Questions about Rural Charters

Nancy from New Sweden, Maine writes with some wonderfully thoughtful questions. Click here to find out where New Sweden is, and it'll give you some idea of the challenges rural schools face.

Here's what I could cobble together for context: New Sweden is part of the four town School Administrative Unit 122 that consists of two K-8 schools; Woodland's serves 132 kids and and New Sweden's serves 82, both including pre-K. The schools are 8 miles apart.

Though it's not clear from the website, I'm assuming students in grades 9-12 attend either Caribou High School or the K-12 Limestone Community School, both roughly 10 miles away and part of Eastern Aroostook RSU, a recently consolidated district that also includes two primary schools, one serving pre-K through 2nd grade and another serving grades 3-5, a middle school and a high school. The schools "serve over 1600 students and employ 250 professionals," or one adult for every 6.5 kids.

An interesting side note is that Limestone shares it's facility with the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, an application-only magnet school serving 130 students grades 10-12 from across Maine. MSSM is publicly financed, but is independent from any individual school district.

On to Nancy's questions:

How would it be determined if the schools produce "quality opportunities and results"? How long would they be given to show those results? And compared to what (if only as they're relevant to kids and families in town, then why are we looking at state/national results now?)


The "quality opportunities and results" is a reference to my last post. Lots of different ways to define that, but in the past, I've suggested the Nellie Mae Foundation's Emerging Principles of 21st Century Learning as criteria for what schools can and should do - the "opportunity" part.

• Learning doesn’t just happen during school hours or during the traditional school year, capitalize on every opportunity to impart important skills and knowledge to learners.
  

• Including a wider variety of adults in all aspects of learning, complementing the efforts of highly skilled teachers;
  

• Assessing students’ skills and knowledge using a combination of performance-based and traditional testing;
  

• Acknowledging that learning takes place both in and out of the classroom, and providing opportunities for students to expand their skills and knowledge in new settings; and
  

• Addressing the needs and interests of learners while focusing on ambitious learning standards.

As for results, one of the reasons I support chartered schools is that they must clearly describe in their charter what results they will seek to achieve and how they will measure success - and can and should be de-authorized if they do not produce measurable results.

Five years is the minimum to determine whether an approach is viable, but not nearly enough to determine real effects. For instance, Maine Enterprise Schools proposes schools that serve students in grades 6-12. Five years into implementation, we will not have graduated any student who began with us as a sixth grader, so any evaluation up to that point will be partial. Nevertheless, real benchmarks for even partial progress can be developed, and assuming such benchmarks are met, can help hone the model. 10 years in, we'd have 4 classes of graduates who'd been with us from the beginning of 6th grade. So in our case, we fully expect to graduate 95% of our students, all of whom will have at least one college acceptance (even if they do not plan to attend college). That is ONE - not the only - criteria which we can set, gather data on, and compare.

But...I don't think we have to choose between relevance and national standards - we just have to use such standards wisely and carefully. Relevance comes from the experiences we engage in with students, and well designed learning experiences can embody rigorous standards of academic achievement. As those who've heard my spiel know, I argue that we need farmers who are soil scientists and sustainability experts, who can master and apply complex mathematical modeling, who can design and maintain a website. Our fishermen and women must also be marine biologists, our artists need to understand the economy, etc.

That is not to say that we should define "relevance" in terms only of job skills - or in terms or preparedness for college for that matter. Not only are distinctions between "vocational" and "academic" profoundly obsolete, but they apportion knowledge and capability in ways that do not seem to produce very good results for many individuals and for the communities in which they live.

Equally, or arguably more important, are things like understanding both big and small economic concepts, being able to critically view and interpret media, and knowing how to function in and contribute to a democracy. And perhaps the most important component of "relevance" (and the one which many one-room schoolhouses or island schools excel at) is the degree to which a school is able to "compel" students to develop what are often thought as soft skills, or "character." Adaptability, perserverence, confidence, compassion, conflict resolution, and, yes, responsibility...what used to be quaintly referred to as "hoeing your own row."

So the key to relevance is NOT that we teach different kids different stuff...it is that we teach the same crucial knowledge, skills and dispositions in ways that kids both VALUE it and actually learn it. Community-based schools weave much tighter connections between adults and kids, between the economics and politics of a community, and between the natural environment the ways in which humans interact with it.

Sorry for the long answer, but it helps explain my answer to Nancy's second set of questions:

For example, the school in our town - New Sweden Elementary - does nicely on most current measures. Would it be your opinion that the town could make the school a public charter and leave it just the way it already is? How would that help the school, the town and/or the state (besides the extra half-a-million for 3 years)?

My opinion (and that of Todd Ziebart of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, who I consulted on Nancy's question) is that the scenario above defeats the purpose of a charter school law. I'd need more definition of what is meant by "doing nicely on current measures," such as data that tracks the high school graduation rate, post-secondary attendance, employment and incarceration rates of New Sweden students over time. If, 10 years later, the K-8 New Sweden school students are above 95% in all those categories accept incarceration, then my answer might change to "maybe." IF the charter application can demonstrate how such status will "help the school, town, or state," - by reducing the cost of education, improving the quality of education, offering a superb New Sweden education to kids from, say, Caribou - then it would be hard not to support that.

Unfortunately, though, I've seen (as a teacher, as a member of grant-making panels, as an outside consultant) an AWFUL lot of federal and foundation grant money go to schools, and NOT a lot sustained change. This first round of charters needs to go to schools that give us the best possible chance of producing better outcomes for as many kids as possible. "Doing nicely by current measures" doesn't sound like a compelling enough reason to grant a charter, nor does it sound like a terribly good use of half-a-million taxpayer dollars.

I would, though, support legislation that grants small schools like New Sweden much of the autonomy to pursue the "best practice" approaches that charters will benefit from. In New Sweden, for instance, the number of students in each grade varies from a low of 3 to a high of 18. Such small schools CAN and should be able to turn their small size into an advantage. Rather than having a teacher for every grade, or at the middle and high school level one for every subject, schools can adopt standards-based, multi-age approaches that require a different set of teaching strengths and a different way of framing curriculum. That in turn implies multiple pathways to teacher certification and adapting NCLB reporting requirements so that schools can develop curricula that covers the same standards, but "delivers" them to a mixed group of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders over three years.

These are examples of the significant drags on both cost and productivity that cause small schools to spend more than they need to. That in turn makes them more "expensive" compared to more "efficient" schools. Especially since consolidation, getting slightly better at efficient mediocrity becomes an argument in favor of sacrificing small schools for the good of overall district budget. That, as I've argued elsewhere, is profoundly short-sighted - resulting ultimately in fewer, more expensive, less capable graduates.