Jay Mathews with a great story about a superintendent who supports charters:

Charter schools and traditional public schools are usually at war. Many educational researchers look for data to make charter schools look bad, or traditional public schools look bad, depending on what side they are on. Traditional public school people say charters are stealing funding and students. Charter school people say traditional schools are crippled by large, unresponsive bureaucracies. As I pointed out here a few weeks ago, most school districts in the Washington suburbs shun charter schools, refusing to authorize them because they don't want the competition.

But St. Mary's has a different attitude. Does being named after the Mother of God make you nicer? I don't think so. The key factor is that the St. Mary's school board hired Michael J. Martirano as superintendent five years ago. The county Web site says he came from Howard County, but he sounds like he is from an undiscovered planet.

Martirano helped the organizers of the Chesapeake Public Charter School work through the lengthy application process. He refers to the school as "my charter."

"My one driving mantra was to ensure that they would be successful and that this would not be viewed as an experiment," he told me.

This is not normal behavior for Washington area school districts. Montgomery County killed off a middle school charter application submitted by some of its best teachers more than a decade ago. Nobody there has dared try that again. Anne Arundel County found a way to strangle a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school, part of the most successful charter school network in the country, by denying it a chance to expand into a county building with much empty space.

…Martirano, Maryland's 2009 Superintendent of the Year, said he thinks the families of his county are entitled to a wide choice of schools. He has three science, technology, engineering and math academies. He has a global and international studies program and an academy of finance. He has an alternative academy for potential dropouts. And he has his charter school.

I wish his attitude were catching, but that does not appear to be the case. St. Mary's is a long drive from Fairfax and Montgomery counties. It is a shame we have to go that far to find a school district that understands its job is to serve its children, not protect its prerogatives. 

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Yikes! A charter-friendly superintendent

Jay Mathews
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/03/yikes_a_charter-friendly_super.html