Editor’s Note
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Archive for April 17th, 2009

The deseg suit and charter schools

9 comments April 17th, 2009

Question: What do charter schools have to do with the desegregation lawsuit that consumed the Rockford School District in the 1990s?

Answer: Charters are but the latest in a long string of last ditch solutions to an education system run aground because we refuse to upend the whole thing. And, charters are exactly like magnets and school choice, except maybe without so much union control.

Before I go any further, let me make this clear: This is not a indictment of individual teachers, professionals or classroom techniques. God love you for what you do under exceptionally trying situations.

Now, the but: But, for heaven sake, we’re using a 200-year-old model. Teacher in front of kids in desks. I don’t care if the desks are in open classrooms or traditional ones, or if it’s a one-room school or a 500-room school. The 1809 student could walk into the 2009 classroom and not be much disoriented.

We cling to our Backwheneye memories and refuse to do more than tweak our educational system. Back to deseg.

Remember the magnet schools and the school choice programs? Both were direct results of the deseg suit — and the loudest voices in town hated them. Magnets and choice were solutions to one problem: The traditional classroom wasn’t meeting the needs of today’s students.

We promised parents a choice of where to send their kids. To a school in a safe neighborhood where parents were engaged and teachers the best. We promised parents magnet schools that offered specialized curriculums for special gifts, interests and skills. We said magnets and choice would show the “public” schools how it was supposed to be done, forcing them to improve to the standards of the choice and magnet schools.

Sounds like all the charter school hype to me. One would think that if the idea of public schools that aren’t public schools is so good, then the magnets and choices should have worked. We ought to have jaw-dropping educational success. We don’t.

Because everyone of these solutions is premised on going outside and around the public school paradigm. Public schools don’t work, so create some new-fangled thing to function outside the existing structure. That’s nuts. Just nuts.

If we want public schools that work for today, it’s time for gut-wrenching, paradigm-shifting implosion. Rip the rug out from under administrative bureaucracies, unions, political patronage and PTOs.

Without a crisis, innovation will not occur. And, there’s been no crisis strong enough to shake the complacency out of the modern public school machine.

I’m cranky today and it shows. Maybe charters will be the miracle. I doubt it. They’re just one more in a long line of ideas that will fail because we refuse to deal with the weary, old, ineffective entitlement-mentality that is the core of today’s public school machine.