Monday, June 12, 2006
Common Ground?
As an addition to the post below on the NEST vs. Ross mess: It strikes me that one thing that both the private-public NEST and the public-charter Ross schools have in common is they believe that public education needs more good schools. NEST, in particular, makes an interesting case in that they have been able to create a school model that is working for their PG+T (precious, gifted and talented) kids, so why should they be penalized for their success?
The city DOE also makes an interesting (data-based) case that it is seeking to house start-up public charter schools in the most underutilized public school buildings. That makes perfect sense, too. But think for a second... What if rather than mere utilization figures, the city instead used another factor for determining which schools should house charters?
Bear with me here. What if (warning: pipedream action ahead) we decided as a city that we no longer would tolerate crappy schools (traditional public or public charter.) No crappy schools period. And as part of the new NYC Anti-Crap Doctrine we pretty much established that no one has a "right" to operate a truly crappy school. It doesn't matter who your friends are: You run a crappy school, you risk having a locksmith come and change the locks on you at any moment. And say we even got people like Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to agree to this big idea and gave him all the credit for ridding the city of crappy learning environments. (NEST is in his district and he's helping the NESTies out.)
Can you imagine how much easier this whole thing would be? Say you are the DOE and you are looking to house 20 new public charter schools... all you have to do is find 20 crappy schools and shut them the heck down! (Finding these schools would take about 3 minutes, and that's a conservative estimate.) So then the charter schools get a new home, and the city has 20 fewer crappy schools. I believe the McKinsey people call that a "win-win!"
Of course we don't like to close down crappy schools because that requires political courage. Try to close a crappy school and you suddenly have state senators and assemblymen and city councilmen that you haven't seen in years coming out of the woodwork to say that the crappy schools are about to turn a corner but they need more money to make them less crappy, even though they have been crappy for years as we continue to spend more and more to reward their crappiness, blah, blah, blah.
So how about it? No More Crappy Schools. Can we at least agree on that?
The city DOE also makes an interesting (data-based) case that it is seeking to house start-up public charter schools in the most underutilized public school buildings. That makes perfect sense, too. But think for a second... What if rather than mere utilization figures, the city instead used another factor for determining which schools should house charters?
Bear with me here. What if (warning: pipedream action ahead) we decided as a city that we no longer would tolerate crappy schools (traditional public or public charter.) No crappy schools period. And as part of the new NYC Anti-Crap Doctrine we pretty much established that no one has a "right" to operate a truly crappy school. It doesn't matter who your friends are: You run a crappy school, you risk having a locksmith come and change the locks on you at any moment. And say we even got people like Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to agree to this big idea and gave him all the credit for ridding the city of crappy learning environments. (NEST is in his district and he's helping the NESTies out.)
Can you imagine how much easier this whole thing would be? Say you are the DOE and you are looking to house 20 new public charter schools... all you have to do is find 20 crappy schools and shut them the heck down! (Finding these schools would take about 3 minutes, and that's a conservative estimate.) So then the charter schools get a new home, and the city has 20 fewer crappy schools. I believe the McKinsey people call that a "win-win!"
Of course we don't like to close down crappy schools because that requires political courage. Try to close a crappy school and you suddenly have state senators and assemblymen and city councilmen that you haven't seen in years coming out of the woodwork to say that the crappy schools are about to turn a corner but they need more money to make them less crappy, even though they have been crappy for years as we continue to spend more and more to reward their crappiness, blah, blah, blah.
So how about it? No More Crappy Schools. Can we at least agree on that?
Most Recent Posts
- Slapped by a NEST Granny!
- Union Voice in Buffalo?
- Clarifying the Correction
- Funky New/Old Charter Building in Bronx
- Battle of the Publicists: NEST vs. Ross
- More Class Size Action
- "Wall To Wall" Union Organizing in Cali.
- Outsourcing Home Schooling?
- He Can Not Be Contained
- Teaching To The Test
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