Let’s
get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter
school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one
size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse
children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools. If I
lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my
children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of
my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically,
I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all
children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had.

One
more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public
schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned
the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public
school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about
charter schools.  Public school academies—charters—seem
to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether
they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother
repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by
tearing someone else down. 

I
have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit,
a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear
fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,”
a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12
Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.

Providence
St. Mel has accrued considerable recognition after parents adamantly refused to
close it on Diocese recommendation, 30 years ago: President Reagan visited,
around the time the “Nation at Risk” report was being crafted, and Oprah
Winfrey has taken a personal interest (and contributed more than a million
dollars). Providence’s outcomes—an average ACT score of 23, and 100% college
admission for graduates—resemble those of well-heeled suburban public schools.
Now, there is an attempt to replicate the “Providence effect:” a charter school
in Englewood, led by Providence graduates and veteran teachers, and based on
programs and principles at the original PSM.

The
screening was part of a two-day professional conference for charter school
proponents and teachers, and featured a panel discussion with Big Names in the Michigan
charter school movement, a State Board of Education member, various business-leadership
types, and the principal of the new Providence charter school. The room was set
up for hundreds of people, but I’m sure the attendance numbers (perhaps 60
people) were disappointing to the organizers. As I was parking on the rooftop
of Cobo Hall, charter school teachers wearing conference badges were flooding
out of the building, recognizable as teachers by their youth, their post-collegiate
dress and willingness to carry a tote bag—plus their “let’s go get a beer”
demeanor.

Impressions
from the film and the panel discussion:

• The
  movie has a campaign-film aura—gauzy graduation footage with students
  inexplicably wearing white gloves, bits of talking-head rhetoric, quick-cut
  black and white shots from Chicago’s troubled past, backed by a vocal track of
  adolescents singing. It’s impressive, all right, especially their catch phrase:
  It’s not rocket science. The
  lingering message: anybody with high expectations and tight rules can turn around
  kids destined for the dumpster.

• There
  is curiously little about instruction in the film; we do see a few examples of
  very traditional classroom teaching. There is a clip of first-graders in a race-to-the-board
  competitive spelling game (the teacher assigning points to teams, a la
  Professor Dumbledore), and a HS math lesson where the teacher puts an equation
  on the board and announces “No calculators!” (which drew a spatter of applause
  from the audience). An elementary teacher models a familiar and effective
  questioning strategy but then suggests that nobody in his circle believes that
  second graders can do work at this level.

• Among
  the panelists, the principal of the new Providence charter school was most
  grounded in reality. She admitted that while they were on a strong upward curve,
  test scores were still mediocre. Asked how they deal with discipline, she said
  that students were put on a “three strikes and out” contract—if they couldn’t
  abide by the rules, they held a conference with parents to decide if the child
  was a “good fit” for Providence. According to the principal, every child, even
  kindergarteners, has a grade point average (another murmur of approval from the
  audience). Nobody asked about parents who never bothered to come to school, the
  advisability of a five-year old having a GPA before he understands cumulative
  averaging, or where the kid who is not a good fit ends up.

• There
  was a kind of professional pep rally atmosphere. The panel moderator took
  questions from people who seemed pre-selected, often acknowledging the “great
  work” Joe was doing or the “outstanding leadership” of Mary. There was an angry
  question on why charter schools get less money than public schools, on average,
  from the public coffers. Reginald Turner, the State Board member, clarified:
  charter schools get the same per-pupil allowance as other public schools in the
  surrounding area. And guess what? There aren’t many charter schools in Grosse
  Pointe, where the funding level is high; charter schools are generally found
  where there is dissatisfaction with public education and not much money. And
  they get the same public monies as the other schools nearby—you might even call
  that equitable.

• When
  asked what Detroit could do as a first step to fix its failing public school,
  the business folks agreed: get new teachers, preferably from Teach for America
  (which one panelist described as “the Peace Corps of teaching,” an unfortunate
  metaphor in a city trying to pull itself out of devastating depression). A
  woman asked what special training Teach for America corps members got that
  would make them particularly effective in Detroit. The panelist replied that it
  wasn’t a matter of training—it was a chance to get “graduates of the top
  colleges” into the classroom.

If you believe U.S. News and World
Report, two of the top twenty Schools of Education are right here in Michigan,
including the long-running #1 in Elementary and Secondary teacher preparation,
Michigan State University, and the #4 public university in the country, the
University of Michigan. There is also a strong network of regional teacher
preparation programs. There is no shortage of highly qualified and skilled teachers
here in Michigan.

Michigan is a teacher-exporting state.
About three-quarters of our best and brightest would-be teachers go to work in
other states (when they can get jobs). Of those who remain in Michigan, a
significant segment gets jobs in newly formed charter schools—because there are
no jobs in public schools. The best new teachers in Michigan? They’re the folks
who went streaming out the door to grab a beer with their teaching colleagues
as I was parking my car.

When
it comes to evaluating charter schools, the key question is always: Compared to
what? Charter schools in Detroit have many potential resources that public schools
do not, beginning with positive public assumptions and PR.

Charter
World is an interesting place, with different beliefs, incentives and catch
phrases than Public School World. It would be a shame to lose the opportunity
to do something truly different with charter schools, relying instead on rhetorical
flourishes and empty myths.