Shouldn’t the goal in Georgia be good schools, charter or not?
I had lunch today with a former colleague who now does a lot of work for Republican legislators in the state. Her greeting to me was, “You are the only person in the state who does not like charter schools.”
Charter students from around metro Atlanta attended a downtown rally Friday. John Spink/AJC
She was referring to a column I wrote for the Monday education page in the print AJC. I explained to her that I like good schools, charter or not, but that I felt the General Assembly had talked about nothing but charter schools for two years to the detriment of more effective reform models.
Here is what I wrote.
Ever go to a movie where all the other viewers left the theater raving about the film except you? Somehow, they all saw something extraordinary in the movie that eluded you.
That’s how I felt Friday at the Capitol as I watched at least 1,500 students, parents and politicians celebrate charter schools and demand more of them.
“I want to say to the legislators who have not been supportive of charter schools that I wish you saw this sea of faces of children in charter schools,” said state Rep. Alisha Morgan (D-Austell), noting that charters now enroll 60,000 students in Georgia.
My response to Morgan and to other lawmakers at the rally: What are you doing to improve the education of the 1.6 million Georgia children who are not in charter schools?
Why aren’t we talking about improving teacher quality, expanding early childhood education and enhancing math and science performance for students, whether they attend charters or traditional schools?I applaud charter schools, which are tax-funded public schools that operate independently of many state and central office dictates in exchange for promises of enhanced student performance.
And, certainly, there’s room for many more charters in Georgia than the 122 now operating. But there’s no magic in a charter school that conjures higher test scores or better-prepared students.
Top charters succeed for the same reasons that top traditional public schools do: Visionary principals, committed and competent teachers, adequate funding, relevant curriculum and involved parents.
That’s what we should rally for at the Capitol — especially the adequate funding considering the deep cuts to education over the last two years.
Charter school legislation dominated the last two sessions of the General Assembly, eclipsing any discussion of more meaningful and consequential reforms, such as teacher quality.
The Legislature has adopted a strategy of renaming schools rather than reforming them, and it’s sticking to it.
Because it’s easier than doing the hard work of true reform.
We could designate every school in Georgia a charter school today, grant them greater flexibility and still end up with dismal results. If the formula for school transformations were that simple, Ohio would be No. 1 in the country.
Ohio showed an out-sized faith when it began allowing charters in 1998, haphazardly approving 328. However, Ohio imposed a moratorium and tightened oversight on its charters schools in 2005 after more than half earned a D or an F on the state report card.
Now, if an Ohio charter school fails two years out of any three — after a two-year starting period — it has to close. (The state is now considering a bill that would remove some of obstacles to charters in the wake of the U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan call for more “high-quality” charters.)
In its unbridled zeal for charter schools, Georgia’s Legislature enacted a law last year that allows an appointed state commission to approve charters over the protests of the local boards of education and to direct local taxes to the charter.
The appointed commission has no accountability to local voters for its actions, although it confiscates local funds. Arguing that the law usurps their constitutional powers, many school boards are now suing the state.
Understandably, charter schools want to keep those local dollars coming, which was the main reason for the rally. Before the enactment of House Bill 881, if a charter-school application was rejected at the local level but approved by the state, it could collect only state dollars. Now, it gets all the money.
“The districts that are suing care more about dollar signs than children,” Morgan said. “It’s about color, not black-and-white color. It’s about the almighty green dollar.”
Interestingly, a General Assembly that complains when federal government meddles in its business had no qualms about hijacking local decision-making and local money.
The Legislature’s defense for its pre-emption is that it’s not the school board’s money to withhold from charter schools. It’s the parent’s money.
I have had four children in public schools. My taxes — as high as they are in my town — covered only two months of my children’s schooling each year. It’s the community’s money that underwrites public education, and the community elects a school board to decide how to spend that money.
I am not going to argue that school boards act responsibly or even rationally with budgets, but the solution is not to turn the reins over to politicians in Atlanta. If residents want more charter schools, they ought to storm school board meetings and demand them.
If the state Legislature feels so strongly about a charter school application that it wants to overrule a local school board, it ought to fund the school fully out of state money rather than snatch up local dollars.
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17 comments Add your comment
Sue Jenkins
November 9th, 2009
4:05 pm
It does not matter how much money is spent trying to improve schools. They are never going to improve until the students are no longer allowed to be in charge. The schools with the worse performance are the ones where the discpline is out of controll. I am constantly amazed that the teachers are continuing to go to work each day and put up with the rude behavior of so many of the students. I taught my children that they went to school for one reason and that was to learn. Two of my boys tried missbehaving in class and making Fs and I withdrew them and homeschooled them for five months each. After the 2nd day, they were begging to be allowed to go back to school because I was not going to put up with the rude behavior and they knew it. They soon brought their grades back up to As and Bs and were allowed to return. The schools never had any more problems with them.
