TiZA, the troubled Muslim charter school in Inver Grove Heights, is only one example of a much broader mess: Too many charter schools do not get adequate oversight, especially from one system that works — elected school boards that answer to voters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And here, Coleman assumes that you either are completely unaware of reality, or is trying to make sure you stay that way.<\/p>\n What are the graduation rates at the Minneapolis and Saint Paul public school systems?\u00a0 Less than half.\u00a0 How about for minority students?\u00a0 Less than that. What do they cost?\u00a0 Vastly more than the state averages per student, and getting worse, and they’re both still <\/em>constantly on the brink of financial catastrophe and begging voters to pass supplemental levies (which charter schools never, ever get).<\/p>\n And who controls those systems?\u00a0 DFL and Teachers-Union-dominated elected school boards.\u00a0 The elected school boards have utterly failed, and still <\/em>fail to provide any faint shred of accountability<\/em>, much less rectifying the disaster in any way.<\/p>\n After nearly two decades of “experimenting,” charter schools need to be held to stricter financial controls, educational performance standards and public accountability. It is also past time to put a cap on the number of charter schools, and the present 150 is more than enough. The urgent need now is not for more charter schools, but better ones. And that requires shutting down the bad ones.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Excelent, Mr. Coleman.<\/p>\n Can we hold public schools to the same standard?<\/p>\n More than 80 percent of charter schools were found to have serious financial or management problems during 2007, according to a review of state records done by the liberal think tank Minnesota 2020. That group’s executive director, John Van Hecke, finds it ironic that charter schools, built on a promise to make education more responsive, have avoided the scrutiny traditional public schools must face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Quoting John Van Hecke?<\/p>\n\n
intrepid gumshoe reporters <\/strike>teachers union monkeys like Nick Coleman, I suspect we’d have heard about it.<\/p>\nsurely <\/strike>probably knows that. Why would he attack Friends of Education with nothing but a scabrous innuendo?<\/p>\n