BLITZ KRIEG PUBLISHING
Are Charter Schools Good for Our Children?
by Donna Gundle-Krieg January 13, 2009
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Charter schools have changed the face of education in Michigan and across the nation. These schools are for students or families who would like a government funded option to the traditional public schools.
Are charter schools good or bad? There are many different opinions on this subject.
Many of the 93,892 Michigan students who attend charter schools love the option, as do many educators. “Charter schools are an experiment that has been phenomenally successful,” Tom Horne, the Arizona Department of Education Schools Superintendent, said in an article on Charter Schools Monthly.
Yet many powerful people in the public school systems have done everything they can do to stop charter schools from opening, and to convince others that they lack quality or accountability.
Of course charter schools have accountability. While many charter schools are great, some have been closed for not performing. Doesn’t the closing of non-performing schools demonstrate the accountability of the system? Have you ever seen a public school closed for non-performance?
In fact, effective performance is the most important factor in the future success of the charter school movement. “With financing growing tighter and state funds shrinking, access to money will increasingly hinge on charter schools’ ability to demonstrate quality in academic achievement, leadership, and management.” says Jan Krygier of Charter School Monthly.
Effective charter schools in failing districts such as Detroit offer options and hope for many children.
A few years ago, retired suburban philanthropist Bob Thompson offered $200 million to build 15 charter high schools in Detroit. These schools would guarantee to graduate 90 percent of their students. Yet the community turned Thompson down, as they felt that he was “a white meddler out to steal their children,” according to Nolan Finley of the Detroit News. “They were joined in their absurdity by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who threw their lot in with the teacher union,” said Finley.
A few years later, Detroit is officially the worst big city school district in the nation, and its finances will be taken over by the state of Michigan. Yet the governor and Democratic lawmakers are still refusing to life the cap on charter schools, and the state House just passed a law protecting DPS from competition.
Even a group of Detroit teachers are pleading for the chance to remake a school under the successful Green Dot model.
Thompson hasn’t given up. He had already opened University Prep Academy, and he's working on a math and science school as well as an art school. The Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies stands to become a model for education as an engine of urban economic development and minority outreach. This combination middle school and high school “gives hope for parents desperate to find alternatives instead of despair over the broken Detroit Public Schools,” according to Daniel Howes of the Detroit News.
Thompson told Howe in an interview: "The biggest challenge I can think of is inner city kids in Detroit and an education for those kids. We think we're making a difference, a measurable difference, and to me that's very important."
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Detroit blew chance for school rescue
By Nolan Finley of the Detroit News
With the Detroit Public Schools near disintegration, it ought to be noted that it's been five years since Plymouth philanthropist Bob Thompson was told to take his $200 million and get back to the suburbs.
Thompson, a retired road builder obsessed with spending his fortune to get urban children a high-quality education, ran into a political buzz saw when he offered to open 15 charter high schools in the city that would guarantee to graduate 90 percent of their students and send 90 percent of those graduates on to college.
Community activists denounced Thompson as a white meddler out to steal their children. They were joined in their absurdity by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who threw their lot in with the teacher union.
The rejection of Thompson's millions became a national story of a city so seized by racial divisions it couldn't set them aside even to save its children.
So instead of a network of alternative schools that would have rescued roughly 5,000 students from the sinking DPS, look what Detroit has today:
A school district that fails to graduate 70 percent of its students; a school board that's fired two superintendents and an interim superintendent in four years; 18 of its 19 high schools on the failure list; and a fiscal meltdown.
Five years after Thompson was given the boot, Detroit is officially the worst big city school district in the nation and still sends more children to welfare and prison than it does to college.
Think about how different things might have been. Had the Thompson schools been built, they would be preparing to graduate their first class in the spring. Two thousand Detroit seniors would be making college plans. And Detroit's fast-fleeing middle class would have a reason to stay.
Yet no one has dialed up Thompson to apologize, to say they were wrong, to beg him for a second chance.
In fact, the governor and Democratic lawmakers are stubbornly blocking other Bob Thompsons from saving Detroit's children.
High-quality national charter school operators are lined up to get into the city. A group of Detroit teachers are pleading for the chance to remake a school under the successful Green Dot model.
But state law still traps students in hopeless public schools. Granholm refuses to lift the cap on charter schools, and the state House just passed a law protecting DPS from competition.
