School daze

Ann Arbor should reject charter school

Michigan continues to be a front-runner in the national race to expand the charter school program that began eight years ago in Minnesota and has since grown exponentially. National Heritage Academies, one of the top charter school developers in the country, has set its sights on Ann Arbor as the location of a new charter school to be opened in the fall. The proposed school - South Arbor Charter Academy - would be chartered through Central Michigan University. Official approval is expected by CMU trustees in March. This rapidly-growing trend - South Arbor would be the fifth charter school in Washtenaw County alone - portends possible disaster for the state's ailing pubic school system.

Charter schools have been justified as a means of injecting new life into public education nationwide. They are a form of quick-fix political euthanasia for the public schools that are being abandoned by their governmental custodians. Twenty-nine states now have adopted charter school legislation and in his recent State of the Union address, President Clinton renewed his promise to increase the number of charter schools to 3,000 by next year. There are currently 137 charter schools in Michigan, enrolling approximately 30,000 students. The addition of a charter school in Ann Arbor would further the state's policy of siphoning money out of public schools and pumping it into privately contracted institutions whose agendas and educational philosophies are largely unregulated.

In an article in The Ann Arbor News, spokesperson Jeff Poole said The National Heritage Academies' schools are based on four basic principles - a strong moral focus, structured discipline, parental involvement and a "back to the basics" curriculum. It is hard to know what is meant by such cryptic phrases as "back to the basics" and "strong moral focus," but it is quite possible that such ideas could include the kind of "traditional" curricula that educational research and movements toward multicultural education have attempted to combat. Most charter schools tend to have a "philosophy" or specialization that community groups and parents have felt were lacking in public schools. This backlash against regular public schools - encouraged by state governments nationwide - amounts to a kind of neo-Populist social conservatism that has become a familiar feature of American life.

The legislative support for charter schools has allowed parents and local, ad-hoc school boards to turn their backs on state public schools and to form whatever kinds of curricula they want, while enjoying tax-exempt status and state funding. Although parents should certainly be involved in their children's education, they need to work together with their governments to ensure all public schools receive equitable attention and improvement. By pouring money into charter schools, the state government is ignoring those public academic institutions in need of funding in favor of private contractors who are given liberty to decide where and how their schools will operate. This is a semi-privatization of public education. Regular, non-chartered public schools are being left out in the cold by their governments, and this will produce a serious decline in our nation's already much too neglected public school system.

01-27-99