Will sent me in search of The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as part of our ongoing discussion about class and how it figures into the charter school debate. Here's a bit about this book:
Successful people, he avows, are “beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up…. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”
Put differently, “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage.’ ”
His book sounds interesting enough, but I wasn't overly impressed with what I read about it. However, in the process of looking into that book I found this one:
Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau. Here's a bit about her book:
"Lareau's work is well known among sociologists, but neglected by the popular media. And that's a shame because through her close observations and careful writings — in books like 'Unequal Childhoods' — Lareau has been able to capture the texture of inequality in America. She's described how radically child-rearing techniques in upper-middle-class homes differ from those in working-class and poor homes, and what this means for the prospects of the kids inside."—David Brooks, New York Times
The most compelling reason, in my opinion anyway, that the GCA charter proposal be rejected, is that this school for self-selected students of parents with cultural and financial resources will exacerbate the class divide in Gloucester.
I have a hard time with the applicant claim that all types of Gloucester parents will apply to this school--mostly because every parent I've talked with who is or was interested in the GCACS is college educated, resourceful, engaged (some parents do not have the time, money or social wherewithal to be engaged in the way that many of the parents I've spoken with are). According to Peter Van Ness, the school will (hopefully) reflect the diversity of the district. According to Annette Lareau, there are poor parents who will not be attracted to a school like the GCACS for all kinds of reasons.
Let's take a hard look at those reasons and then figure out how we can best serve all of Gloucester's kids. Let me know if you've read either book--I'd be interested in hearing your opinions and reviews.
Best,
Jane
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Jim Dowd's Call to Action
Who is this Jim Dowd person? Inquiring minds want to know.
Jim and his lovely wife Bo were originally part of the charter school group. They left specifically because of the funding impact on the rest of the school system.
Jim Dowd began his adult working life as an experiential educator with Outward Bound and Project Adventure. Somehow, he still doesn't really know how, he left that career to become a technology strategist. He has worked with numerous fortune 500 companies, a good collection of startups, the Tech Boston Academy and today is the co-founder of HelpGuest.com an online marketplace for skills that launched in October 08. He has one child thriving in the Gloucester Public Schools and one who will begin kindergarten in September 2010.
TOP 5 THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO TO MAKE NOISE ABOUT THE GCA CHARTER PROPOSAL
1. Write a letter expressing your objections to the Board of Education.
Letters should be sent to:
Mitchell D. Chester
Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148
Or
charterschools@doe.mass.edu
by JANUARY 5TH, 2009
2. Write a letter to Governor Patrick asking for a moratorium on new charter schools until the financial crisis is resolved. Follow the link for e-mail and snail mail addresses.
Contact Governor Patrick
3. Talk to a friend who you know supports the GCA Charter School proposal. Give them the address to this website.
www.offthecharter.blogspot.com
Urge them to use the resources available to get informed. Ask charter school applicants to prove, demonstrating thorough budget analysis and understanding, how this charter school can be funded without disastrously affecting the rest of our school district. Ask hard questions. Wait for answers. Find out the truth about the school budget and the charter school funding.
4. Write a letter to the Gloucester Daily Times expressing your objection.
Click here to write a letter to the editor of the GDT
Scroll down the "contact us" page until you reach the section called "Submit Your News." Contact editor Ray Lamont at the GDT if your letter is not printed a few days after you submit it.
5. Organize the other people you know who care about education for all of Gloucester's kids, send them to this blog, get them to follow the above steps.
Jim and his lovely wife Bo were originally part of the charter school group. They left specifically because of the funding impact on the rest of the school system.
Jim Dowd began his adult working life as an experiential educator with Outward Bound and Project Adventure. Somehow, he still doesn't really know how, he left that career to become a technology strategist. He has worked with numerous fortune 500 companies, a good collection of startups, the Tech Boston Academy and today is the co-founder of HelpGuest.com an online marketplace for skills that launched in October 08. He has one child thriving in the Gloucester Public Schools and one who will begin kindergarten in September 2010.
