New Age charter school business
model: By default or design, leave them behind
ByRobert
Yarnall
Click here for Part 1
In a
succinct seven hundred word essay on the original intent and design of charter
schools (“Charter
schools burden 95%,” Providence Journal, July 6, 2015) Dr. Peter Adamy,
associate professor of education at URI, describes the essence of the mission
of American public education and the creation of the charter school concept as
a tool of innovation to refine the process of “creating an educated citizenry.”
Dr.
Adamy contrasts the original charter school model, a school-within-a-school
that develops innovative instructional methods applicable to the rest of the building,
with the recent development of stand-alone models operating independently of
the district and in the sole interests of only a small number of students earning
roster spots based primarily on a lottery system.
Dr.
Adamy notes, “…while there are certainly
pockets of innovation in Rhode Island’s charter schools, as there are in most
public schools in the state, our charters are not “laboratories of innovation,”
as some have called them. Rhode Island’s charters have simply been better able
to implement reforms that researchers have been pushing for decades…”
Assuming
this to be true, that “…charters have simply been better able to implement
reforms…” than traditional public schools, the obvious question an average
citizen would ask teachers is: “Why is that?”
Simple.
Virtually every charter school in the state functions as a taxpayer-funded private school, with near-private school levels of control over admissions, student behavior, and parental involvement that are not available to traditional public schools.
Teachers
working in traditional public schools know it, teachers working in next-generation
charter schools know it, and the bevy of charter school advocates- the politicians,
the privateers, the parent groups- know it.
This
little chunk of inconvenient reality is the tenuous bedrock that the architects
of new age charter schools hope to continue to exploit.
New Age
charter school networks react defensively to criticisms that they do not deal
with the same sets of challenges as public schools. They routinely publish
rebuttal dialogues using the popular “myth v. fact” format in professional
marketing campaigns meticulously crafted by the research divisions of
prestigious conservative think tanks.
Their
end game, beginning innocently enough with ventures like Rhode Island’s
“mayoral academies,” is a gradual for-profit privatization of public education
via a post-industrial Ponzi scheme masterminded by a consortium of
ideologically conservative legislators, investment firms, and grassroots
political action committees intent on exploiting the inherent weaknesses of a
public education system struggling to cope with growing pains unleashed by the
imperatives stipulated by The Education of All Handicapped Children Act of
1975.
Former
conservative icon as well as former Assistant Secretary of State Diane Ravitch
detailed the “hoax of the privatization game” in her 2013 book Reign of Error.
Whether or not newbie Rhode Island Commissioner of Education Kenneth Wagner is
a disciple of the privateer coalition will soon be apparent, one way or the
other.
Before 1970,
virtually every American citizen who looked or acted “differently” was
ostracized from birth and assigned a label that categorized them based on the
predominant feature of their exceptionality. Dehumanizing descriptors such as
“cripple” or “retarded” were applied to people with cerebral palsy or Downs
Syndrome.
As
children, some attended special schools separate and apart from their
chronological peers while others attended no school at all, their lives being
considered inconsequential. As adults, most were destined to live their lives
in barracks style housing located in rural settings, far removed from urban
centers.
Beginning
in the late 1960’s, human
rights activists in the disabilities field, notably Dr. Burton Blatt of Syracuse University, raised public
awareness of the plight of America’s most vulnerable citizens with his powerful
pictorial essay, Christmas
in Purgatory, a damning critique of America’s practice of
institutionalizing people with disabilities for the majority of their lives.
The efforts of Burton Blatt and like-minded
colleagues such as Rhode
Island’s Meeting Street School founders, Dr. Eric Denhoff and Margaret Langdon,
in concert with Massachusetts Chapter 766 and Public Law 94-142, set the stage
for the integration of exceptional people into the mainstream of society,
beginning with their schooling and continuing throughout their adult lives.
The
underpinning of PL94-14, “The Education for all Handicapped Children Act,” was,
and remains, the conceptual phrase “least restrictive environment,” or LRE. It
means simply that all children, regardless of their handicapping condition, are
best educated together with their non-handicapped chronological peers to the
greatest extent possible.
But simply
stated is not always simply accomplished. While the integration of special
needs children across most categories of disabilities (more appropriately
called “categories of abilities”) has been successful, children with serious
behavioral issues were, and remain, the most challenging aspect of
“mainstreaming,” the teaching profession’s operational term for integration.
Academic
programming for youngsters with behavioral disabilities is not especially
difficult as a surprising number of these students are very intelligent and can
utilize the same curriculum as their peers.
What
sets them apart them apart from their peers is the extent to which behavioral
issues obscure any vision of success and happiness to the point where life
seems hopeless. Adults must help them develop that vision, a positive attitude,
in spite of factors and circumstances largely beyond their control. This was a
critical part of the mission that social services used to fill before the 1981
Reagan budget cuts and for which organizations like The Providence Center now try
to compensate.
For some
children with serious behavioral disorders, just the sight of other children
enjoying themselves in productive, positive ways can elicit contemptuous
acting-out behaviors that are incredibly problematic for teachers to defuse and
downright frightening for other students to witness.
School
bullying is an all too familiar manifestation of a child with a behavioral
disability. Conversely, children with behavioral disabilities are themselves
often targets of bullying.
For
students with diagnosed behavioral disabilities, standard school disciplinary
practices and classroom management strategies are limited based on rights
accorded by law and stipulated in legally binding Individualized Education
Programs, or IEP’s.
In
general, special needs students may not be discriminated against based on their
primary handicapping condition. For students with behavioral disabilities,
then, disruptive behaviors that would normally result in detentions or
suspensions for regular education students may not evoke the same sanctions.
Typically,
there are alternative consequences that take place, but from the perspective of
the rest of the class, the student who caused the disruption “got away with
it…” and for parents who hear about disruptive incidents from their children,
the scenario lacks any semblance of common sense and shakes their faith in the
ability of the school system to provide a safe learning environment for their
children.
A
child’s physical and emotional welfare in school is the self-evident primary
concern of parents. Academic achievement is important as well, but it
necessarily takes second place in any conversation about school choice.
Columbine
and Sandy Hook changed American education forever. Those images lurk in the
back of every American parent’s mind. Every time a son or daughter comes home from
school with a story about a confrontational incident in school, a parent
shudders.
Some
parents believe that New Age charter schools can make those bad thoughts go
away by leaving the disruptive children behind in the real public schools. They
believe that New
Age charter schools, freed from the burden of managing behaviorally disabled
children and instructing children with moderate to severe special needs,
will produce superior academic gains for their children.
So
unless a child is one of the lucky 5% to pull a winning ticket stub, he or she will
not be climbing aboard the charter express. Instead, they will join the other 95%
on the regular bus. As Harry Chapin
often said, “There’s always room in the cheap seats.”
They are further advised by Lieutenant Governor of Charter Schools Dennis McKee, former mayor of Cumberland who was instrumental in crafting legislation allowing charter schools to ignore a range of regulatory policies and practices applicable to traditional public schools, some of which are in violation of procedural rights accorded to special needs students by virtue of federal legislation such as PL94-142 and get the attention of advocacy groups because of this.
The
Raimondo Administration is well aware that Rhode Island public school teachers
are catching up with their pernicious
Wall Street pranks. Once the general public, especially parents of children
who choose to remain in traditional public schools, become aware of the real
tune that Gina & the Gypsters are having them dance to, the only things
being left behind will be derailed political ambitions and a pathetic legacy of
financial malfeasance perpetrated by a scurrilous band of Wall Street pirates.