Lately, there’s been a lot of chatter about charter schools. Rochester, with some of the lowest-performing schools in the country, is a market ripe for an explosion of charters, according to some local educators.
Rochester schools Superintendent Bolgen Vargas has on multiple occasions talked about the decline in student population, which is largely attributable to charter schools. The district has lost about 3,200 students to charters, and a continued decline would have a serious impact on almost every aspect of city schools, he says.
Fewer teachers and non-teaching employees would be needed. Fewer schools would be needed, which raises questions about the massive $1.2 billion schools modernization project under way.
The big question: How many students could the district potentially lose? The answer could be thousands.
Most of the charter schools that have opened here are small schools developed by local educators, some of them expatriates of the city school district. But what if Rochester attracted more attention from the larger charter management organizations like Kipp, for example?
These are companies managing a portfolio of schools with resources, methodology, and a track record — something attractive to business leaders and investors.
Joe Klein, chair of Klein Steel and former treasurer of True North Rochester Preparatory Charter School, has created E3 Rochester, a company that could radically change the education landscape in the city. E3 recruits successful charter management organizations. Klein has so far attracted the interest of at least two organizations, and each has applied to open a school in Rochester in 2014.
Klein says E3 will be driven by quality, and not growth for growth’s sake.
At a meeting last night, Vargas said he knows of seven more charter schools that will open in the district over the next two years. Rochester’s hospitals aren’t reporting a boom in the city’s birthrate, so you can see where this is going.
Let’s assume Vargas is right, and let’s also assume that none of the existing charters close; the drop in the district’s student population could be substantial over the next decade.
It’s too early to say whether that’s bad or good.
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2013.
I don’t know if charters are good or bad per se, but you’re assuming that this is a zero sum game due to our slow population growth. Every year plenty of middle class parents exit the city for the suburbs because they rightly or wrongly believe that their children won’t have an opportunity for a quality education if they stay. If charters provide that opportunity then the overall pool of students within the city is larger, not smaller.
Thank you RochesterParent for making the case more clearly and cogently than I generally do.
It doesn’t matter if the students are picked by lottery. Simply entering the lottery indicates a higher level of “give a crap” than those who don’t. Taking 3.000 of those kids out of the public schools basically reduces the percentage of students in the district whose parents do care enough (or are knowledgeable enough) to perform this advocacy for their children.
I suppose that eventually there will be 80 charter schools and what’s left will be a few public schools where the students who are the worst problem children, or whose parents don’t/can’t advocate effectively will rot until they are 16, when they drop out to live on society’s margins.
If public schools could expel problem children the way charter schools can, if public schools could claim hardship to prevent having to have a major special ed program, if public schools had the parent involvement that charter schools do, they’d be doing as well as charter schools.
I know that in some areas the charter school experiment has been a failure due to a variety of reasons, but here, the conditions I just outlined have helped charter schools to become successful enough. God knows our school has about 10 middle schoolers we would love to expel. Our school would run far better and the scores would improve immediately if we could. We can’t, so we will be judged a failure for making an effort to educate some seriously difficult children who have arrived in middle school without the skills to do 5th grade work.
Let us not forget that my evaluation is tied to some extent to these children’s ability to do middle school level work. I’ve spent my year trying to get them to that level.
Analogy: try to get a high school baseball player to be able to play in the major leagues. The kid’s the right size, the kid’s at his physical prime, but the kid does not have the experience or skills to do that. Is it the coach’s fault the kid can’t cut it in the major leagues? Or is it the decision of the person who foisted that kid on the hapless coach?
Carry the Analogy: Take a mid-level baseball team. Ship all the best players to other teams. Now try to make the playoffs. That is what charter schools are doing to the RCSD.