TOP 5 THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO TO MAKE NOISE ABOUT THE GCA CHARTER PROPOSAL
1. Write a letter expressing your objections to the Board of Education.
Letters should be sent to:
Mitchell D. Chester
Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148
Or
charterschools@doe.mass.edu
by JANUARY 5TH, 2009
2. Write a letter to Governor Patrick asking for a moratorium on new charter schools until the financial crisis is resolved. Follow the link for e-mail and snail mail addresses.
Contact Governor Patrick
3. Talk to a friend who you know supports the GCA Charter School proposal. Give them the address to this website.
www.offthecharter.blogspot.com
Urge them to use the resources available to get informed. Ask charter school applicants to prove, demonstrating thorough budget analysis and understanding, how this charter school can be funded without disastrously affecting the rest of our school district. Ask hard questions. Wait for answers. Find out the truth about the school budget and the charter school funding.
4. Write a letter to the Gloucester Daily Times expressing your objection.
Click here to write a letter to the editor of the GDT
Scroll down the "contact us" page until you reach the section called "Submit Your News." Contact editor Ray Lamont at the GDT if your letter is not printed a few days after you submit it.
5. Organize the other people you know who care about education for all of Gloucester's kids, send them to this blog, get them to follow the above steps.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Why the People of Gloucester Should Ask the State to Reject the GCA Charter Proposal
1. The GCA charter school plan isn't fair. 240 of 3600 students will enjoy mandated, capped class sizes of no more than 20 students. Charter school proponents and district officials agree that keeping class sizes down correlates with effective teaching and learning. Class sizes for the rest of the district's 3,360 students will not be capped. When staff is cut to accommodate charter school funding, class sizes will increase for the remaining students in the district. Why should some students have small, capped class sizes while some students try to learn in classes as big as 25 or more? This is not consistent with the MA Education Reform Act of 1993 that states that all students should have access to a high quality education.
2. The GCA charter application is a faulty, misleading document. On page 5 of the document applicants state that, "A charter school will bring the innovation that the district desperately needs and has shunned. Attempts by parents, teachers, volunteers, and others actively advocating for change have largely fallen on deaf ears...At present no schools in Gloucester offer arts-integrated curriculum--or any of the alternative approaches we intend to use." These statements are simply not true and the innovative approaches taken by Gloucester's teachers were demonstrated over and over again by teachers, parents and school administrators at the 12/11/08 public hearing officiated by the state. Teachers in Gloucester have been required to teach using the MA frameworks since 1993 (link to frameworks in sidebar). This has involved curriculum development using alternative approaches to teaching. Teachers in every school in Gloucester have been applying Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences since at least 1998. Furthermore, it is insulting to suggest that the district's teachers and principals have not been implementing alternative teaching strategies, especially since the state requires that all teachers have master's degrees and that graduate programs teach students about the MA frameworks and how to develop curriculum using said frameworks. I graduated from Tufts University with a Master's of Arts in Teaching degree in 1998 and applied the "new and innovative" approaches described in the charter application at Gloucester High School, as did other teachers at GHS and throughout the system, 10 years ago.
Is it true that some teachers should be using better alternative approaches? Yes. Is it true that the district could do a better job recognizing and recording the efforts of its innovative teachers? Absolutely. Most teachers can and want to do better and we should give them this opportunity. Instead of making false claims about lack of innovation in our district, show teachers exactly how and when and where they can be innovative by citing numerous examples of the groundbreaking work that is taking place around our city.
The analysis of MCAS data in the document is misleading and leaves out essential analysis and information regarding Gloucester's demographic. Our district's low income population is 26% and our special needs population is 21% (see "selected populations" link in sidebar). Substance abuse, domestic violence (HAWC--number of restraining orders issued each year in Gloucester), mental illness, heroin use (AGH--methadone clinic and waiting list) and its persistence in Gloucester are not analyzed by the applicants thus showing a lack of understanding of the complex needs of our community. There are factors that a school, despite outreach and education, cannot change. Evidence that the applicants considered these factors when analyzing test scores cannot be found in the charter application.
