The supposed “target” of the piece is charter schools, which
Breslin characterizes as little more than “diploma mills” that have lost sense
of their primary mission as laboratories for innovation. Breslin sees enemies
everywhere, and this paranoia blinds him to the real problems facing our inner
city schools in particular.
The Christie Administration’s main focus has been on the
subject of accountability, and on that issue alone he deserves high marks.
Setting in motion a system of performance review is a critical step, and while
I agree with critics who believe that devising a fair system, one that utilizes
qualitative as well as quantitative metrics, is problematic.
Breslin also bemoans efforts to encourage veteran teachers
to consider early retirement as some kind of nefarious policy, but as one cog
in the effort to get new teachers into our urban schools, early retirement is a
reasonable position. Teachers have proven, for the most part, to be risk
averse, and this is most evident- for different reasons I suspect- in our
youngest and oldest teachers. Aversion to risk is a serious hindrance to
innovation and reform, and anything we can do to encourage, and reward teachers
to be risk takers are essential.
Charter schools will never, on their own, be able to provide
broad reform to our education system in the current environment, where charters
are seen as competitors rather than partners in the reform process. Individual
families in the inner city do deserve the opportunity to send their children to
quality schools, but rather than siphon off money, resources, and proactive
families and students from the urban schools, I would rather the inner city
public schools themselves be given the freedom to act like charter schools.
It is obvious to me that there is an unfortunate negative
correlation between government intrusion and the performance of urban schools;
greater government oversight and mandates has done nothing to improve performance
in these schools, and in many cases performance has actually declined.
New Jersey public schools are not “under siege,” but they
are being mismanaged, poorly staffed, unduly burdened by government, and
resource poor. It will take comprehensive, holistic, iconoclastic solutions to
improve the quality of instruction received by inner city students. The
solutions to what ails our schools will be, in many cases, counterintuitive to
conventional thinking, and that is a main reason that so little has been accomplished.
Rather than see charters as the enemy, Mr. Breslin should
join me in calling for greater cooperation between our public and our charter
schools, ; working together these schools can share ideas on “what works” and
make a positive contribution to instruction and management.
More to the point, what public education requires for them
to be successful is the adoption of a more entrepreneurial mindset. From
management of the school to management of the classroom, we must kindle in our
schools the entrepreneurial spirit that has proven so successful in our general
economy.
In my next posting I will explore more deeply what it means
to be an entrepreneurial educator, and how we can improve the quality of
instruction delivered to our children in the inner city. This entrepreneurial
spirit, when tied to essential reforms in our state curriculum and testing, and
to the greater involvement of key stakeholders in our business and non-profit
communities, holds the key to education’s future.
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