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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, August 18, 2008
Dayton: New Orleans without the storm?
In Sunday’s New York Times magazine there was a long story about the effort to rebuild the schools of New Orleans in the years since Hurricane Katrina.
The storm just about wiped the city’s school district — long known as one of the worst run and lowest performing in the country — nearly off the map. The school system there is being rebuilt largely with charter schools. There are three oversight bodies — the now much smaller school district, the state education department and the “recovery” school district, which was set up to charter new schools as part of the rebuilding effort.
New Orleans is a closely watched test case. One of the few good things that resulted from the storm was an opportunity to practically start over when it comes to educating kids.
So now, nearly three years after the storm, education in the city is considerably less centralized and the story covers efforts to police entrepreneurs after they get green-lighted to start new schools, including the need for vigilance both to support schools that slip and, ultimately, to close schools that fail.
There are some parallels between New Orleans and Dayton, the nation’s two biggest charter school markets.
While we had not storm here, we did have an intense crisis in education about 10 years ago that led to an explosion of charter schools to provide choice options to families, who responded by choosing those schools in large numbers.
And like New Orleans, Dayton today has three distinct education sectors, all of which were affected by the emergence of charter schools — the much smaller public school system, a thriving charter school movement and private (mostly religious) schools. Also like New Orleans, the chaos of the early days of the choice movement have subsided and our local education marketplace has begun to settle.
So perhaps a similar discussion is needed here, much like the conversations that are beginning in New Orleans. How can we bring these education sectors together? How can we effectively police the wide variety of schools — holding them to high standards, offering supports when the falter and, when all else fails, closing or restructuring the consistent poor performers?
Late last month during Gov. Ted Strickland’s “conversation on education” in Dayton U.S. District Court Chief Judge Walter E. Rice raised his hand during the question period and suggested Strickland try to organize a summit to include public and charter schools to begin the conversation about where we go from here.
Those folks really do not want to get together and talk. It probably would take a major political play for a summit like Rice described happen. But at some point doesn’t there have to be a unifying force over the total education market here pushing all schools toward better achievement?
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