Visit the links in the sidebar to help you understand how special populations compare in neighboring districts such as Rockport, Manchester/Essex, and Ipswich, districts to which students from Gloucester are "choicing" into for obvious reasons--smaller size, more money, fewer complex needs. Information about how much a district spends per student, how much teachers get paid, as well as size of a district can also be found at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website (was DOE, now called DESE).
3. Our city's recent efforts at change need to be given time to take hold i.e. a school closure and redistricting efforts to more equally distribute Gloucester's poorest students. The small, neighborhood school model has proven effective in many districts. Give Gloucester's small, neighborhood schools a chance to strengthen and grow. Other changes are underway in our schools. There is qualitative and quantitative improvement regarding O'Maley. The word on the street is that fewer parents have concerns about O'Maley. "Don't take the legs out from under O'Maley," pled John Doyle, a parent in the know at the 12/11 hearing. The word from the state is that there has been significant recent O'Maley test score improvement. Principal Tracy reports, "O’Maley Middle School made AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress--No Child Left Behind) in ELA (English Language Arts) and Math in the aggregate this past year and 76% of our 8th graders were in the advanced and proficient categories for ELA-the highest percentage of advanced and proficient designations in the district. MCAS results for Gloucester have numerous examples of longitudinal trends from Grades 3-10 that demonstrate the shrinking gap between Gloucester Public School students and their state level peers— the same students heralded by the Commissioner for leading the nation and ranking alongside some of the highest performing nations in the world. But standardized test scores are just one measure of a student’s progress."
4. The city doesn't have the money to fund the charter school. The argument being made by GCA charter school proponents such as founding member Kate Ruff is that we'll find the money; schools don't have to close. I implore you to attend city council meetings, talk to building principals, talk to well-informed people who work on city budgets and ask where this so-called money can be found. In order to understand the school budget making process, it is necessary to understand how fixed costs and special education mandates affect a budget. Analyze the answers you receive in context of what is happening in our city and state. Fire stations are closed. We're in need of money to make major infrastructure repairs--our roads and public buildings. Deval Patrick recently announced the need to make 1 billion in cuts. The "bloated budget" argument doesn't fly. Do we have 2.4 million identified ways to save a dollar (without cutting staff and closing schools)? The answer from city officials and proven budget visionaries alike is a resounding NO.
5. It is dangerous for the state to override a city's elected officials without excellent reason to do so. The GCA charter applicants do NOT make the case for this kind of intervention. See item two on the list.
6. The application does not focus enough on Gloucester's poorest children. Where is the outreach? There is a clear lack of understanding of social dynamics in Gloucester on the part of the proponents. There is an assumption that poor families will want to leave their schools--underestimating the power of community in each of Gloucester's schools. The charter applicants and letter supporters, as demonstrated at the public hearing, are a college-educated, homogenous group. This applicant group and "arts school" will attract a certain type of student. Because the school is so small (240 students), because the low income population is so large--approximately 900 students--and the applicant group is as homogenous as it is, the school stands little chance of helping the city's poorest children. How might the applicants have better targeted the subgroups performing most poorly on the MCAS?
2. The GCA charter application is a faulty, misleading document. On page 5 of the document applicants state that, "A charter school will bring the innovation that the district desperately needs and has shunned. Attempts by parents, teachers, volunteers, and others actively advocating for change have largely fallen on deaf ears...At present no schools in Gloucester offer arts-integrated curriculum--or any of the alternative approaches we intend to use." These statements are simply not true and the innovative approaches taken by Gloucester's teachers were demonstrated over and over again by teachers, parents and school administrators at the 12/11/08 public hearing officiated by the state. Teachers in Gloucester have been required to teach using the MA frameworks since 1993 (link to frameworks in sidebar). This has involved curriculum development using alternative approaches to teaching. Teachers in every school in Gloucester have been applying Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences since at least 1998. Furthermore, it is insulting to suggest that the district's teachers and principals have not been implementing alternative teaching strategies, especially since the state requires that all teachers have master's degrees and that graduate programs teach students about the MA frameworks and how to develop curriculum using said frameworks. I graduated from Tufts University with a Master's of Arts in Teaching degree in 1998 and applied the "new and innovative" approaches described in the charter application at Gloucester High School, as did other teachers at GHS and throughout the system, 10 years ago.
