Count on the NY Times to run a one-sided hatchet job on charter schools on its front page during the week of critical deliberations on whether to raise the charter school cap in NY state. To see what I mean, let's dissect this article.
Starting with the headline: "In Death of Bronx Charter School, a Wider Problem" Gimme a break! The closure of this dismal school, which never should have been approved from the get-go, based on what I can infer from this article (a founder with no relevant experience, no meaningful financial backing, no facility, etc.), is cause for CELEBRATION because it underscores one of the most important things about charter schools: their ACCOUNTABILITY! The headline for this article should read: "Closing of Bronx Charter School Highlights Accountability"
The entire first part of the article focuses on the trauma of having to switch schools and a 7-year-old's nightmares from it. Again, gimme a break! While I'm sure the school's closure is a pain for parents and unpleasant for the children, kids switch schools all the time. Growing up, I lived in New Haven, Boston, Tanzania, Palo Alto, Nicaragua, Palo Alto again and then finally settled in western Massachusetts in from 6th grade until I went to college. I don't recall enjoying moving all the time and switching schools every few years, but it wasn't the end of the world either.
While this charter school seems like a real lemon, there was nothing in the article about chaos or violence at the school, any scandals with abusive or incompetent staff or teachers, etc., so let's be clear: the real nightmare the children and their parents are experiencing is having to return to the abysmal public schools they had fled, which the article only alludes to once: "...Mott Haven, a gritty neighborhood with some of the city's worst schools." Why doesn't the article focus on THIS scandal -- the shocking, outrageous, utter failure of HUNDREDS of schools in poor neighborhoods across the city -- rather than highlighting the shortcomings of one school, run by well-intentioned people who were trying to save these children from nearly certain failure in the existing system?
The article also twists things when it says that "Traditional public schools can also close, and New York City is in the process of shutting 17, according to the city Department of Education. But those schools are phasing out gradually, by ceasing to accept new students." If a school is so bad that it is being shut down, why is it a good thing that it's shut down slowly, with students continuing to be miseducated for even more years?! It stikes me that shutting down a failing school immediately is the right thing to do, so this is a PLUS not a minus for charter schools.
This 2nd sentence of this paragraph, while of course factually correct, leaves the impression I think that the money was somehow wasted:
The brief life of the ReadNet school offers a stark lesson in the ways in which charter schools can go wrong — with initial troubles finding a building, continuing financial woes and difficulties attracting qualified staff. ReadNet has received close to $3 million in public financing.
Here's another way to put it: though they are public schools, charter schools only receive approximately 80% of the per-pupil funding of regular public schools, which, while saving the state money, can put a school in a financial bind, and which many view as discriminatory toward to the children who choose to attend charter schools. Though the article doesn't provide the data on how ReadNet did versus the nearby public schools that the children would have attended had ReadNet never existed, I doubt the children were worse off for having attended ReadNet, PLUS the state saved 20% financially. Thus, even with ReadNet's failure, it's not clear to me that the $3 million the state spent on ReadNet was wasted, given the alternative that even more money would have been spent on the same children in the nearby public schools, with no better outcome in all likelihood.
Maybe I'm nit-picking now, but what does this mean?
In March, six employees, including two teachers and the part-time guidance counselor, were let go.
"We didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to the children," said JoAnne Faruolo, 45, a teacher's assistant who was among the six..
Was Ms. Faruolo denied the chance to say goodbye to the children by the heartless administrators of the school? I suspect not, though that's the clear impression.
The rest of the article does a good job of laying out how and why the school failed, which underscores for me the fact that starting and building a successful inner-city school is the hardest entrepreneurial challenge I've ever seen. These two statements are indeed correct:
"I think the experience of ReadNet will certainly be a cautionary tale for all charter schools around their financial operations and their organizational sustainability," said Garth Harries, chief executive of the Department of Education's Office of New Schools.
"Growing a school into academic excellence is not as easy as it looks," Dr. Evans-Tranumn said. "It is a very difficult thing to do, and sometimes even with the best intentions, things don't work out."
Such difficulties make the achievements of the successful schools all the more remarkable!
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In Death of Bronx Charter School, a Wider Problem Published: April 3, 2006
When Yvonne Robinson heard that a small charter school with a focus on reading and computers was opening amid the weedy lots and graffiti-marked buildings of her South Bronx neighborhood, she thought it sounded like just the sort of place where her kindergarten-bound son, Warren, could flourish.
And for more than two years he did, she said in an interview. But in November, Warren's school, the ReadNet Bronx Charter School at Metropolitan College of New York, announced that due to mounting money problems and scant evidence of academic success, it would close in June. Now Ms. Robinson is school-hunting again, and 7-year-old Warren's anxiety surfaced in a recent nightmare...
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