Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Tuesday, April 4, 2006
The death of a school
The New York Times Monday told the story of one New York charter school that failed — the managerial missteps and overblown idealism that brought it down and the heartache and headaches that resulted for the kids who attended.
And the story makes that case that chaotic school closings are a byproduct to be expected when you introduce market effects into education.
Here in Dayton, where a higher percentage of kids attend charters than in any other city, we’ve only seen a few schools fail. And only one crashed and burned in such an unsettling manner.
But that was under the old rules. With Ohio’s new approach to managing charter schools, there’s a chance there could be more school closings. The question is whether the new system will mean less dramatic cases of upheaval when schools don’t make it.
There’s no doubt that school implosions are bad for everyone. When I wrote about the closing of a charter school here in 2001, teachers were unsure they would be paid. The school’s lunch vendor cut off services for non-payment, leading to hastily-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. The school ultimately closed mid-year and kids had to find somewhere else to finish the school year. That’s disaster for everyone — especially the kids.
Charter opponents argue that regular public schools, even when they are troubled, are at least reliable. Rarely, if ever, has an Ohio public school closed mid-year.
So the question posed by the Times story is if these sorts of collapses are simply to be expected in a market-based education system, even if it’s potentially harmful to kids. After all, this is what happens in business. Sometimes even good ideas are poorly executed or fail to catch on, causing even a well-financed new business venture to fail. And that’s what most charter schools are — new business ventures.
Many proponents of charter schools think it’s fine when bad charter schools fail. To them, it’s the market doing it’s job by weeding out the weak and it makes the remaining options that much stronger. I’ve heard charter guru Checker Finn say many times that it’s good when bad charters close.
But most would agree that a school implosion mid-year isn’t good for anyone. The key to avoiding such a meltdown is probably monitoring. If someone is watchdogging a troubled school, they should be able to take action before disaster strikes. If a school must close, it could be closed at the right time — the school year’s end — to allow everyone to adjust and find new schools.
Ohio’s new sponsoring system leave monitoring and oversight largely in the hands of non-profit “authorizers.” Charter proponents believe these sponsors will be more invested in the success of their schools, less tolerant of repeated failure and better attuned to the day-to-day issues of their schools.
Now the first schools are losing their sponsors under the new system and are in danger of closing. So we should get a chance this spring and summer to see if this leads to less chaotic school closures or if new issues arise as schools that were not renewed scramble for new sponsors.
What do you think? Are sudden school closings an acceptable trade off for the promise of market-based education?
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