In order to fully understand the magnitude of claims that districts don't collaborate very well with charter schools, despite much clamor to the contrary, consider recent happenings in Columbus. A few weeks ago the vice president of the Columbus City Schools Board of Education, Stephanie Groce, wrote a letter to the Columbus Dispatch criticizing the district for leasing one of its nicest vacant buildings to a start-up music industry program with no track-record of academic success. The program's bid won out over three well-regarded and high-performing charter schools, including middle schools that handily outperform the district's middle schools (which are notoriously bad). (We chronicled this here and here.)
Groce's brave step of calling out the district in a public manner (her letter ran under the title ???Refusal to work with charter schools harms kids???) garnered a lot of attention ??? both positive and negative.
Today the Dispatch opened the window wider into some of the negative attention, through its article ???Columbus school board VP under fire for opinions on district.??? As the newspaper reports, last night the board held an ???emergency meeting??? to discuss Groce's behavior. Comments from board members included:
- It was ???a real inappropriate step-out by our vice president.??? (member Gary L. Baker II)
- ???If there is something that you wanted to share, you could have shared it before printing it.??? (member W. Shawna Gibbs)
- ???You screwed up.??? (board member Mike Wiles)
School board President Carol Perkins even went so far as to tell the newspaper she thinks the incident could threaten the success of future tax levies.
No good deed goes unpunished. Groce is catching flack from her fellow board members and district bureaucrats for defending the interests of children above all else. Last year half of the district's middle-schoolers attended a school rated D or F by the state, while two of the schools snubbed for the building were schools rated Effective (B) by the state (one was a middle school, and one was a high school expanding into middle grades). Both schools had some of the highest test scores in the city in 2010.
If anything, an ???emergency meeting??? should have been called to discuss the district's failing middle schools and how to ensure quality opportunities for more students, rather than to spat about damage control and protecting the district's reputation. After all, the district's continued failure to educate middle schoolers well, not Groce's honesty about that problem, is what should ???threaten future levies.???
- Terry Ryan
