The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is meeting in Gloucester this afternoon to hear from an independent consultant what options it has with regard to the charter it granted earlier this year for the proposed Gloucester Community Arts Charter School.
In an email reported here to the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester, Secretary of Education Paul Reville thanked Commissioner Chester for his felxibility in supporting this charter application since granting it would be a “tough but I think necessary pill to swallow.” Secretary Reville explained that granting this charter would be a “matter of positioning ourselves so that we can be viable to implement the rest of our agenda.”
The questions that have yet to be answered are :
We had a public reading of Secretary Reville’s email, accompanied by children chanting “Hey Mr. Paul Reville, we won’t take your bitter pill!” and “CSO [Charter School Office] said No Go!”
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p>Reporters from the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Globe are here.
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p>Commissioner Chester comes out to engage the protesters. He makes the point that in his opinion this was a good application. When I pose the three questions above, he does not have any answers.
I don’t like the idea of encouraging children to chant slogans or hold signs of messages they do not understand. (unless the “children” you refer to are high school age with some grasp of the issue and acting on their own, in which case I would have used the word “teenagers” because at least in my mind the word “children” conjures images of elementary age)
and I understood at age 8 that it was wrong to deny a person the right to rent an apartment or buy a home because of the color of their skin. A friend’s fifth grader told me a few years ago, “all they are doing at school is teaching us to take a test (MCAS).” I suspect the young people outside understood why they were there.
“That’s not fair” is a basic enough concept for a 4-year-old. I don’t even understand all the nuances of charter schools. I just know that I cringe when I see young kids with signs saying “God hates fags” or “No homosexuals allowed”. I feel like saying, “Listen, I doubt you can spell or pronounce ‘homosexual’; I sure has heck don’t want you parroting an opinion your bigoted parents taught you about it.” I still say teaching kids to chant slogans, no matter how benign or noble the cause, raises concerns in my mind, especially if no opportunity were given for someone to explain the other side of the argument to the kids.
and then there are other protests. I don’t see anything wrong with sharing my values, ideals and principles with my own children. I never felt any compunction to have “information neutrality” when it came to my kids. I don’t owe the “other side” anything, particularly if I disagree profoundly with the message.
…at least in part because I trust your values. On the other hand when I hear parents talk about homeschooling their kids in order to isolate them from facts regarding evolution or anything that might conflict with their religious beliefs that sympathy disappears rather quickly. Parents do not necessarily need to give equal time for the sake of their own children in every instance, but if it’s a broader organization then some balance might be in order.
You should get to know us here in Gloucester before you read too much into this. I know every kid and parent at that rally. Not one of them are political extremists. All of them send kids to public school and two teach or taught public school. The kids all have friends who’s parents are on the board of the charter school that we oppose, and they are still our friends as well. We maintain these friendships as much as their belief that establishing an expensive charter school in Gloucester has strained our relationships with them. Our kids are taught to and were expected to and did respect everyone there, but also to understand our positions on what having to pay millions for a school will only serve to exacerbate our educational problems rather than solve them.
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p>We are about as far from homeschooling Tea Party Rapture-happy nuts as you can get. They haven’t gotten to The Rapture at my kids hebrew school or the UU that some of the other kids belong to, for instance. Most of us work in technology, the arts, education not-for-profits and the natural sciences. As for Darwin, we have been reading a kids version of The Voyage of the Beagle to great success, my third grader knows what DNA does in a simple way and our favorite album currently is They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science.
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p>Please don’t compare us with the crazies. We didn’t paint a Hitler mustache on anybody. We didn’t make a sound during the hearing. We’re just trying to get an injustice [this completely baffling and politically motivated charter approval and funding process] redressed.
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p>Maybe I shouldn’t have worn my “Palin/Bachman 2012” t-shirt. Maybe that was the problem.
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p>KIDDING! SO VERY, VERY KIDDING!!!!! PLEASE UNDERSTAND I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THE PALIN BACHMAN THING!!!!
I’m in no way suggesting this is a battle between extremes. I’m just weary of participation by young kids in general, though on the other hand I guess it is a good lesson in civic engagement.
because their school is the one that will have its class size enlarged if the Charter goes through [this is undeniable]. This directly affects them. And it has nothing to do with crazy rev. Phelps stuff- the kids were instructed to be respectful and that there are differences of opinion, but our family believes that every child deserves an opportunity for a good education and not at the expense of any one else.
There’s an historical note about kids in protests. The civil rights marches in Birmingham Alabama were stalled for a considerable period, with only a small contingent of King’s local followers willing to answer King’s call for large scale civil disobiedience in the face of Bull Connor’s police. Eventually King convened a meeting in which a couple dozen kids stood up in response to his request for volunteers. They were told they weren’t old enough, and it was too dangerous. Rev. James Bevel famously asked, “Are they too young to go to segregated schools? Are they too young to be kept out of amusement parks? Are they too young to be refused a hamburger in a restaurant?…No…then they are not too young to want their freedom.”
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p>Our kids in Gloucester are not too young to go to a school where the auditorium is unavailable during or after a rain because of the leaking roof, or one where the playgrounds have been displaced by temp buildings housing the overflow after a school was closed to meet a starved school district budget. They can properly form a reasonably informed opinion of the value of the argument of Gloucester’s charter proponents–who say their schools are amply funded, and they’ll not miss the millions of dollars lost to pay for the charter.
