Portfolio School Governance Creates Unstable Charter Sector with Too Many School Closures
In an important brief from the National Education Policy Center, William Mathis and Kevin Welner define “portfolio school reform”—a school district governance theory which originated at the Center on Reinventing Public Education: “A key, unifying element is the call for many neighborhood schools to be transformed into privately managed charter schools… The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager. If a stock is low-performing, the manager sells it. As a practical matter, this means either closing the school or turning it over to a charter school or other management organization.”
Peter Greene recently suggested one of the inevitable implications of portfolio school reform: “(G)iven the portfolio emphasis on continually closing bottom-ranked schools, you can think of the portfolio model as trying to fire your way to excellence on the institutional scale.” It’s all about closing schools.
Chicago was an early example of portfolio school governance, which now dominates the school districts in a number of big cities. Because of a study last year by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and a book by University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing, we’ve finally begun paying attention to the resulting closure of too many traditional neighborhood schools. In Chicago the researchers have described widespread community grieving for public schools that were once central in the lives of generations of families.
School closure is also characteristic of charter schools. A school district committed to shedding its poorest investments—its so-called “failing” schools—will be shutting down the low-performing or poorly managed charter schools as well. The underlying assumption is that the parent-choosers buying into a market approach will just accept the notion of the closure of “failing” charters because it’s all part of the cycle of school improvement.
Parents of students in charter schools, however, are not calmly accepting the closure of their schools. Why should they? Like other parents, charter school parents are looking for stability when they choose a setting for their child’s education. Here are just three examples of churn and disruption as charters are shut down in districts and states dominated by the theory of CONTINUE READING: Portfolio School Governance Creates Unstable Charter Sector with Too Many School Closures | janresseger
