LeBrun: Charter schools' Zero Option
Shutting the doors on Albany's Brighter Choice middle schools for boys and girls for failing to meet academic and financial expectations seems to be the only choice.
After all, the charter school mantra is a very narrow definition of public school success: live by the data, die by the data.
And a blizzard of data and audits presented on Friday to the State University of New York Charter Schools Committee by the Charter Schools Institute, which was acting as prosecutor, left little doubt.
The State University is the issuing agent for the charters in question, and renewing those charters was on the table.
Institute Executive Director Susie Miller Barkersaid, ''renewing these two schools would send the message that SUNY trustees accept the status quo,'' and went on to enumerate the benchmarks the schools had failed to achieve.
But a stout defense was raised by the charter schools in an effort to stay open, a startling and impassioned one.
It was about the last argument you'd expect to hear from charter schools, 180 degrees from what we've heard in the past from Albany's well-established mini-charter movement embodied in the work of Tom Carroll's Brighter Choice Foundation.
Brighter Choice school board President Martha Snyder, while acknowledging the data spoke against them, argued that these two schools, side by side on upper Elk Street, were meeting the needs of a largely underserved population in the Albany community by offering a safe and secure learning experience.
Brighter Choice Boys Middle School Principal Marcus Puccioni, in pleading for a temporary charter extension, said the schools had been ''thrown a curve ball'' by the inept Common Core rollout and needed time to adjust. The data, said Puccioni, didn't tell the whole story.
''Our process and tools may not look like other, larger systems, but we're not in this to replicate the McDonaldization of education,'' he said.
In short, the argument for the defense sounds remarkably similar to what traditional public schools in challenging environments like Albany's have been claiming for years, while being smugly put down by charter proponents as irrelevant.
Unsurprisingly, the SUNY charter committee on Friday voted against renewing the middle school charters.
A grim-faced Snyder, the Brighter Choice board president, made it clear the battle isn't over. She did not elaborate.
I have a sneaking suspicion that money and financing at stake over bricks and mortar are as much of a motivator for keeping those charters alive as is serving the community. Regardless, about 440 students after this academic year may well have to find an alternative school.
Students, and parents, who had put their hopes in charters, Brighter Choice in particular, now find themselves associated with failed schools as defined by the Charter School Institute.
It was five years ago that Brighter Choice got into the middle-school business, with fanfare and swagger.
The same year Albany's first charter school, New Covenant, one of the first in the state, finally gasped its last after 11 years of teetering. The failure of New Covenant was devastating to the city's minority community, which had invested heart and soul in it.
The leaders of Brighter Choice at the time coldly wrote off New Covenant as exactly the way LeBrun: Charter schools' Zero Option - Times Union: