One of the conditions of the probation supplement was that the school create a plan to address the deficiencies in its special education program. Why these deficiencies exist is puzzling given that the schools founders had promoted the benefits of their proposed school for students with learning disabilities. The marketing rhetoric of one founder might have given some parents the impression of a Lourdes for the learning disabled. Another booster, a music teacher, went as far as to tell parents of prospective students that “a student who can square dance doesn’t have a learning disability”.
A correction plan has been submitted to the DESE for review. In it, the school offers parents whose children’s IEP’s are not being implemented properly a choice from the following menu:
1. Additional service hours will be offered this year through the hiring of an additional part-time
SPED teacher. The teacher will have a Masters Degree in Special Education.
2. A two-week summer program will be offered August 8-19 providing three hours of academic
services in ELA/Reading and Math with the provision of PT/OT support as needed.
3. Additional services will be made available during the 2011-2012 academic year.
Board minutes show that given their current financial state it will be hard, if not impossible, to implement that first option, and explain why they have failed to satisfy another significant requirement of the probation supplement.
On paper at least, the BESE had directed the school to hire a Director of Education (principal) by February 1, which they have failed to do. We’re told by the DESE that they tentatively plan to look at the status of this school again in March. Right now, though, they are too busy getting ready for Monday’s BESE meeting at which Commissioner Chester will recommend adding the supervision of 17 more charter schools to the Department’s workload.
Does getting our hands on Race to the Top money trump educational quality and justify corrupt decision making driven by gutless political pandering? At least one trustee of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School says an enthusiastic yes it does in his “Fact #5” about his school.
Human beings come in different models. On paper, at least, we value all the varieties of human beings – but in reality, we stigmatize anyone different.
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p>I think the movie The King’s Speech for show casing the reality that even in the elite, someone like Peter, the future king’s brother, was “hidden away”, as well as the struggles that the future King George VI had to over come.
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p>There was no charter school that could – or would – meet the needs my children had as elementary or secondary school students.
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p>How much potential is thrown away by the failure to provide the needed education for kids with as much potential as anyone else – but greater needs in terms of the kind of education needed to meet that potential in both “regular” and so-called “charter” schools.
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p>Again – give charter schools THEIR OWN LINE ITEM and eliminate the “us v. them” divide and conquer paradigmn – and fully fund restorative, specialized education.
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p>And oh yeah – go see The King’s Speech. You will walk out of that theater seeing the world and education in a whole different way.
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p>Like the royal who became George VI I too had those metal splints on both legs (they called them something different, braces I think) and suffered ostracism and worse. But that is part of another story – suffice it to say I find the Charter School myth a cop-out and yet another way to marginalize the folks who we wish to discard as children, while grooming the kids in the middle of the bell curve.
The brother you refer to as Peter was actually John, who suffered from epilepsy.
…and it was epilepsy per that extraordinary movie.
I can still get rather emotional about those elementary school days – and have not seen anything to love in the Charter School movement as it impacts any kid with challenges other than their families income.
I had a few when I originally posted. It’s hard not to be angry when you realize that Chester and Reville concealed the negative evaluation of this school’s application by the Charter School Office when Chester brought it to the BESE for approval.
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p>So you have the school’s marketing operation promoting the school to parents of children with learning disabilities, Chester and Reville knowing what the CSO had concluded in their evaluation, but ultimately deciding that to satisfy their “key moderate allies” and not be “permanently labelled as hostile [to charter schools]” they needed to give this school a charter.
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p>Now, while the school is unable to satisfy the requirements of the education plans of the students who have enrolled, one of their trustees brags in print about getting the charter because it helped Massachusetts win Race to the Top money.
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The black comedy of Gloucester Community Arts Charter School, with our DESE’s competence, political and otherwise on display, likely would not have happened with a charter school line item. Had it’s money come directly from state coffers, the worst that would have happened would have been disappointed parents who sent their children to it.
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p>Few of the “reasons” for charter schools have actually panned out. Their innovations haven’t pointed to anything particularly replicable on a large scale. Their competition with public schools hasn’t led to increased achievement. The only reasons for charter schools to exist are: 1) to offer city parents and alternative to terrible public schools 2) to offer experiences–such as intensive arts education (PVPA) or foreign language immersion.
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Neither the total cost, nor the cost per student, nor even performance are capable of competent tracking and evaluation without a separate breakout line item. That would serve EVERYONE’s interests: Students, taxpayers, educators, and private for profit charter school companies.
If the state didn’t take the money from the sending district, this would lead to an imbalance between richer and poorer communities. A richer community might pay 10% of the cost of educating a student, whereas a poor community might pay 30%. When a wealthy community loses a kid to a charter school, using a $10,000 example, that would result in $7,000 that could be spent on the other students. When a poor community loses a kid to a charter school, that would result in $1,000 that could be spent on the other students. This might turn into a perverse incentive, whereby wealthy communities encourage certain students to leave the school system for charters, simply to free up that kid’s marginal costs.