Is it true that some teachers should be using better alternative approaches? Yes. Is it true that the district could do a better job recognizing and recording the efforts of its innovative teachers? Absolutely. Most teachers can and want to do better and we should give them this opportunity. Instead of making false claims about lack of innovation in our district, show teachers exactly how and when and where they can be innovative by citing numerous examples of the groundbreaking work that is taking place around our city.
The analysis of MCAS data in the document is misleading and leaves out essential analysis and information regarding Gloucester's demographic. Our district's low income population is 26% and our special needs population is 21% (see "selected populations" link in sidebar). Substance abuse, domestic violence (HAWC--number of restraining orders issued each year in Gloucester), mental illness, heroin use (AGH--methadone clinic and waiting list) and its persistence in Gloucester are not analyzed by the applicants thus showing a lack of understanding of the complex needs of our community. There are factors that a school, despite outreach and education, cannot change. Evidence that the applicants considered these factors when analyzing test scores cannot be found in the charter application.
Visit the links in the sidebar to help you understand how special populations compare in neighboring districts such as Rockport, Manchester/Essex, and Ipswich, districts to which students from Gloucester are "choicing" into for obvious reasons--smaller size, more money, fewer complex needs. Information about how much a district spends per student, how much teachers get paid, as well as size of a district can also be found at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website (was DOE, now called DESE).
3. Our city's recent efforts at change need to be given time to take hold i.e. a school closure and redistricting efforts to more equally distribute Gloucester's poorest students. The small, neighborhood school model has proven effective in many districts. Give Gloucester's small, neighborhood schools a chance to strengthen and grow. Other changes are underway in our schools. There is qualitative and quantitative improvement regarding O'Maley. The word on the street is that fewer parents have concerns about O'Maley. "Don't take the legs out from under O'Maley," pled John Doyle, a parent in the know at the 12/11 hearing. The word from the state is that there has been significant recent O'Maley test score improvement. Principal Tracy reports, "O’Maley Middle School made AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress--No Child Left Behind) in ELA (English Language Arts) and Math in the aggregate this past year and 76% of our 8th graders were in the advanced and proficient categories for ELA-the highest percentage of advanced and proficient designations in the district. MCAS results for Gloucester have numerous examples of longitudinal trends from Grades 3-10 that demonstrate the shrinking gap between Gloucester Public School students and their state level peers— the same students heralded by the Commissioner for leading the nation and ranking alongside some of the highest performing nations in the world. But standardized test scores are just one measure of a student’s progress."
4. The city doesn't have the money to fund the charter school. The argument being made by GCA charter school proponents such as founding member Kate Ruff is that we'll find the money; schools don't have to close. I implore you to attend city council meetings, talk to building principals, talk to well-informed people who work on city budgets and ask where this so-called money can be found. In order to understand the school budget making process, it is necessary to understand how fixed costs and special education mandates affect a budget. Analyze the answers you receive in context of what is happening in our city and state. Fire stations are closed. We're in need of money to make major infrastructure repairs--our roads and public buildings. Deval Patrick recently announced the need to make 1 billion in cuts. The "bloated budget" argument doesn't fly. Do we have 2.4 million identified ways to save a dollar (without cutting staff and closing schools)? The answer from city officials and proven budget visionaries alike is a resounding NO.
5. It is dangerous for the state to override a city's elected officials without excellent reason to do so. The GCA charter applicants do NOT make the case for this kind of intervention. See item two on the list.
