Charter Schools Have Worsened the Existing Wretched K-12 Education System in Minnesota >>>>> The Errant Approach of Joe Nathan and the Center for School Change

Terrible K-12 education in Minnesota was made worse with the unfortunate advent of charter schools in June 1991, errantly celebrated by Aaliyah Hodge and Joe Nathan in their article, “30 years into the charter school movement” (Star Tribune, June 12).

 

The early 1990s could have been a promising time for the improvement of public education in Minnesota.  In 1983, the federally commissioned study, “A Nation at Risk,” had called attention to the academic failings of public education in the United States, giving considerable attention to the disparities that existed in terms of ethnicity and class.  Widely varying calls for reform ensued.  A major force among those calling for public school change came from those who wanted to institute annual objective testing and the production of disaggregated data specifying how students performed on academic assessments by ethnicity and economic status.  This push for rigor and equity eventually resulted in No Child Left Behind legislation (2003) and a system by which schools were held responsible for results pertinent to students in all ethnic and economic categories.

 

But another, very different, major force among those advocating for reform came from those calling for school choice.  In Minnesota, this induced locally centralized public school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools to offer ranked options to students across residential boundaries.  A lawsuit filed by the NAACP, settled in 2000, opened the way for students from families perceiving inequities to transfer to suburban districts.  Others called for vouchers, whereby students could gain governmental subsidies to move from public to private schools. And then there were those, such as Joe Nathan (director of the Center for School Change since 1988), who advocated for the creation of charter schools.

 

To understand why all of these approaches calling for school choice are lazy and misguided, first consider the following:

 

Excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum to students of all demographic descriptors.  An excellent teacher is a professional with deep and broad knowledge, possessing the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.  Curriculum should be logically sequenced, grade by grade, to allow for review without excess repetition.  At grades preK-5, curriculum should be uniform for all students, with an emphasis on the key areas of mathematics, natural science, history, government, geography, economics, literature, English usage, and the fine arts.  At the middle school (grades 6-8) level, those subjects should also be emphasized, with increasing access also to world languages and the technological and vocational arts.  Upon the foundation of a rigorous preK-8 education, most students should be able to focus on Advanced Placement courses in high school and to exercise multiple elective options according to driving interest.

 

With such a curricular approach, students will go forth at graduation upon a shared base of knowledge necessary for an informed citizenry, prepared to live as culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied adults.  Having gained knowledge and skill sets across the liberal, technological, and vocational arts, students will be in a position, particularly by their last two years in high school, to focus on those subjects for which they have developed an informed interest and are consonant with their vocational and professional goals.

 

School choice is a lazy way to go about education change and almost always denies to students the commonly shared bodies of knowledge afforded by the above-described approach.  All of the school choice plans tend to hope that some situation other than the one that a student is in will somehow be better.  But suburban school systems, particular those of the near suburbs, are just as wretched as those of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  There will never be enough public funding to pay for widespread student attendance in private schools.  And charter schools are widely variant in quality;  most, operating with limited curriculum and ill-paid teachers, are even worse than traditional public schools.

 

We should put aside our American exceptionalism and realize that the best school systems of the world (Taiwan, Singapore, Finland) focus on providing high-quality instruction in the mainline public schools;  uniform academic excellence across demographic groups is the emphasis, not student choice.  In the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized districts, the most critical problems have to do with knowledge-deficient curriculum and ill-trained teachers, the latter of whom go forth from abominable college and university based programs operating upon a philosophy that devalues knowledge and creates teachers largely bereft of same.

 

Charter schools have been a distraction from those most vexing dilemmas of curriculum and teacher quality:

                       

We would have been much better off without charter schools, focusing our attention instead on the schools of locally centralized districts, staffed with retrained, knowledgeable teachers capable of imparting to all of our precious children a commonly shared body of knowledge, on the basis of which those students exercise options in high school that allow them to express their personal creativity and pursue their driving interests.