Wednesday, August 25, 2004
While In Paris
Wow, it was fun to write that. Each morning in Paris, while I waited for my 3 girls to be ready for breakfast, I sat in the hotel lobby and read the International Herald Tribune and USA Today. One day I saw a report the New York Times had printed a story about an American Federation of Teachers study that showed that charter schools students are falling behind in reading and math test scores compared to a similar population of traditional public school kids. I'm not worried.
Charter schools are start-up businesses. Any start-up business is going to have significant challenges in its early years of development. The William E. Doar Jr. Charter School was founded by experienced educators frustrated by the mistakes the had observed in other places they had taught. Although these fine people have lived through there own experiences of wrong turns and miscalculations we will still find that there are things we could have been done better once the school is opened in the September. Cesar Chavez, led by a Principal who was a D.C. public school administrator for 9 years, changed direction so many times that it may have looked to an objective observer that we didn't know what we were doing.
In fact, sometimes we admitted we didn't. The student population was so far behind academically and there were so many social and financial issues faced by our children that we were unprepared for how to fit our college prepatory curriculum to the reality of the situation.
The truly sad part about all of this is that we are learning how to best organize our schools with kids as the guinea pigs. This is one significant reason that vouchers are a better choice mechanism than charters. At least if a student receives a voucher her or she may have the opportunity to attend a school which has been around for awhile and has figured out how to be successful.
The other little secret about charters is that, like any business, there is a wide variety of quality in the marketplace. Some are going to be great, while others should have never been opened in the first place. For those of us who believe that competition holds the key (and it does) to improving public education then this spectrum of quality is not a major concern. Just like we know where to buy a television set we can figure out pretty quickly the best place to sent our children to be educated. The whole process is just a little messy in the beginning.
In today's New York Times, Samuel Freedman has an essay which mirrors most of these points.
PermaLink | 5:30 AM |
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Charter schools are start-up businesses. Any start-up business is going to have significant challenges in its early years of development. The William E. Doar Jr. Charter School was founded by experienced educators frustrated by the mistakes the had observed in other places they had taught. Although these fine people have lived through there own experiences of wrong turns and miscalculations we will still find that there are things we could have been done better once the school is opened in the September. Cesar Chavez, led by a Principal who was a D.C. public school administrator for 9 years, changed direction so many times that it may have looked to an objective observer that we didn't know what we were doing.
In fact, sometimes we admitted we didn't. The student population was so far behind academically and there were so many social and financial issues faced by our children that we were unprepared for how to fit our college prepatory curriculum to the reality of the situation.
The truly sad part about all of this is that we are learning how to best organize our schools with kids as the guinea pigs. This is one significant reason that vouchers are a better choice mechanism than charters. At least if a student receives a voucher her or she may have the opportunity to attend a school which has been around for awhile and has figured out how to be successful.
The other little secret about charters is that, like any business, there is a wide variety of quality in the marketplace. Some are going to be great, while others should have never been opened in the first place. For those of us who believe that competition holds the key (and it does) to improving public education then this spectrum of quality is not a major concern. Just like we know where to buy a television set we can figure out pretty quickly the best place to sent our children to be educated. The whole process is just a little messy in the beginning.
In today's New York Times, Samuel Freedman has an essay which mirrors most of these points.
PermaLink | 5:30 AM |
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