6. The application does not focus enough on Gloucester's poorest children. Where is the outreach? There is a clear lack of understanding of social dynamics in Gloucester on the part of the proponents. There is an assumption that poor families will want to leave their schools--underestimating the power of community in each of Gloucester's schools. The charter applicants and letter supporters, as demonstrated at the public hearing, are a college-educated, homogenous group. This applicant group and "arts school" will attract a certain type of student. Because the school is so small (240 students), because the low income population is so large--approximately 900 students--and the applicant group is as homogenous as it is, the school stands little chance of helping the city's poorest children. How might the applicants have better targeted the subgroups performing most poorly on the MCAS?
Jim Dowd's guest post
We have this thing in the tech industry called "vaporware." A project is considered "vapor" when the people selling it get beyond the realistic expectations of what they are creating can provide. I think this is an apt comparison for what is going on with the charter school proposal right now.
You won't believe the kind of crazy crap that gets passed off as serious tech once it hits the vapor realm. Actually you would:
Remember "Clippy" the tremendously annoying paperclip in Windows Office from 1997-2003? Clippy, which is now considered the greatest failure in the annals of programming history, started from noble origins, Bayesian algorithms, and the idea that the computer should do the technical stuff and the people should only have to add the content. Somehow, though, it got sold as the thing that would allow every person on Earth to easily use a computer regardless of proficiency, age or language barriers, something that Bayesian algorithms could never, never do. In the end it wound up sucking worse than anything had ever sucked, not because it didn't do what the engineers who designed it expected, but because somebody (I'm looking at you here, Melinda) over-promised then spectacularly failed to deliver.
Another great example is the Segway, which was kept as a secret project of Dean Kamen, noted inventor. They merely promised before it was released that whole cities would be redesigned around Segways and that their product would change the way we work, live, play and love. Ok, not the last one, but you get the idea. They sort of pushed the envelope. A lot. In the end it was a three thousand dollar dorky scooter. I actually worked on some of the initial marketing of the Segway, after the disastrous launch. Even once it was crystal clear that beyond airport cops and meter readers there would never ever be a large market for it, they kept telling us how amazing it was, and blamed us for not getting the public to share in this view. There is nothing harder to deal with than true believers refusing to face the brick wall of reality.
But there is also nothing more fun than selling vapor at the early stages. It is all good times. You don't have a price, you
don't have any limitations, you don't have what we in the industry call "speeds and feeds." Everything is pure, high-grade potential.
Q: "Does it work underwater?"
A: "You bet it does! It's at its best underwater, unless you are using it on land, where it also overperforms!"
Q: "Will it be able to interface with our legacy systems, which were written by drunken Eskimos who broke into our server farm and coded everything in a language that we think they made up on the spot?"
A: "What's amazing about this product is that it seems to naturally understand intoxicated Aleutian Islanders as if they were having some kind of mind-meld...."
You get the idea. Man, it's fun selling stuff that hasn't been made yet. It solves all your problems, doesn't cost but instead makes money, works in both good economies and bad, shines the floor while doing your taxes...
The proposed Gloucester charter school has sailed hard into the fog of vaporware. The promises the founders and advocates are making at this point are way beyond reasonable. Think of what the founders of this school are promising to do, and see if you might detect a whiff of vapor: They claim they are going to stop people from choicing out, even though the people who are leaving are going to established, well-funded schools in rich nearby towns with real track records, not a risky charter school with no definable outcomes. And school choice kids take 1/2 of what a charter school student takes from the budget. Not exactly apples to apples.
I heard one of the founders promise that the charter school would make people move to Gloucester because we will become "an educational beacon" to the rest of the Commonwealth. Vapor talk. I used to hear it every day- pure, unhinged vapor talk. We're in the midst of a significant economic downturn, housing prices have cratered, local industries here are laying off people by the hundreds and we're losing the fishing industry. I don't think, "Gloucester has a nifty charter school, let's move there!" is going to motivate anyone before some of those other factors are taken care of, even if the charter reaches significant levels of niftiness.