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p>And I hope they learned in kindergarten the value of this administration’s argument, laid out by Paul Reville in his now notorious email, saying that their loss is justified by the administration’s political rewards.
Chair Maura Banta called the meeting to order. Nine of the Board members are present. Dana Mohler-Faria and Sandra Stotsky are not attending. This good attendance up here in Gloucester on a Saturday afternoon is not surprising.
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p>When the public hearing was held on the application in December of 2009, no Board member attended – even though a legal regulation calls for at least one board member to attend.
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p>At their next meeting, the Board voted retroactively to waive the requirement for attendance at the public hearing, citing regulation 603 CMR 1.03(2), which seems to pertain to the Board waiving requirements that apply to a charter school’s board of directors not the BESE itself (not to mention a fairly detailed list of requirements Board must satisfy to grant a waiver).
Attorney David Kerrigan gave the Board his opinion as to their options for proceeding should they wish to reconsider or revoke the granting of the school’s charter.
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p>He discussed procedural requirements under Massachusetts law as well as the standard by which elements of the original application could be considered “material misrepresentations”, one of the areas listed in the law for revoking a charter.
There has been some discussion of whether or not actions by the Board itself might constitute grounds for the Board to revoke the charter.
Gloucester Mayor Kirk, State Senator Tarr, Represenative Ferrante, and School Superintendent Farmer spoke about the process by which the charter was granted.
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p>Senator Tarr and Representative Ferrante focused on flaws in the process by which the charter was granted. Superintendent Farmer focused on both the process and shortcomings of the application itself.
Three members of the board of the proposed school speak, followed by their attorney. The attorney is the only one who squarely addresses the topic of today’s meeting,which is what are the Board’s options with regard to the decision they made to grant the charter earlier this year. He provides his perspective on the points made in Kerrigan’s report to the Board. The members of the school’s board speak primarily about why they want this school in Gloucester and the good they feel it will do for the students in the district.
Good citizen journalism….appreciate the hard work on a gorgeous Saturday…
I gained some additional appreciation for the hard work of journalists as I tried to do this modest bit of live blogging.
While the BESE framed the discussion as solely whether the board had the ability to revoke on the conditions of “material misrepresentations” in the application, the overriding concern to me is that a fundamentally flawed process brought the BESE to their flawed decision to grant the charter. If the steps taken to reach the final conclusion short-changed the process, then I would contend that that conclusion should be obviated.
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p>There was no board member at the public hearing in Gloucester — a requirement in the process. This “rule” was subsequently waived citing a provision whereby the applicants could request a waiver of a requirement having to do with their application, but not attendance of a board member at the hearing. Nothing in that provision indicates that the board can similarly waive it’s own rules.
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p>The Charter School Office reviewed the three finalists and concluded that NONE of them warranted approval — but that they should be encouraged to correct their deficiencies and reapply the following year. In the period between which Commissioner Chester received this “DO NOT RECOMMEND” recommendation from his professional staff and his recommendation to the BESE he had managed to turn around a negative recommendation to a positive which he transmitted to the BESE (without of course informing them of the opinions of the CSO). There are no minutes of any meetings or other documentation that tracks this transformative opinion, and no such allusion to the thought/decision making process was given to the Board prior to their vote.
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p>During this deliberative period (on Feb. 5th) Secretary Reville sends his now infamous email citing the need to approve at least one school during this round of applications: “Frankly, I’d rather fight for the kids in the Waltham situation, but it sounds like you can’t find a solid basis for standing behind that one. I’m not inclined to push Worcester, so that leaves Gloucester.”
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p>(full email at the bottom of the story at this link – http://www.gloucestertimes.com…
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p>During the debate prior to the vote at least one board member praised the professional and respected work of the CSO and cited it as a critical component of his decision making — and that he would vote YES on the Charter. Commissioner Chester made no effort to correct the member by indicating that in fact the CSO had judged this application unworthy.
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p>The BESE needs to recognize that allowing an unripe application to skirt through on a truncated and politically driven process is going to jeopardize the integrity of their future approvals. It is not weakness to admit mistakes were made and move to correct them. Simply turning the other cheek and promising not to let it happen again is not good enough.
When Chester came down to talk to the people holding signs, not only was he condescending, but he had like a huge hair sticking out of his nose. Dude, get a personal groomer.
it’s forcing on Gloucester, due to its perceived internal pressures.
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p>If these charters are that important to the state, fantastic, let’s get school choice, let’s see some ‘competition,’ and let’s see Beacon Hill stand up and pay for it. If it’s so damn important, surely Beacon Hill will be able to convince Massachusetts citizens to raise taxes or cut other state programs to pay for them, right?
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p>(I’ll believe it when I see it.)
The story on the first page of today’s Metro section of the Boston Globe is here. Secretary Reville continues to say that his email was part of a larger conversation, but the details of that larger conversation remain unclear. How did he decide he needed to approve one charter school application in order to please his “key moderate allies”, and how, even though he said he would “rather fight for the kids in Waltham”, did he make the choice of Gloucester over his home town of Worcester?
Quriltai on the Shore observes:
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