Tantillo Hit the Drum

An Insider's Account of How the Charter School Idea Became a National Movement
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-6745-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 340 Seiten

The first state charter school law was passed in Minnesota in 1991. The idea that teachers, parents, and other community members could launch these independent public schools of choice proceeded to spread rapidly across the country. Within two decades, many charter schools had long waiting lists and parents willing to march on their behalf. By 2017, more than 6,900 charter schools were operating in 44 states plus DC, serving 3.2 million children. In spite of the controversy that often swirls around them, charter schools have dropped strong roots into the field of education. HIT THE DRUM is a page-turning narrative that gives an insider's perspective to explain how this transformation happened. It tells the engaging stories of several dozen unsung heroes and heroines-many of them classroom teachers-who decided to change their lives in order to join this grassroots movement which has dramatically altered the landscape of public education in America. If you are interested in education reform or how social movements grow and spread-or if you want to understand more about why we have the kinds of schools we do and how schools might look in the future-this book is a must-read.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tantillo, Sarah

Leseproben

CHAPTER 3

Where Did the Idea
of Chartering Come From?

Al Shanker, the AFT leader who was probably best known for helping American teachers win the right to bargain collectively, was one of the earliest proponents of chartering.27 (To be clear, I would add: “to a point.”28 Shanker’s notion of chartering was in fact somewhat different from that of others who stepped up to carry the concept forward.)

Shanker was relentless about the need for teachers to be treated as professionals, and he saw school restructuring as a way to achieve “differentiated staffing, in which certain highly talented teachers took on greater responsibilities and were paid more, accordingly.”29 He became captivated by the idea of chartering when he read Ray Budde’s 1988 book Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts,30 which suggested that “districts [should] be reorganized and innovative teachers should be given explicit permission by the school board to create innovative new programs, and like explorers hundreds of years earlier, report back about their discoveries.”31 In fact, Shanker thought this idea should be extended even further, to include entire new schools.32

It should be noted that around the same time, a policy researcher named Joseph Loftus was also pushing the idea of chartering in Chicago. In 1987, not long after the Chicago Teachers Union had struck for the ninth time since 1969,33 US Secretary of Education William Bennett called Chicago’s public schools “the worst in the nation.” He pointed to the 43 percent dropout rate and abysmal ACT (American College Test) scores, adding, “How can anyone who feels about children not feel terrible about Chicago schools? You have an educational meltdown.”34 Mayor Harold Washington appointed a 50-member citizens group to hear proposals for reform and develop a strategy to tackle the problem(s). Joe Loftus’s paper “Charter Schools: A Potential Solution to the Riddle of Reform,” emerged in 1989 as part of that work.35 But in the debate about what to do, the winner was “parent-run schools.” So Loftus put his paper away.

Unaware of the work that Loftus was doing in Chicago, Al Shanker became intrigued by Ray Budde’s ideas and began to pitch them publicly.

On March 31, 1988, Shanker gave a speech at the National Press Club in which he reflected on the reforms that had taken hold in the five years since the release of A Nation at Risk. The way he saw it, “so many things have happened as a result of reform that we are at a point where there is now more than one reform movement in this country. There are really two.”36

The first was a push for a higher standards. He noted:

These reforms are very good for kids who are able to learn in a traditional system, who are able to sit still, who are able to keep quiet, who are able to remember after they listen to someone else talk for five hours, who are able to pick up a book and learn from it – who’ve got all these things going for them.37

But this reform movement, he lamented, “is bypassing about 80 percent of the students in this country.”38 He compared it to a doctor who prescribes a pill that doesn’t work, who says when the patient returns uncured, “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve not responding to my pill. What’s wrong with you?”39

He explained that there was a second movement, “a radical and tiny movement,”40 which needed to be nurtured because it was composed of a small number of people who were trying to build something different that would meet the needs of the remaining 80 percent. Frustrated with the slowness of the first reform movement, he exhorted:

We can’t wait until all the districts throughout the country have the strongest and the best bargaining relationships. We can’t wait until there are more districts that have both charismatic union leaders and superintendents. We can’t wait to find places where everyone feels free to risk things. The question is, can we come up with a proposal which will move us from five or six or seven or ten districts that are doing these very exciting things to reach many, many more students? Can we expand that number very rapidly; not from 10 to 20, but from 10 to 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000? Can we put in a new policy mechanism that will give teachers and parents the right to “opt for” a new type of school, to “opt for” the second type of reform?

I believe that we do not have to wait for the impossible to create the possible. I do not believe that all the conditions have to be right throughout the system in order to do the possible.41

He proposed that school districts and the teachers union could develop a procedure that would encourage any group of six or more teachers to submit a proposal to create a new school. Ultimately, that school-within-a-school could become a totally autonomous school within the district.42

A few months later, he reported in his Sunday New York Times column (the AFT’s paid weekly advertisement called “Where We Stand”) that at the 70th convention of the American Federation of Teachers, 3,000 delegates from across the country had “proposed that local school boards and unions jointly develop a procedure that would enable teams of teachers and others to submit and implement proposals to set up their own autonomous public schools within their schools’ buildings.”43

In October, Shanker was invited to speak at the Itasca Seminar, a three-day annual gathering sponsored by the Minneapolis Foundation at a resort on Gull Lake in northern Minnesota. For years, the seminar had mostly been an effort to connect civic and community group leaders, but in 1988 it focused on policy in the field of education. John Merrow, education correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,44 was brought in to moderate.45

Though Minnesota’s charter law would not emerge for three more years, something definitely began to take root in that setting. First, Shanker spoke about the need to give teachers more opportunities to create innovative programs.46 Then, Joe Nathan, a longtime educator and the founder of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota (and later the author of one of the first books about charter schools47), shared some key findings from the National Governors’ Association’s Time for Results report, which he’d helped to coordinate.48 In particular, he stressed two themes that the governors supported: 1) more public school choice and 2) less regulation in exchange for better results.49 Governor Lamar Alexander had noted in his “Chairman’s Summary”:

We’re ready to give up a lot of state regulatory control—even to fight for changes in the law to make that happen—if schools and school districts will be accountable for the results. We invite educators to show us where less regulation makes the most sense. These changes will require more rewards for success and consequences for failure for teachers, school leaders, schools, and school districts. It will mean giving parents more choice of the public schools their children attend as one way of assuring higher quality without heavy-handed state control.50

Nathan’s focus on state policy caught the attention of Ember Reichgott Junge, the Democratic state senator who ultimately co-sponsored Minnesota’s charter legislation.51 These ideas also intrigued the president of the Minnesota PTA, Barbara Zohn, and a civil rights activist, Elaine Salinas.52

Then longtime educator Sy Fliegel stood up to speak. He and his colleagues in East Harlem District 4 were famous for having created a public school choice system of more than two dozen small schools. What had enabled them to do this? As Fliegel liked to joke, “We had the big advantage of being the worst district in the city of New York. It was always 32 out of 32.”53 In 1973, only 16 percent of the students were reading at grade level, and dropout rates were high.54 The only place to go was up.

As he explained in his book, Miracle in East Harlem,

Nobody really wanted these kids, and because nobody at the central Board of Education cared enough about the worst school district in the city to keep them from trying something new, and because the local district authorities were desperate to try anything that might work, [one unusually dedicated teacher] was allowed, even encouraged, to start a small, experimental school.55

In 1976, Superintendent Tony Alvarado had named him the director of the Office of Alternative Schools, and from that point on, Fliegel had supported teacher after teacher in developing new small schools that offered parents, students, and teachers an array of new choices. Probably the best-known school leader he worked with was Deborah Meier, who founded three successful Central Park East elementary...