The fat’s in the fire

Last Wednesday’s Policy meeting was a quiet affair—only a handful of community members there, which was a bit of a shame since we got to see the explosion in slow motion of a small policy bomb.

 Check out the proposed changes to Policy 011:

As some have said before, this reads like a headline from The Onion: “School board tires of half measures and decides to go ahead and abandon public schools.” 

One school board member argued that the proposed deletions were unnecessary, since everything the board members did showed their commitment to public schools.

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Yes! Everything the 6 have done has undermined CB, its teachers, its students, and the trust and freedom of its families—so on one level it makes a certain honest sense to go ahead and reveal their true intent.

But this school board member also betrayed an ignorance of charter schools’ threat to public education. She noted with disdain such districts as Chester and suggested that if they can’t do a better job with the kids, then they deserve charters which, she noted, are in fact public schools because they are funded by taxpayers.

This word salad deserves some analysis. Yes, charters are publicly funded, draining resources from public schools, but they endure zero oversight. You can’t go to their school board meetings to advocate for your kid, because they don’t have school board meetings. You can’t vote out the governing body because they aren’t elected. Charter schools get to do what they want to do and the only power you have is to remove your kid.

In which case, you’d better hope that there’s a good public school ready and waiting.

• Charters can close at any time, leaving your kid literally locked out of their education.

• They can teach anything they want, including religious studies or anti-democratic indoctrination.

• Also in question is whether students attending charter schools have the same civil rights and Constitutional protections as their public school peers.

• Their much-touted successes are predicated on kicking out kids who don’t perform well. Attrition ought not to be a point of pride.

Furthermore, “bad” school districts aren’t “failing” because they don’t know how to teach or refuse to give it their all. They’re “bad” because the kids are traumatized by poverty. There is no secret sauce that makes CB teachers great, besides their own hard work and tireless dedication—which Chester teachers have in abundance, too.

Blaming schools in poor districts for kids’ poor performance is like blaming doctors for bad health during a cholera epidemic or a famine. Yes, something is causing illness, but the doctors have no power to fix it. It’s systemic. 

Don’t you wonder why test scores track so closely to parent income? It’s not the teachers!

But apart from the robust and undeniable argument against charters, do you really want people on your school board who want to get out of advocating for public schools? Is this a winning platform?

Let’s hope not.

There’s also the issue of shortsightedness of this board majority. They like to pass policies that stir up the hornet’s nest of public opinion, but they are not keen on looking to the unintended consequences. Right now, they say, they’re doing what they can to support CB. So what happens when they strike those “extra words” and new board members are elected who don’t want to see CB succeed? Do these 6 people imagine that all policies refer only to them? Do they plan to live and get elected forever?

We’ve seen enough of their badly crafted, barely considered policies and the damage they do. What amount of money will they spend to make this latest misstep look appealing to the public?

Only Devine and Partners will know for sure.