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p>Although I raised this in another post, it was late in the thread so I don’t think many commented — what about regionalizing all state charters, eliminating restrictions in both enrollment and placement? If charters are a grand experiment, the experiment is being undertaken on a limited population — public school kids in urban communities, affecting both those in the charters and those left behind. This might also provide some voluntary desegregation — because our schools are nearly as segregated today as they were in the 60’s and 70’s, maybe even more so. Maybe the funding could still be based on what is being spent in the sending district, which might provide some incentives for a regional charter to market themselves to kids in wealthier communities — and the improvement in school quality would provide the incentives for kids in poorer communities. Transportation might be problematic though, though not much more problematic than what occurs today (unless a regional charter was deliberately built in an exclusionary way, such as on the opposite side of town from a community that people want to exclude – hard to know intent though.
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p>Has anyone seen the information on the “innovation schools”? There was an article in the Springfield Republican describing them — the article wasn’t very well written (it made it sound like all the schools were “virtual” schools where kids stay home and learn), but it did provide a link to the state’s FAQ about them. They basically sound like a district-sponsored charter school, as opposed to the state-sponsored schools we now have.
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p>After writing this post, it occurs to me that a “competition-based” school paradigm is not particularly good, because it lends itself to perverse incentives — far more than the ones we already suffer through with community-based schooling (like steering, zoning, etc.)
Your post reminds me of two questions I like to ask from time to time.
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p>First, if charters are so good, just by virtue of being charters, why don’t we see more in our wealthier communities? Take a look at where the charters being handed out today are located. How did those people in more affluent districts get to be wealthier if they aren’t smart enough to capitalize on the magic of charters?
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p>Second, if there are districts that are “better districts” (my anecdotal observation is that when people talk about a “good” public school district it’s at the top, not the bottom of the income ladder), why can’t we replicate what they are doing “better” in the so called “underperforming” districts without using a charter school to do it?
I would consider the two Western MA “specialty” charters — Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter and Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter — to be geared more toward wealthier Western MA communities (Amherst, Northampton, other small rural-ish towns such as Belchertown, Hadley and Granby, communities once thought of as farm communities which have seen a surge in upscale developments). Are charters even allowed in wealthy communities though? I didn’t think they were.
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p>I am definitely skeptical on the concept of charters. That said, I can sympathize with the parents who support them and I can see they offer benefits to many people. I think they rise primarily out of dissatisfaction, and when you buy a house in a district with “good” schools, it is less likely you’re going to be dissatisfied. The dissatisfaction arises when you have no other practical choices for schooling, maybe because you can’t move for a variety of reasons.
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p>I think that they are being borne out of a seed that has a layer of viciousness around it. Their supporters include an alliance between an anti-public-education crowd that wants to dismantle public schools, a group of anti-union people who want to dismantle teacher unions, a group of general government privatizers, and a group of concerned parents who want to give their children a “better education” because they are constantly told that their kids can’t get that education where they live.
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p>I can definitely see that the charters are appealing mainly due to their segregationist nature. Mostly not racial segregation — though in Springfield we have charter schools that are pretty racially homogeneous. They are appealing because they offer parents who have been segregated out of communities with “good” schools an opportunity to get in on the action by segregating themselves from “others”.
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p>Keep in mind that Massachusetts schools are primarily based on economic and racial segregation, that is the primary motivation of parents, to school their kids with “like” peers, with a minimal amount of intrusion from “others”. I’m not saying it with quotes to suggest racism or codewords, it’s more to express the generic segregationist framework that people follow, involving many forms of segregation, such as separating the “education conscious” from the “others”, or in the case of the specialty charters, separating parents who want Chinese immersion or Performing Arts from the “others”. This is attractive because it gives more people the same opportunity for homogeneity that wealthy parents can “purchase” via their housing.
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p>The whole segregationist method is generally bad because it winds up concentrating a group of kids in one place, a group that are very difficult to educate, and even harder when they are concentrated. No one talks about these kids when talking about charters. On the other hand, I can see a benefit in homogeneity that is based on interests (science, arts, etc.), not on things like race or class.
I know that there is a population requirement. You must have a minimum 30,000 people in an area that will host a charter (charters can be regional). This is another disturbing aspect of what Chester and Reville have tried to do in Gloucester, where the population in the 2000 census was barely over that minimum, and may fall below it in 2010.
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p>As far as I know, there is nothing that would preclude a district from having a charter based on income or other wealth measure.
Can we stipulate the data that almost no child attending an inner-city, open-admissions traditional school will get a 4-year college degree, whether Boston or Chicago or Hartford?
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p>If no, let’s talk.
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p>If yes, then my question. What about a parent who simply wants a more challenging academic school, where the courses are similar (math English science history) but the effort and behavior standards are higher — such that their kid can be the first-in-family to succeed in college?
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p>I”m interested in the data. I wouldn’t be surprised — college graduation rates in the US are low and lowering, particularly among socioeconomic minorities.
In some ways, you’re describing Boston’s exam schools, aren’t you?
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p>Again, the main problem I see is that when you take all the high-performing kids from a school, that school is basically doomed. We have no solution on how to educate the left-behind kids other than opening up more charter slots. It’s clearly the wrong policy, and we’re just making matters worse in the public schools by intensifying their bad reputation and taking away funding.
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p>If the state had a plan to help those kids, and if the push for charters wasn’t being done hand-in-hand with the anti-union, anti-public-education crowd, I don’t think charters would bother me at all.
Charter schools, as with multinational financiers, use law when it is to their advantage, and ignore it when it is not.