 November/December 1999 (XXXVII 5) |
n September the first meeting of PYM's Public Education Working Group focused on "Charter Schools: What are they? Should Friends be in favor of them or not?"
Phil Esbrandt, executive director of Foundations, Inc., an organization providing technical assistance to groups interested in beginning charter schools, outlined the history and goals of the national charter school movement. Intended to provide choice within the public school system and to encourage competition in order to improve schools, the first charter schools were opened in Wisconsin in 1993. There were 1,200 such schools operating in the United States last school year, and another 500 were expected to open this school year, bringing the total number of students attending to 350,000 or about 1 percent of the school population.
Charter schools may be started by individuals, agencies, coalitions, community-based nonprofit groups, and private corporations. Pennsylvania provides start-up funding for charter schools and allows six months before a new school must open its doors. The local school district must pay the charter school an annual amount equal to 75 percent of the district's per-student expenditure for each student who enrolls. Charter schools are permitted to raise additional money. The first large assessment of such schools will take place in two years, so their effectiveness is unknown.
Sharing concerns about this movement was Dennis Barneby, a Germantown High School teacher and member of School Employees Action Caucus of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Fearing that the charter school movement is yet another assault on society's commitment to the public good, Barneby argued that rather than increasing standards and enforcing them for all schools, charter schools are freed from many regulations, in fact diminishing what is expected of them. Barneby sees the public school system as the last bastion of "public space," and the charter school movement as allowing a fragmentation and privatization of that space, just when society needs to coalesce around agreed-upon expectations for the education of all of its students. Draining much-needed resources from an already underfunded public school system and allowing rushed, poorly-thought out schools to open will only serve to deplete what support exists for the public system, Barneby believes.
The discussion that followed was indeed lively. Great concern was expressed that charter schools will siphon off the parents with the most motivation, skill and time, thus weakening parental involvement in neighborhood public schools. There was a generally-held feeling that charter schools are yet another abandonment of our commitment to a quality education for all.
The Public Education Working Group encourages Friends to express their views on this and other controversial issues in education by writing PYM News and local newspapers and by attending its meetings. The next meeting of the working group is from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday, November 22, at Friends Center, 1515 Cherry Street, Philadelphia. The main topic will be preschool education. For information, contact co-clerks Marlene Santoyo at 215-247-4385 msantoyo@erols.com or Penny Colgan-Davis at 215-247-3697 PenColDav@aol.com.
Penny Colgan-Davis
Germantown Meeting (PA)
Co-clerk of Public Education Working Group
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM