My wife and I had a heated dispute a few weeks ago over an issue that the UFT’s Leo Casey also blogged about over the recent weekend. Leo had nothing to do with the flap, but in the education reform marital dispute, I ended up taking the same side that Leo took in his post and I came this close to having to sleep on the couch that night.
Leo’s blog post, if you didn’t see it, concerned the “politics of audits” and was prompted by a lawsuit trying to stop some anti-charter school grandstanding by State Comprtoller Thomas DiNapoli. I have an op-ed on the issue in today’s NY Daily News, but that isn’t what got me in trouble with my better half.
Leo’s point is that while charter schools have been complaining about the “regulatory creep” aspects of DiNapoli’s audits, they should have also complained when the city Department of Education said it would subject non-DOE charter schools in NYC to new citywide school report cards, among other things.
Leo writes: That’s not regulatory creep; it’s a regulatory run away train. If there is any principle which is at the core of charter schools, it is educational autonomy from the local school district.
I offered the same argument to my wife, who is a bit of a parent warrior. I talked about keeping charter schools pure, free from the contamination that educratic inertia can provide. I said that even though the report card issue might not be a huge deal, it was important for charter schools to assert their very charter-ness on each and every chance they get, etc.
My wife’s take was very different, and in some ways is the result of her being a parent consumer back in our Milwaukee days. When our oldest son started Kingergarten, we had choice up the wazoo. You could choose neighborhood schools, magnet schools, suburban schools, public charter schools, and – starting that year – low-income parents could choose to enroll their kids in private and religious schools under the state’s voucher law.
We went to a lot of the open houses and school fairs. Even though we didn’t qualify for vouchers, we checked out some of the private and religious schools in our neighborhood. We ended up selecting a public magnet school (arts-centered) for our son, in large part because we completely knew what we were getting. We had access to all sorts of data that allowed us to compare the school’s performance with the state average, with the city average, with comparable schools, etc.
While we liked what we saw in some of the private schools (and I understand why sometimes the climate of discipline and safety itself is enough to sway parents to enroll their kids there), we just didn’t know what we’d be buying. We wanted data. We saw the test scores the private schools touted, but at times it felt like comparing apples to oranges. The scores the Milwaukee Public Schools used might not be perfect, we thought, but at least they are consistent for comparison’s sake.
So this is the direction in which my wife gravitated when the issue of the DOE report cards came up. While I was thinking about regulatory creep, my wife wanted more and consistent data so she could compare charter school performance with real examples that she knew and understood. She thought it would be lame for charter schools to fight that kind of marketplace-friendly evaluation.
Despite my insistence that it is important to keep the bureaucrats out of charters, I did see what she was getting at.
The only question that remains, I suppose, is whether those DOE report cards are as parent-friendly as they have been billed. If a school got an “A” does that mean it is a school where we should feel comfortable sending our kids, or does it just mean it had a lot of growth last year and still sucks. (My wife has since raised this same point after spending more time with the city’s report cards.)
This is the problem when you have to rely on the system you’re competing with to handle these sorts of evaluations. I think I’m still siding with Leo.