My own experience has shown me that many in the charter school movement in CA reach a level of commitment burnout in their efforts to keep and maintain their charter school. CA law, like most other states, requires a significant component of parent leadership and involvement. Usually the founding councils are filled with dedicated hardworking people, often focussed ont he betterment of their own childrens' education through self-empowerment. The school is founded and run well for a couple or more years, and then two things begin to happen.
First, their own children successfully matriculate, and thus the parents interest and involvement in the day-to-day operations of the school diminish. They tend to make less and less efforts at recruiting new parents to replace them on the council.
Second, the financial burden of operating the school becomes a time consuming liability for them. Seeking all sorts of additional funding and locating quality directors caves way to simply allowing the local school districts to take over the school (part of CA law).
I have watched this happen again and again. As the grind of the bureaucracy begins to take its toll on the will power and energy of parents and teachers--health benefits, facility management, increasing funding, insurance requirements, etc.--the school's sense of purpose and focus becomes diluted and lost. Fewer and fewer parents make further efforts to volunteer time and energy and money, and within a five to seven year period the charter lapses and the school closes.
While it might be easy to suggest that better enactment legislation would help to solve these problems for the parent council, there really is a great essential need for putting energy(human contact) into recruiting new younger parents of new children. The founding principle of charter school reform has always been the empowerment of parents to exert and influence and control the direct education of their own children within a community of like minded souls. Maybe as Dan Quizenberry suggests, some schools should close as that guiding principle is lost. If a group of core parents choose to matriculate on with their children, then it might be quite appropriate for the charter to be given up.
Posted as a reply to:
Strong contracts by Paula Crandall Decker 
|
|