The list of promises is long. I heard actual testimony that the charter school is going to rebalance the unequal opportunities given to kids from richer neighborhoods and less well-off ones. We already did a lot of that in the Public Schools with the districting, but to take them at face value you have to assume that numerous families from less well-off households will want to send their kids to an "arts focused school" with no athletics and where their friends don't go. Why does my Spidey sense tell me that when you advertise your school programing as inviting students to create performances and plays merged tightly with the Gloucester Historical Museum and the paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane, you are going to wind up with kids from richer, college educated households, probably with NPR as a radio preset in the imported family wagon? Just an instinct, there, not data based.
My favorite particular strand of this vapor sale has been watching the charter school adherents talk about their ideas to "save the district money." I have heard more than once as a response to "Umm, it sounds like this charter school proposal of yours will wind up costing crazy amounts of money..." the reply:
"Don't worry, Peter Van Ness has some great ideas on how to save the district using quantum-efficiency techniques he learned studying advanced management theory at a Lamaist monastery in Himalayan Bhutan" [paraphrasing]. Peter Van Ness may be a smart guy, he may be a good guy overall, I don't know, but I can assure you he is of mortal-kind. A lot of very smart people work on the district budget, not just from inside the public school system, but people who used to work at Bell Labs, people who do budgets for huge government institutions. There simply isn't some big pile of cash sitting in budget waiting to be redistributed. But a classic problem with vaporware is that it gets mixed-up with big personalities. Kamen is a smart guy, a genius, even. But the Segway was never more than a scooter and a really freaking dumb idea to drop on the general public (hence the multi-million dollar losses).
Which brings us to outcomes. Projects that come out of vapor are typically, on the merits, worthwhile in the end. One just has to greatly re-calibrate realistic expectations from the hype. If you have trouble walking, or are a mall cop who just doesn't get enough ridicule, the Segway is the device for you. And the backsystems that made up Clippy have gone into making user-interfaces better overall, just without the annoying cartoons. Neither wound up as the panaceas they promised, but both were useful technology at the core.
The charter school is probably the same way. It would end up as a reasonably useful thing to a very narrow slice of Gloucester students. The question then becomes, is it enough of a useful thing to risk the developments and improvements we're trying to make in other areas?
When one really looks at the realistic possible returns from a charter school, by looking at other similar charter schools and what they've been able to accomplish, the answer is simply no. Not now, not with the budget the way it is, not with the limited scope of the innovation they are proposing.
You won't believe the kind of crazy crap that gets passed off as serious tech once it hits the vapor realm. Actually you would:
Remember "Clippy" the tremendously annoying paperclip in Windows Office from 1997-2003? Clippy, which is now considered the greatest failure in the annals of programming history, started from noble origins, Bayesian algorithms, and the idea that the computer should do the technical stuff and the people should only have to add the content. Somehow, though, it got sold as the thing that would allow every person on Earth to easily use a computer regardless of proficiency, age or language barriers, something that Bayesian algorithms could never, never do. In the end it wound up sucking worse than anything had ever sucked, not because it didn't do what the engineers who designed it expected, but because somebody (I'm looking at you here, Melinda) over-promised then spectacularly failed to deliver.
Another great example is the Segway, which was kept as a secret project of Dean Kamen, noted inventor. They merely promised before it was released that whole cities would be redesigned around Segways and that their product would change the way we work, live, play and love. Ok, not the last one, but you get the idea. They sort of pushed the envelope. A lot. In the end it was a three thousand dollar dorky scooter. I actually worked on some of the initial marketing of the Segway, after the disastrous launch. Even once it was crystal clear that beyond airport cops and meter readers there would never ever be a large market for it, they kept telling us how amazing it was, and blamed us for not getting the public to share in this view. There is nothing harder to deal with than true believers refusing to face the brick wall of reality.
But there is also nothing more fun than selling vapor at the early stages. It is all good times. You don't have a price, you
don't have any limitations, you don't have what we in the industry call "speeds and feeds." Everything is pure, high-grade potential.
Q: "Does it work underwater?"
