Education in Boulder

Idealism, Idiocy in Charter Schools

By Richard Martin, 4-03-07

	It's great, if you can get in

When Rep. Michael Merrifield resigned from his post as the chairman of the House Education Committee last week, it may have seemed just another boneheaded maneuver by a politician who doesn’t know better than to keep his real views buttoned up even in a “private” email.

In a message to State Sen. Sen. Sue Windels, referring to the ongoing battle over creating new charter schools in Colorado, Merrifield was impolitic enough to write, “There must be a special place in Hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherizers!”

Apologizing for his unfortunate remark and citing his struggle with throat cancer, Merrifield stepped down from his statehouse leadership on education. The subtext to this tale, though, is that almost a decade-and-a-half after the charter-school movement caught wind in this country, there remains a deep pool of mistrust and opposition regarding these private-style, state-funded schools.

Merrified and Windels may or may not have been “conspiring to shut down the Colorado Charter School Institute,” as Post columnist David Harsanyi put it, but they were certainly voicing the conviction of thousands of parents in the West, where the movement has been particularly powerful, that charter schools suck resources from the traditional public school system while not being subject to the same level of scrutiny.

The conservatives who believe that charters and vouchers are the only way to save the disgraceful public-education system in this country have long railed against “the war against charter schools,” as this 2002 editorial from “School Reform News,” published by the Heartland Institute, exemplifies. But now, with counties like Boulder pretty much overflowing with charter schools (Boulder County now has 9; Denver County has 20), and with school boards and county governments effectively blocking any new charter schools, the movement has definitely reached a plateau.

That doesn’t mean they’re actually accessible. When our 7-year-old son applied to kindergarten two years ago at Horizons Alternative Charter elementary along with a few other well-regarded public schools, he didn’t even come close to getting in any of them. It’s a lottery with very few winners. We ended up helping start a new private school, Eastern Sun Academy, which was originally envisioned as a charter, until it became clear that the new elementary’s vision of “contemplative education” would never pass muster with the local school board.

But the opposition to expanding charters is real, and it’s not just limited to “local school districts … populated by old-guard union hands,” as Harsanyi sneers. State and federal legislators, school boards, parents, and education reporters all have growing questions about the system for granting and overseeing charters.

“A decade after creating its first publicly funded charter school, Florida has turned a worthy educational experiment into a blank check for eager entrepreneurs,” opined the St. Petersburg Times, not known as a bastion of old-school liberalism, earlier this week. “As a new report by the Orlando Sentinel suggests, the push for quantity has supplanted the pursuit of quality. And the students are the ones who suffer.”

For an over-the-top tale of the charter-school world, see this New York magazine feature on Courtney Ross, widow of media tycoon Steve Ross, and her pet educational project, Ross Global Academy.

Ross Global, writes New York reporter Phoebe Eaton, epitomizes everything idealistic and idiotic about the charter-school educational utopia.

The school has “an unusual—even loopy—vision: a Metropolitan Museum ambience wreathed with the joss-stick smoke of the New Age movement. ‘Educating the whole child for the whole world’ is how the school frames its quest to turn its charges into global citizens of the 21st century.

Sounds like it would fit right in in Boulder, now that I think about it.

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