Shouldn't the goal in Georgia be good schools, charter or not … | Georgia Today
November 9th, 2009
5:41 pm
[...] See the original post here: Shouldn't the goal in Georgia be good schools, charter or not … [...]
catlady
November 9th, 2009
6:12 pm
Discipline is key. Charter schools benefit from “buy in” that helps them get parent involvement, which translates into better discipline.
Second is an administrator that values learning over paperwork. A good administrator protects the teachers from the cure du jour, parent and CO administrator nitpicking, and uses the wealth of his/her actual classroom experience, which should be recent and extensive.
Third place goes to student ability and teacher talent.
Annette
November 9th, 2009
6:48 pm
The writer of this column has obviously never tried to propose a new idea to a local board. Try it, and then write another column on this subject. Without outside legislative intervention, some school districts would not allow integration. In fact, change has primarily come to public schools from legal amd legislative means.
Old School
November 9th, 2009
6:49 pm
Until we start to make significant and meaningful changes from the bottom up instead of the top down, nothing will improve. Teacher morale will be in the toilet, administrators will shuffle data to keep the pols happy, parents will demand change without a significant number stepping up to help, fine arts and recess will be cut, vocational programs will still be the dumping ground, and the inmates will STILL be running the asylum.
But we’ll always have football.
clyde
November 9th, 2009
6:54 pm
Keeping charter schools away from local boards of education seems like a good idea to me.If you want them to succeed. Taking my tax dollars to run two school systems in the same place seems a bit counterproductive to me though.We only need one public school system,and I don’t care if it’s chartered or decorated with polka dots.At that system we need accountability to the public that’s paying the bills.At that system we need to create a place where it’s possible to teach children.We need discipline.We need to permanently remove students that are causing problems,then we need to decide what to do with these problem students.
TW
November 9th, 2009
7:30 pm
An educated electorate would mean the death of the GOP.
They know exactly what they’re doing when they turn their back on public school. At least some of them, like Chip Rogers, admit it by sending their own to private school and stripping the public schools of all the funding he can – check the record.
Keeping a great part of this country ignorant allows them to keep funneling our tax dollars to their own selfish concerns.
Ever notice the test scores in the red states? I rest my case.
Veteran teacher, 2
November 9th, 2009
9:42 pm
Clyde, please understand that removed students count AGAINST the school in the crazy No Child Left Behind Statistics. I assure you that most of the kids you refer to were not around until we got NCLB. What are we all doing to get rid of NCLB??
Jennifer
November 10th, 2009
8:03 am
The goal should be better schools – all the way around. Why you see the outlash in the community for charters is that even storming the school board for improvments in the traditional public schools fall short – every single time, unless you are wealthy and politically connected. That is why charters are taking on a life of their own, and I agree that skews things out of balance. The biggest problem is that many local school boards think that offering the poor and minority students in communities low hanging fruit (less qualified teachers, less prioritization of attention, celebrations for “meeting expectations” (as if that were something to brag about it) is all their community is entitled to. I am sitting in Valdosta City as we speak, and I can tell you that even in this small community ( and still under a court order desegregation decree) – the issues are exactly the same as in Gwinnett and it is because mobilizing the vote to remove school board members in poorer zoning area’s (if the zones are not already politically fixed anyway) is very, very difficult. School board members no longer hold superintendents accountable for the struggling students and communities, so the power shift is having to move to the parent who is already overburdened with just getting their kids off to school well fed and healthy while holding one or two jobs to keep a roof over their head. The charter movement from a parents perspective is the result of inattention to the needs of underserved communities by the school board superintendents and their elected members.
dgroy
November 10th, 2009
8:35 am
Good parenting is the key to good schools……
Don’t care what kind of school it is…..you don’t have good parenting, you don’t have good schools…..someone has to be held accountable and I don’t trust the county school boards and administrators……they are all trying to be too politically correct I do not blame these charter school parents…..it’s better than sending your children to school and worrying about them all day. Private school parents learned this a long, long time ago.
SBC Charter Roundup 46 – Schools Building Communities
November 10th, 2009
8:44 am
[...] (Denver Post) Ga. — Learning Curve: Tough charter choices (Atlanta Journal Constitution) Ga. — Shouldn’t the goal in Georgia be good schools, charter or not? (Atlanta Journal Constitution) Ill. — Detroit charter school offers 1 year college (Chicago [...]
Marney
November 10th, 2009
11:31 am
Superintendents and school board, by their nature are about incremental change.
