LITTLE ROCK — THE EDUCATION reporters and editors over on the other side of our always busy newsroom have been in what the military calls a Target Rich Environment for a week. A bombshell of a court ruling on desegregation that could have national implications, a whole new way to evaluate the state’s teachers is in the works, the state’s throwing out superintendents in failing school districts . . . . Let’s just note that the state’s Board of Education met on a Sunday last week. Somebody put on another pot of coffee.
The photographers have been busy, too. Our own Karen Segrave caught what may have been the most heartbreaking photograph of last week. It showed parents, faces downcast, the very picture of dejection, at a hearing that ended with the state’s taking away their charter school.
This time it was the Dreamland Academy in southwest Little Rock. The board of education voted unanimously to shut it down after it had been going, not very well, for some five years.
Did you ever see that documentary Waiting For Superman, the one about charter schools around the country and how kids are chosen to get in? Watching parents in that movie learn that their kids didn’t win the lottery so they could move on to a better school and a better life would be enough to melt the hardest heart. So was Karen Segrave’s photograph taken right here in Arkansas.
We wish there were a way to tell those parents that everything will be just fine, that it’ll all be okay, that their neighborhood school is doing a bangup job, that their babies will get the very best education. And to cheer up.
Only that wouldn’t be true. Little Rock’s neighborhood schools aren’t exactly setting any records. Except dismal ones. Back in January, the paper reported that 23 schools in Little Rock had scored at less than the 40th percentile in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Which is not good. Which is awful. Something has gotta change if we’re not going to leave another whole generation of children behind.
So in stepped charter schools, and about time. Charters are experimental schools that don’t have district headquarters burying them in red tape. Charters allow teachers to try new things—without having to run them through the school district’s bureaucratic maze, where they tend to get lost. Or at least need four peer endorsements, all in triplicate with union consent. And then they can be postponed. Maybe forever.
But charter schools, they work.
Or they don’t.
And the Dreamland Academy didn’t. Not according to the state’s board of education. And so the board voted to shut it down. Unanimously. Which is saying something. Note that this wasn’t Little Rock’s school board trying to shut down another charter school. So its long record of fighting charter schools could be maintained. (Although, to its credit, it supported Dreamland when it opened.) The state’s board of education does approve charters, and it takes its duty seriously. And if a charter school isn’t working, it takes its obligation to shut them down seriously, too.
Dreamland was supposed to focus on educating kids who had struggled in school and might have problems with their behavior. Talk about taking on the tough jobs. (Tell us again, critics of charter schools, how they cherry-pick the best and brightest from the regular public schools.)
Unfortunately for all concerned, Dreamland couldn’t boost scores high enough to suit the state. For three years, the charter was on the state’s schoolimprovement list because of those low test scores. And this past year, the school was the subject of something called a Scholastic Audit. That audit found, among other things, “a culture of low expectations.” It’s the latest form of bigotry.
Just about the most damning thing you can say about a charter school is that it has a culture of low expectations. After all, the people who sacrifice, survive and generally struggle to create a charter school are the kind who dream dreams. Big dreams. As in Dreamland Academy. A culture of low expectations at a charter? It violates the basic reason for having a charter school, which is supposed to have great expectations. And fulfill them.
THERE WERE other problems at Dreamland. Reports said students were consistently late. Some of the teachers weren’t licensed to teach the subjects they were assigned. The report found little evidence of parental involvement.
The kids can get all that in any poorly run public school. Why have a charter?
Which brings us to the good news, such as it is in this case.
This school—deemed a failure by the state—was closed.
That’s the difference between a charter and a regular public school. When was the last time you heard of a regular public school being closed “just” because it didn’t educate its kids? When charters fail, they shut their doors. The other kind can go on to ruin another generation of kids trapped in failing schools.
Yes, that’s cold comfort for the once hopeful parents of Dreamland’s students. Make that former students. But those students can now go to other schools, and, who knows, maybe even better ones. That is, if charter schools continue to spread and regular schools have to compete with them.
Maybe, just maybe, these parents or another equally brave bunch of them and educators to match will put together another charter school. One better than Dreamland. One where dreams become real, not vanish.
A parent can dream. And with the right charter school, those dreams may yet come true.
Strength.
Editorial, Pages 14 on 06/22/2012