Schooling brief

Black Commentator, the great online e-magazine, has an important piece about charter schools vs. public schools, in the article "The Demise of Public Schooling."

Neal Peirce has an interesting upcoming column about broadening school choice in Minnesota, by allowing high school students to take classes at public community colleges and four-year institutions. This column won't be online until Monday, but here's an excerpt:

Can a single state bring off a reform that sways a nation -- even in an era of extraordinarily tenacious lobbying by entrenched interests? It’s tough. But it can happen. In St. Paul last month, supporters gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of just such a breakthrough -- America’s first program to let impatient juniors and seniors skip a beat in regular high school curriculums and take courses in state colleges and universities, earning credits both toward their high school diplomas and college degrees.

Called Postsecondary Enrollment Options (PSEO), the program was in fact the first statewide school choice legislation in America. It was followed -- Minnesota again leading the nation -- by laws letting parents and students (instead of school bureaucracies) select which public schools the students should attend, even across school district lines.

Minnesota’s PSEO law was especially galling to the education lobby because it directed that money would “go with the students” -- from the high school where they were omitting classes to the college where they picked courses. A monopoly was threatened: suddenly schools would have to compete for their dollars....

Twenty years later, modeled largely on Minnesota, 18 states have comprehensive programs allowing high school juniors and seniors to apply to take courses in state colleges and universities at minimal or no cost, the course credits honored both at the high school and colleges. One study estimates up to 30 percent of U.S. high school juniors and seniors, under varieties of new state programs, take at least one college course before graduation.

In Minnesota, 110,000 young people have taken advantage of the program since its inception. And the results have been nothing less that stellar, asserts Joe Nathan, now senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and a member of the support team when the legislation first passed in 1985. Polling, Nathan reports, shows 97 percent of the young people who took advantage of PSEO report they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with it. They cited learning more than their high schools could offer, being challenged more than in high school, feeling better prepared academically for college, saving money they’d have to expend later in full college tuition fees, and saving time by getting high school and college credit simultaneously.

Finally, this article galls me, "Arlington firm will tout city schools" from an earlier in the week edition of the Washington Times, but maybe that's just 'cause I'm not on the list for such public communications contracts (see previous entry on transit marketing). From the article:

The D.C. school system has awarded a no-bid contract for more than $250,000 to an Arlington consulting firm to "educate the public" about D.C. Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey's upcoming master plan.

I fear this is another example of citizens to be "consulted" or treated as "customers," rather than responding to the needs of desires of those of us committed to "Creating a City of Learning," which is more than just the issues around K-12 education.

Index Keywords: education; civic-engagement