by David Safier
My picture of a charter school has always been a few crazily dedicated educators who want to start their own schools so they can work harder and be more successful than traditional public schools. They create educational plans, start charters, hire the best staff they can find and see if they can turn their vision into practice.
That happens sometimes. But more and more, the movement has gone corporate. Many charters are wholly owned subsidiaries of national companies, and others have contracted out for so many of their physical and educational needs, they are local, independent charter schools in name only.
The common term for a company that runs schools in whole or in part is Educational Management Organization, or EMO. If EMOs and the (usually) conservatives who love them have their way — and, I worry, if Obama's Ed Sec Arne Duncan buys into this model — they may be the dismal, corporatized, homogenized future of charter school education. Good-bye independent alternative. Hello McEducation. "Would you like fries with that diploma?"
The nation's 72 Imagine Schools, which I have been writing about lately, are run by a Virginia-based EMO. Though most of the schools are "run" by local organizations to give them non profit status,that's pretty much a sham. Basically, the schools send all their state funding to national headquarters, which hires and fires the principal and teachers, supplies the furniture and textbooks and creates the overall curriculum. Regional managers who report back to the home office oversee the schools in certain geographical areas. In the case of the Imagine Schools, the job of local boards is to rubber stamp the decisions of the Virginia office. Imagine Schools makes no bones about the fact that the company, not the local non profit and certainly not the community, owns and runs the school.
EMO-run charters tend to consider their communities a nuisance, especially if parents and others want a say in how the school is run. Ironically, the community is often pushed farther away from the charter than in a typical public school. Local control? Uh uh. You pay your money to the EMO and take what they give you. If you don't like it, leave.
No wait, don't leave! We'll do better next year, we promise. Give us another chance. We want your tax dollars, I mean your children, to stay right here with us.
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Funny thing, Thane. The ads are generated by some algorithm at the company that puts up the ads. Every time a topic is mentioned, that increases the likelihood of an ad showing up. So when I was going after Arizona Virtual Academy daily, their ads were in regular rotation on the site. Obviously, the algorithm isn’t sensitive to tone.
To clarify one thing: I’m a “critic” of charter schools in the broader sense of the term. I try to look at charters with a critical — that is, careful and discerning — eye to find their strengths and weaknesses. A movie critic isn’t someone who hates movies. It’s someone who wants to separate the best from the worst. I’ll put myself in that general category when it comes to charters, and education in general. In my ideal world, we’d have the best charters and traditional public schools full to overflowing with students and the others either improving themselves or dropping out of the picture. That’s a goal to strive for and a journey worth taking. I don’t expect to reach a destination, just hope we move further down the path.
Gosh, those charter schools sound kinda lousy. I imagine it must be easy to persuade parents not to patronize those charter school huh?
Of course, with all those Google ads from K12 Virtual Academy on this blog I imagine it must be tough for public schools to get the eye of the parents of Arizona… or am I missing something here?
In case anybody needs some help learning about how much Arizona charter schools suck, feel free to take advantage of the following URL:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Arizona+charter+schools+suck
BfA is #5 in the results – but wait, don’t leave! It will do better next year, we promise.
(There has been some sarcasm in this post – buy only because I love this place.)