Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

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  1. So let me see if I read his email correctly — Keenan apparently recognizes the disaster that is the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School.

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    p>On one hand, their group is dedicated to opening as many charter schools as possible and they don’t want to be seen questioning the validity of any school regardless of the facts surrounding its dubious existence…

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    p>But on the other, support for it would seriously jeopardize the credibility of their pro-charter agenda because what they’d essentially be saying is that ANY charter, even one not approved by the CSO, that allegedly ignores the law and that is now in the cross hairs of the very person who previously championed it is better than no charter at all.

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    p>If Keenan is interested in maintaining any sense of credibility for his organization, he’d recognize that the GCACS is and will continue to be a millstone around his movement’s neck for as long as it exists.

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    p>If you want to push an agenda with credibility and integrity, there HAS to be a line over which you will not cross… I think the MCPSA has reached that threshold.

    • In this mail, Mr. Kenen surveys charter supporters from around the state to decide how his Mass Public Charter School Assocation (MPCSA) should respond to problems at the Gloucester charter school, problems including managerial incompetence, illegal bidding practices, open meeting law violations, covering up the resignations of key staff, failure to open on schedule, etc.  

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      p>Kenen appears to believe that the problems at the Gloucester charter are so bad that they complicate the MPCSA’s basic mission, which is to promote charter schools so as to grow MPCSA membership.

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      p>Here’s the question Kenen puts to his membership: what’s likely to help MPCSA grow membership more–i)lobbying to open the Gloucester charter despite its egregious problems and with the threat to charter credibity that its opening entails; or ii) lobbying to close it so as to acquire credibility as an organization genuinely concerned with eduational reform?  Evidently, this is a really tough question for MPCSA.

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      p>The coming of a charter to Gloucester will be a defining moment in the lives of public school families.  Some parents (not many) feel pleasure at the prospect.  Some (a lot) fear it, since the opening of a charter school in Gloucester is likely to require the restructuring or consolidation of the city’s neighborhood elementary schools, increased class size, and so forth.  

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      p>In this context, the charter lobby is complacently polling its state-wide membership–all of whom know or care little about Glocuester schools–with the avowed aim of deciding the question for us, in a way that best assures growth in  MPCSA membership.

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      p>It’s like our city is on a kind of reality TV, a game of educational Survivor, and we’re waiting for the invisible Fox News audience to decide if we’ve been selected to keep our school system intact.  Except the audience hasn’t been paying attention to the program, is voting on their preference for hair styles, and couldn’t care less how our lives are changed by their votes.

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      p>When the results are in, Kenen will once again be on the phone with Sec. Reville giving him the group’s demands for Gloucester schools, based on his polling data.

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      p>I hope the charter lobby elects to do the right thing and urges closure of this failing charter. Eventually, I’d hope that the MPCSA would mature into an organization that understood that sustainable educational innovation requires some old-time values–integrity, credibility–that are not to be voted up or down by the TV audience.

      • only what you read/ hear in the news.  But we’d love to know what you think about the situation and how we should respond…. “

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        p>What a wonderful poll it is.

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        p>As with Reville’s email, every sentence is just so rich.  It truly speaks for itself.

  2. Well, well. Should we support a charter that is proving it has no merit, or should we back the Commissioner who pushed a charter that had been rejected by the CSO because they found it had no merit to begin with?

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    p>Should we look as if we have integrity, or look as if we have solidarity?

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    p>Should we go to the mat for a group that may make the whole movement look ridiculous (wrong tense, but never mind), or cut them loose and be called hypocrites for having said they had every right to press forward against the big bad public school crowd, no matter what and by whatever means available?

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    p>Hmmm. Unlike Chester, whose neck very much depends on who is elected in November, the MCPSA is supported by zealots in both parties and does not really have to worry about staying alive, as long as the anti-union guys are attached to charters as virtual Vouchers in Birkenstocks.

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    p>Difficult bedfellows, but crucial.

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    p>However, like Chester, the MCPSA’s fingerprints are all over the birth and delivery of this boondoggle to a city quite enraged enough on both sides right now to reunite, like Scottish clans of yore, to bash England’s guts out no matter what happens next. That is to say, England being anyone or any office with the word Massachusetts in front of it.

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    p>I do sympathize. But I also remember Keenan addressing us at Gloucester City Hall as if he had been sent by Zeus to tame the inferior and oh so irrelevant savages who dared oppose him and his pompous agenda, and so I am inclined to say,

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    p>See you in the funny papers, scrambling out of this one. Well done and just desserts.

    • Yes, I remember him at City Hall.  The state legislature came to Gloucester to investigate the process by which this charter had been granted.  This was after it had come to light that the proposed school in Gloucester had been rejected by the Charter School Office, but before Sec. Reville’s now famous email had been uncovered by the press. and before the Attorney General started looking into the no-bid contracts awarded by the school.

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      p>Mr. Keenan gave us a speech about the wonders and miracles of charter schools, but as I recall he had little or nothing to say about the actual topic of the hearing.  He just used it as an opportunity to promote his view of charter schools.

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      p>The meeting was on You Tube. I don’t know if it’s still there.

  3. The clearer your your disingenuousness, the better it will be for those of us who see education as a mission, not an economic opportunity.

  4. So, here is evidence, once again, that the substance of what any particular charter might offer is immaterial; it is the pushing of charters as a concept, across all barriers that may arise and beyond any taint of wrongdoing, that is the underlying value.

