Gary Charter School Fights for Space

Actually I just saved this story in my del.icio.us links. It deserves some play here though.

So I want to attack a point that was made here that Gary, Indiana a struggling city doesn't seem to want to work with charter school such as the one we hear about here....

Back in May, a KIPP school in Annapolis, Maryland, had to close its doors because it couldn’t find a bigger space. KIPP says it’s determined to avoid the same fate in Gary. But the Gary district doesn’t seem to want to help out. The school has tried to purchase one of the district’s abandoned buildings. But the Gary school board was prohibited from selling to competitors. This summer, though, that changed. The state legislature passed a new law. It said districts could not keep charters from buying their buildings. But Goble says shortly after that, the Gary district took all their vacant facilities off the market. Why the resistence to charters?

ROSE: They pull a significant amount of students out of the public schools.

Lowell Rose is an Indiana educational consultant.

ROSE: And every kid that they take out..takes with the kid, to the charter school, the dollar amounts of state support and local support that would have otherwise gone to the Gary public schools.

So these students that they've failed to teach, especially the one I heard at the beginning talking about how the teachers in his Gary public school just gave up on him, represents nothing more than revenue. And that reminds me, isn't this something that's been talked about as reform for our public schools? To allow the money to follow the students instead of remaining with the public school district?

I didn't notice the answer of that educational consultant when I listened this report, but I was about to conjure up another answer. My answer to the hostility towards the charter school in Gary was a certain amount of jealousy. Such as how dare this upstart school do better than us. Well we have no way of knowing that do we.

Anyway I got this from the District 299 blog, they cover the Chicago Public Schools. I've been reading that blog for a while now and I even got them on my blogroll. If you want to know where District 299 came from well I guess that the CPS' district number. These schools districts in this state have numbers. And that's probably everywhere.

Of course I want to point out a couple of other education stories out there.

From the Capitol Fax Blog about the difficulty of removing problem teachers.

And Bill Baar's West Side chimes in on a public high school to be run by the US Marine Corps. I imagine there'd be more resistance to that since the Marines are a military organization but like doing a charter school you gotta do something to help these kids learn something. Furthermore this is a way to take back control of the classroom as well.