A: "You bet it does! It's at its best underwater, unless you are using it on land, where it also overperforms!"
Q: "Will it be able to interface with our legacy systems, which were written by drunken Eskimos who broke into our server farm and coded everything in a language that we think they made up on the spot?"
A: "What's amazing about this product is that it seems to naturally understand intoxicated Aleutian Islanders as if they were having some kind of mind-meld...."
You get the idea. Man, it's fun selling stuff that hasn't been made yet. It solves all your problems, doesn't cost but instead makes money, works in both good economies and bad, shines the floor while doing your taxes...
The proposed Gloucester charter school has sailed hard into the fog of vaporware. The promises the founders and advocates are making at this point are way beyond reasonable. Think of what the founders of this school are promising to do, and see if you might detect a whiff of vapor: They claim they are going to stop people from choicing out, even though the people who are leaving are going to established, well-funded schools in rich nearby towns with real track records, not a risky charter school with no definable outcomes. And school choice kids take 1/2 of what a charter school student takes from the budget. Not exactly apples to apples.
I heard one of the founders promise that the charter school would make people move to Gloucester because we will become "an educational beacon" to the rest of the Commonwealth. Vapor talk. I used to hear it every day- pure, unhinged vapor talk. We're in the midst of a significant economic downturn, housing prices have cratered, local industries here are laying off people by the hundreds and we're losing the fishing industry. I don't think, "Gloucester has a nifty charter school, let's move there!" is going to motivate anyone before some of those other factors are taken care of, even if the charter reaches significant levels of niftiness.
The list of promises is long. I heard actual testimony that the charter school is going to rebalance the unequal opportunities given to kids from richer neighborhoods and less well-off ones. We already did a lot of that in the Public Schools with the districting, but to take them at face value you have to assume that numerous families from less well-off households will want to send their kids to an "arts focused school" with no athletics and where their friends don't go. Why does my Spidey sense tell me that when you advertise your school programing as inviting students to create performances and plays merged tightly with the Gloucester Historical Museum and the paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane, you are going to wind up with kids from richer, college educated households, probably with NPR as a radio preset in the imported family wagon? Just an instinct, there, not data based.
My favorite particular strand of this vapor sale has been watching the charter school adherents talk about their ideas to "save the district money." I have heard more than once as a response to "Umm, it sounds like this charter school proposal of yours will wind up costing crazy amounts of money..." the reply:
"Don't worry, Peter Van Ness has some great ideas on how to save the district using quantum-efficiency techniques he learned studying advanced management theory at a Lamaist monastery in Himalayan Bhutan" [paraphrasing]. Peter Van Ness may be a smart guy, he may be a good guy overall, I don't know, but I can assure you he is of mortal-kind. A lot of very smart people work on the district budget, not just from inside the public school system, but people who used to work at Bell Labs, people who do budgets for huge government institutions. There simply isn't some big pile of cash sitting in budget waiting to be redistributed. But a classic problem with vaporware is that it gets mixed-up with big personalities. Kamen is a smart guy, a genius, even. But the Segway was never more than a scooter and a really freaking dumb idea to drop on the general public (hence the multi-million dollar losses).
Which brings us to outcomes. Projects that come out of vapor are typically, on the merits, worthwhile in the end. One just has to greatly re-calibrate realistic expectations from the hype. If you have trouble walking, or are a mall cop who just doesn't get enough ridicule, the Segway is the device for you. And the backsystems that made up Clippy have gone into making user-interfaces better overall, just without the annoying cartoons. Neither wound up as the panaceas they promised, but both were useful technology at the core.
The charter school is probably the same way. It would end up as a reasonably useful thing to a very narrow slice of Gloucester students. The question then becomes, is it enough of a useful thing to risk the developments and improvements we're trying to make in other areas?
When one really looks at the realistic possible returns from a charter school, by looking at other similar charter schools and what they've been able to accomplish, the answer is simply no. Not now, not with the budget the way it is, not with the limited scope of the innovation they are proposing.
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