You’d like to think that Education, in the business of encouraging being thoughtful and curious about things, would be curious about itself. But it would be naïve to expect that. Education isn’t any better at self -examination than any other embedded institution.
There was a news story early in August about a ballot question for a future election that, if passed, would allow for expansion of the number of charter schools allowed by the state. A big point of the article was that charter schools are still, 20-some years out, controversial.
The article rehearsed the usual pros and cons. But if there have been attempts to assess the effect and effectiveness of the charter school movement, the article didn’t allude to them. Are charter schools, though public themselves, with enrollment by lottery, elitist, as charged? Have they in fact siphoned off money and energy from regular public schools? Or, as proponents argue, have they provided refreshing, innovative competition?
We’ve been hearing the same old bickering all these years. What we don’t hear about is any attempt to get closer to the truth of the matter.
I was talking to a friend the other day about the other big topic of public education, regionalization. 55 years ago Wellfleet made the historic decision to loosen its grip on its own youth and subject them to the considerable commute to the Nauset region. And as far as I know, there has never been an attempt to find out if Wellfleet’s kids been well served by this decision.
The friend said, “What’s the use? We’re not going to stuff the genie back in the bottle.” But presumably we could; there’s plenty of room in the two-thirds empty elementary school, which is down from a 1990s high of mid-200s (and growing, at the time) to 94. If, as a result of a thoughtful assessment of the effect of outsourcing of our kids’ education, we concluded that Wellfleet would make a more nourishing educational context, I suppose we could de-regionalize them.
A couple of years ago, because of shrinking enrollment, Provincetown made the excruciating move to close down its high school. Since them the town’s youth has been homogenized into the regional mix. How’s that been working? I haven’t heard. What do the parents think? What’s been the effect on kids? What about the Pied Piper effect on the town? (Yes, it’s true that the secondhome market was the real Pied Piper responsible for the dwindling school population.)
In the mid-90s several Wellfleet families met to come up with a proposal for a charter school for our children, who were about to leave the bosom of Wellfleet’s elementary school. The charter school movement was a hot new idea at the time. We did not relish sending our young innocents out into the cold, cruel world upCape or the prospect of the long bus ride, over two hours roundtrip to the middle school in Orleans. Why would we deliberately deprive our kids of the creative atmosphere of our own wonderful town? Campus Wellfleet became the premise of our charter school proposal.
As I remember, our proposal lost out to that of the Lighthouse Charter School. Our son attended the regular Orleans middle school for one year, then got into the charter school by lottery for the other two years. Life being not a controlled experiment, I have no idea what of his subsequent life is a result, for better or worse, of the switch from one school to the other.
Have charter school kids gone onto to measurably better lives than their regular school counterparts? (As measured how? By salaries? Kinds of jobs? Divorce rates? Some sort of quality of life index?) If Education itself is not interested in asking such questions, somebody should. Perhaps this very newspaper could do an in-depth investigation.
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