Innovative schools will teach us all about bean counting

I never went to a special school. As was the case with most of us in 1954, I was inserted into the American public school system and 12 years later spit out with a piece of paper in hand.

This is not to say my experience was either grand or hellish. It probably was a little of both. Still, I am merely another homogenized product of the theory of mass education so common in those days.

The current charter school movement in Idaho and its evolution is interesting as a leap into creative but potentially dangerous schooling territory.

A charter school is a quasi-independent group of grades and classes set within a traditional public schooling district. It is tasked by the law with creating a unique and innovative approach to learning that the district as a whole is unable to provide. And it must administer that approach with an odd mixture of state-imposed limitations and freedoms: they do not get funding for building projects but neither do they have to provide all of the traditional district services or activities; they can focus on a specific and limited mission for their curriculum but they are not allowed to exclude any students who wish to enroll in that curriculum.

Such experiments in education were uncommon in my '50s childhood but Sandpoint has had an abundance of them over the past two decades. Selkirk School, the cooperative classroom model of Washington Elementary, Waldorf School and the latest offerings of last year, first of John Sarchio and Da Vinci Academy, and secondly, with Gary Quinn and Sandpoint Charter, are all substitutes for the standard educational menu.

Experiments in the public sector always raise eyebrows and objections. With charter schools, administrators worry such schools have no obligation to retain students who are failing and can thus dump them on the rest of the district. Taxpayers see them as drawing revenue away from the district because state funding is subtracted for each transferred student, while cost savings never occur.

Although realistic problems for managers, for the public such worries are merely budgetary distractions that remove our gaze from whether the education charter schools offer is superior and should be demanded statewide. But then, isn't the charter school movement itself a distraction? Along with parent voucher programs and magnet schools, isn't it a huge, hyped diversion from the fact our schools are sinking to performance levels below that of all other developed nations?

Isn't this Idaho experiment just part of a nationwide educational bandage calling market forces - choice and competition - into the public schools to transform them back into centers of competence, brilliance and innovation? Although used by good-hearted folks, the competition and selection of charter schools seems crafted not by believers in Jefferson's educated democracy but by devotees of capitalism, our only true national idol - people who now wish public education to be sacrificed on the alter of the free market.

Corporate commercials in classrooms, districts recruiting retired CEOs as administrators and job training emphasized over liberal education represent just the first wave of free market influences in the classroom.

Sarchio, who now runs the Couer d'Alene Charter School and Quinn, the local teacher who next year will head the new Sandpoint Academy, both have invested vast amounts of time, energy and credibility in their respective charter school efforts with the goal of reinfusing the vitality of real life and imagination into the classroom. They are to be applauded and supported.

But as the public plays the hopeful, unaware puppets on this national stage of educational reform, we must lift our eyes to the master puppeteer, in this case, Alan Greenspan. The disease growing in the protective shade of charter schools and parent vouchers is a belief that education no longer is a basic right of the child but an economic choice to be packaged, marketed and consumed.

And you can bet that the invisible hand of Adam Smith will give the same justice to the life of the child as it has to health care, air quality and political elections, turning decisions that should rest on principles to ones based on accounting ledgers.

As education is removed from the sanctity of a public function and gradually lowered to the status of selecting detergents from the shelf at Safeway, parents beware and poets please remind us that the soul is a better long-term investment than is NASDAQ.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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