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E-mail Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > August > 18 > Entry
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?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Comments
By Dayton Mom
August 19, 2008 9:37 AM | Link to this
I was pleased to see several charter closings — which to me has meant that the system of transparency we have here is working to keep the best and wean the rest. More needs to be done but to me it was a good sign of system reform. I’m ok with charters that are exceeding the results of the public system, and I’m impressed when a charter and DPS merge to create a new kind of system like WoW and East End becoming Ruskin. I think these kinds of reforms are promising. And, I see that the market forces of charters - encouraging DPS to right size and open specialty schools like the girls and boys schools are also the kind of market forces that charter openings were meant to encourage. Thinking too of the STEM initiative, and the private school options, I feel that most parents in Dayton, myself included — have the options we need to get the best results for our children. I am now much more concerned about Early Care and Education. I feel that level of school I could purchase for my daughter was substandard and had ECE been part of a publicly funded school system like k-12, we would have had more choice and been better off during her school preparation years. Too, I see that there is much much more that could be done at home. On my block, my daughter is the only child of 15 or 20 who gets dinner every night, who has a bed time, rules about where she can play, and read to everyday. While there is more any parent can do, there are many children who get no educational support at home other than showing up dressed appropriately every day. I think parents and ECE are two areas we should really be focusing our attention.