What if the publisher of the Hartford Business Journal came to me and suggested that while my column was certainly a gift from God, I remained a disappointment.
Impossible, you say? Well, of course, but stick with me. This is a case study, designed to make a point.
The publisher’s problem: I hardly ever write about poetry, sports, theoretical physics, or medieval romance novels. I have to reach out to more diverse readers, the publisher said. It isn’t fair for me to compete only for business leaders interested in utility regulation, while the rest of the staff felt obligated to write about the classicism of John Keats.
The publisher is the publisher. That’s who signs my $5 paycheck each week. Despite the fact that my core competency, superb as it is, has its boundaries, I’ll take a stab at comparing the dreary work of Henrik Ibsen to the atmosphere of the Front Street development project in Hartford. That will be very inclusive.
This is just about the kind of conversation going on these days between charter schools in Connecticut and those busy-bodies who pretend to be watching over them.
The charter schools aren’t being asked how they are doing, or whether they are cranking out scholars, or whether they have discovered the secret of how to trick suburban white kids into going to school with their black and brown brothers and sisters.
No, these days, the charter school folks march solemnly off to the General Assembly and promise that they will make every effort to be inclusive; that is, to seek out “special education” kids and kids with basket-case academic records and other candidates likely to drag down the charter schools’ performance and make them mirror the mediocre-to-awful performances of the public schools against whom they “compete.”
It just isn’t fair, the traditional public schools say, that the charter schools don’t necessarily have to take every Tom, Dick, and Harry who walks in the door, but that they can “cherry-pick” and seek out only those kids steps away from a full scholarship to Oxford.
Notice that none of this nonsense leaves much room for the charter schools to say, well, yes, we don’t have many special-ed kids; or, yes, maybe because by our nature, the families who choose us are a bit more competent and motivated than the average urban canon fodder — but, hey, look at the good job we’re doing with the kids we do have.
No, no, we don’t care about that. Educating the kids is the least of it. The goals are, first off, to not embarrass the adults in the traditional public school system. Next, it’s all about the test scores — and the challenging kids don’t do median scores any favors.
So, if through some miracle, a charter school attracts a certain kind of kid who prospers in the charter-school environment, we really don’t care. The school must muddy its mission, risk its focus, and take in a bunch of kids who may or may not be right for the charter school’s environment.
Governor Malloy and his boys call the challenging kids “priority students.” Perfect. The priority isn’t finding a perfect mix of school and student. No, the priority is making sure that, just in case a charter school succeeds, in the absence of “special” students, we will make every effort to disadvantage the school’s success with arbitrary admission criteria.
To suggest that every charter school in creation must be a perfect environment for every student is madness. By their nature, some charter schools focus on niche markets. Leave the poor things alone.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