Chartering—which should be viewed as a process of bottom up redesign, allows one to play with more variables in that redesign and therefore allows for the possibility of “order of magnitude” change. But that change must have the “permission and buy-in” because all change requires an element of risk and no child should be experimented on without some degree of parental permission. For more and more parents, especially those that can’t afford the “move to a good school or put your kid in private” game—charter’s are the only thing different from the low expectations “take what I give you and like it, cause it’s all your worth” message from the traditional low SES school that is their assigned prison.
And so superintendents and local BOE’s usually find it more comfortable to sit with the status quo (which means they are in charge and stay in charge).
I seem to recall a piece of legislation in the last session to make some changes to the expectations on local school board members. It died… And so chartering is the detour. When the school board/ fix my local school path is closed, I’ll take whatever will get my child to the destination that I see for him, not the one implicit in the status quo…
Batgirl
November 10th, 2009
1:59 pm
Maureen, thank you so much. This is what I have wanted to say for some time, but have not been able to put it as eloquently as you.
HB
November 10th, 2009
3:21 pm
Charter schools can be great (or not — some do fail), but they are not a magical solution so wonderful as to deserve to have local decisions on their funding overturned. Would the state take the entire local system into consideration or just the proposed charter school? For example, if parents want a charter, but other schools in the system are recognized as excellent, would the state be able to force the local district to take funds from those excellent schools to hand over to the charter group? How well would state officials even know the local district and its needs?
Really, this reminds me of the later start-date debate. A bunch of parents got a couple of legislators to propose a state-wide start-date a few years ago after they were unable to convince their local board to continue with longer summers (largely because most parents, teachers, and admins in that district actually liked the shorter summer, early start calendar). Or the bill to mandate that multiples be placed in the same classroom at parents’ request that 1) didn’t have any provision for parental requests to separate their kids even though it was supposedly a bill about parental choice, 2) gave the schools no right to separate siblings if being together caused classroom disruptions, and 3) had no age limit — that’s right, folks, high schools would have to have given 17-year-old twins matching schedules if parents wanted it. That bill came about because of inflexible policies by some schools on keeping multiples separated (parents were rightfully angry), but instead of building a framework to help parents and admins work together, Chip Rodgers sided with one interest group and tried to narrowly mandate policy for every classroom in the state.
The state legislature should not be in the business of regularly changing state law to benefit people who have lost their battles at the local level. The state approving charters that local boards have denied and diverting state dollars to those schools sends a very strong message of support for charter schools. It’s state money, so while I could see arguments against it, the legislature deciding to make distribution of those funds a state rather than local decision is reasonable. Overruling the local board’s decision and diverting local funds, though, is a very bad move that dismisses both the board and the majority of residents who elected them to make those decisions.
Veteran teacher, 2
November 10th, 2009
6:44 pm
Well said, HB. We will find out that most of the outcry about the new math is about the same people that want to control everything for their benefit. The controversy about the non-profit organizations facing paying property taxes is also about the legislature trying to manipulate a situation for the few. How long are we going to allow this??
Parent in Gwinnett
November 12th, 2009
10:06 am
It is an eye opening experience for me every time I read these blogs. Thanks all for your comments, they have aided my perplexity and education about the public school systems and why they are deemed such failures.
We car pool my child 17 miles (one way) every day to one of the charter schools in Gwinnett funded by tax dollars, because we were concerned about what we had heard from parents who had children in the public high school nearest to where we live. We also pay property tax, and for all of the aids our child uses including copies of handouts. We get no tax credit or anything special concession from Gwinnett County, because the school system does not provide transportation for any of the students going to this school.
This school like so many others is not perfect, however, we do not have to worry about our child’s safety (this child was teased and bullied all through middle school) which is not a distraction for either the child or us. The curriculum is HARD and WORKS the students’ butt off to the point of exhuastion. There is no easy “A’s” as had become the norm for children in middle school. Only time will tell if this charter school has been successful in actually educating these children and not just teaching them to take a test.
Maybe the perpetual stagantion which cause redundancies and failures are because if you look at the tenure of many members of the various school baords, many of them have been on the boards for a very long time. In Gwinnett County there is one lady who has served continuously for thirty-seven (37) years, her marignal rate of effectiveness becomes an increasing rate of diminished effectiveness (i.e. it is a fact of life that in any endeavor one engages in, one tends to become redundant and ineffective after a such a long period of time if there is no re-education). Maybe we should start looking at term limits for these board members, we cannot use the same sets of people for such extended periods of time and expect different results!
James Young
November 13th, 2009
9:49 am
In your being a parent to your children, it doesn’t make you their master to be feared. You only have to be their guides as they trod along their own life’s path. At this stage of their lives, it would be helpful if you don’t give them someone who’s judgmental, but rather, a person whom they could rely on for advices and encouragement.