Nothing's changed in Detroit.
To his credit, Thompson didn't sulk back to Plymouth. He already had his University Prep Academy up and running, and thanks to a loophole engineered by Republican lawmakers, he's at work on two more schools, a math and science school at the Detroit Science Center and an art school in the Argonaut building.
The pace is less aggressive than he hoped -- he once believed other national foundations would match his funds and make even more schools possible -- but it's a lot better than nothing.
If Detroit families are lucky, the public school system will collapse in the coming year, and in the rubble, someone will come across Thompson's phone number.
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New school gives hope for the future
Daniel Howes of the Detroit News
Who says nothing creative can come from Detroit anymore?
As the city's public schools prepare to become wards of Lansing for the second time in a decade, a new kind of public school this week is beginning to take applications. The Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies stands to become a model for education as an engine of urban economic development and minority outreach.
This is a good news story, folks, optimism for the future amid deepening gloom. It's progress instead of imminent collapse, an innovative solution instead of more chronic failure, revival of a city landmark instead of abandonment, hope for parents desperate to find alternatives instead of despair over the broken Detroit Public Schools.
Financed by $19 million from philanthropist Bob Thompson, the combination middle school and high school is scheduled to open in September and is expected to be fully enrolled with 880 students by 2012. Alongside, in the former General Motors Corp. Argonaut Building, will be the new graduate program at the College for Creative Studies.
"This really can have an impact on Detroit," CCS President Rick Rogers told me Wednesday. "This huge building has been vacant for 10 years. Two thousand people a day will be coming into this building."
A middle school. A high school. A grad school -- altogether a chain of aspirational education, where older students of design and the creative arts can set examples and chart career possibilities for younger ones. Also, there will be five undergraduate design programs, a design research center, a conference center with a 500-seat auditorium, 300 beds for CCS students and a dining facility.
That's just the end of a beginning, an educational jolt to a New Center in need of more people and the economic activity that comes with them. It's also another option, because Detroit needs schools that can keep kids enrolled, get them to graduation and into college instead of watching roughly 75 percent of them drop out and restart the downward spiral dismantling Detroit.
"What's the biggest challenge you can think of," Thompson asked me Wednesday in a rare interview. "The biggest challenge I can think of is inner city kids in Detroit and an education for those kids. We think we're making a difference, a measurable difference, and to me that's very important."
It should be to Detroit, too, where the appalling inability to adequately educate its kids, to supply them with textbooks, to provide accountability to a dwindling number of taxpayers has reached towering heights of tragedy and embarrassment.
DPS teachers and bureaucrats may oppose Thompson-backed schools, as they did a few years back in a legendary protest against his offer to spend $200 million building 15 high schools, but do they have any credibility given their epic failure?
The School for Creative Studies, a joint venture of CCS and the Henry Ford Learning Institute, is the third school in Detroit underwritten by Thompson's Thompson Education Foundation. Its only requirement in exchange for a grant: that 90 percent of the students graduate and 90 percent go to college, a metric that all the Thompson-backed schools, as well as the similar Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, have exceeded.
This stuff -- small schools with high standards and such themed curriculums as college prep, science and math, creative studies -- works. Dearborn's Henry Ford Academy, replicated in Chicago and, soon, Detroit and San Antonio, has a cumulative graduation rate of more than 90 percent. All of the graduates of its 2007 and 2008 classes here were accepted to college.
This isn't just academics; it's economics, too. For all the efforts to make Detroit "cool," to woo knowledge workers, to lay plans for an "aerotropolis" near Detroit Metropolitan Airport, to rebuild downtown, little of it has a chance of long-term success without schools that can produce new, contributing members of the city's economic community.
And if the traditional public school system can't do the job because it won't, competitors with a not-for-profit educational mission will take risks, leverage foundation dollars and step into the void -- which is exactly what's happening with the Thompson-backed schools, among others.
"This is about looking to the future," says Steve Hamp, former president of the Henry Ford and a consultant to the CCS Argonaut project. "This is a doable thing. It's about placing a bet on the future in a very positive way."
Yes, it is.
Stories by Donna Gundle-Krieg:
Education in the United States
Books With Stories by Donna Gundle-Krieg
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Michigan Death Notices home page
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