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    p>Not children.

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    p>In this particular case–let’s speak only of the children for a moment–they are nearly a month late going to school at all. The school is under threat of closure from many directions, not simply Chester’s decision that it is not viable. That closure could come in a couple of weeks, 60 days, or, at the outside, when the judge rules on the injunction for next year’s funding, sometime shortly after Christmas.

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    p>Following closure, the kids whose parents elect to re-enroll are placed back into their original schools–some of which their parents have trashed so thoroughly and publicly that any respect for a teacher or administrator by that returning child is bound to be, shall we say, iffy–having missed many many “units” of study among their classmates. Not to mention, seating time and play time and team building time.

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    p>And, though the kids already in the GPS whose schools must absorb the charter kids back have long since been considered irrelevant by outfits like the MCPSA, they too will experience disruption. They have heard and seen their schools and teachers trashed on TV and in the papers; they have heard and seen their parents called all sorts of names for speaking out in defense of the public schools.

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    p>Essentially, they’ve heard their schools blamed for most of the evils of mankind over the last two years, and this particular charter, which can’t find its way through either a Charter Handbook or an Open Meeting Law after 19 months under obligation to both, as the single salvation to all their ills.

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    p>Sorry. This charter was born among affluent parents with a beef at an exemplary elementary school; it was born in spite, has evolved in spite, and nearly every single one of its problems right now have arisen as a result of that spite combined with utter ineptitude as managers and leaders of anything but, well, spite. That, I will give them, they have raised to new levels. All else has collapsed.

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    p>If you look into this entire debacle back to its inception, and still think it’s worthy of any political support whatsoever, I hope you realize it will be the MCPSA that remains tainted well beyond the fight. Forty applications that may or may not deserve your energy instead are likely to be affected by your choice.

    • that come MCAS, the public schools that have only recently gotten the charter kids back are going to have those kids’ “I just got here” scores under their names.

  5. I’m not surprised in the least that the Globe – one of the key moderate allies that the Patrick administration feared angering — wrote in favor of keeping open the misbegotten GCACS — but their reasoning is really beyond belief:

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    p>”THE FOUNDING of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School has been a mess by any standard, but the state would disserve students if it closed the school down. The Patrick administration mishandled the approval process for the school last year. And the school hurt itself more recently by violating Massachusetts bidding laws during construction. Now, officials are mulling whether to keep the school open or revoke its charter.
    “http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2010/09/25/keep_this_charter_going/

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    p>They acknowledge in the opening graf that the approval was a mess. That the Patrick administration mishandled the approval process and the school is under scrutiny for violations of bidding law… AND YET they persist that the kids will suffer therefor keep the beast alive.

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    p>They ignore that it was the incompetence of the GCA Board in not getting a contingency plan in place for opening when it was widely known their construction schedule was beyond ambitious. It ignores that it was the parents keeping their children out of school for the past month based on the daily and weekly promises that they’d be open tomorrow… or the next day… or soon…

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    p>It ignores that a school that failed its review process, was pushed through to satisfy a political agenda (not on merit), that had 19-months to get its act together, will, if allowed to continue, draw $millions of critical funding to the rest of Gloucester’s small school district. This will harm the education quality for THOUSANDS of children, not scores… Thousands… and yet the Globe chooses this as the proper solution?

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    p>This has become the poster child for all that is wrong with the charter movement. Shut the school down and end this charade.  

    • So, if I rob a bank, and manage to build myself a nice house with the money before they catch up with me, and my family is enjoying life in that house, we should just let bygones be bygones?  That seems to be the reasoning behind the Globe’s editorial.

  6. Charter schools are the only hope for inner city kids trapped in a bad system.   I think that it is a sad commentary that every road block seems to be thrown up to prevent more opportunity for the kids who need the option the most

    • Would you consider getting a negative recommendation from the Charter School Office a roadblock?
      Would you consider the Secretary of Education pushing a failed application for the purposes of a broader political agenda a roadblock?
      Would you consider the violation of laws, rules, regulations and common sense a roadblock?

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      p>However you feel about charters, the GCACS situation is rife with problems and should never have been allowed to fester to this point. I’m personally opposed to the idea of only trying to help a few at the expense of many and would prefer our leadership focus on the issues facing public school education. But even IF you approve of the concept, you can’t possibly suggest that any charter, even one as ill conceived and executed as this one, is better than no charter.

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      p>Allowing the GCACS to exist after this cumulative absurdity damages the credibility of the entire charter movement…  By the way — if you look at the MCAS tables you will find that there are charter schools at both the top and the bottom of the list. Some charters work, some charters don’t, most do exactly what the district schools do…. that’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

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      p>After the cheating scandal of the Springfield charter, I have to wonder how often this has happened in other charter schools without being detected?  

        • To be fair, Gloucester does in fact have a serious issue with poverty and other inner city issues – most of which are disguised by the bucolic seaside exterior. BUT that being said, this school was never born out of a desire to reach that population, rather that was a development that emerged when they realized they weren’t getting the expected response from their intended audience. The size of Gloucester’s district ensures that the funding drain from the charter school will exacerbate even more the issues facing our most at risk school.  

    • I would recommend that you look at how the charter for this school was granted before you complain about roadblocks.

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      p>Read Reville’s midnight email to Chester.  They sure don’t sound like two guys throwing up a roadblock to this school.

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      p>What’s sad is that some people can only respond to criticism of the process in this case with broad generalizations about how good charter schools are.

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