Charters and Vouchers Archive

It’s easy to see where things went wrong after the fact, especially as an outsider. But what baffles me is why school authorities at Cleveland’s SuccessTech Academy didn’t see trouble brewing before it was too late and they became a site of school violence. Maybe it’s not a fair question to ask but consider the clues.

Asa H. Coon was just a freshman at the Ohio magnet high school, but he’d already made quite an impression, and it wasn’t a good one. Described as sullen and strange by his classmates, the 14-year-old dressed in gothic fashion, sporting trench coats and black fingernails.

While his garb alone didn’t deserve attention from school officials, his accompanying behavior should have. Last year, he was suspended after attempting to assault a fellow student. Court records revealed that Coon suffered mental health problems, had threatened to commit suicide, and didn’t regularly take his medication.

Coon’s disciplinary problems continued this school year at SuccessTech, where he apparently got into a few scuffles with other students, for which he was suspended on Monday. Upon suspension, Coon purportedly made a series of threats, intimating that he would blow up the school, stab people, and otherwise retaliate in a violent manner.

Several students tried to tell the principal of Coon’s threats but could not get to her because she was busy. And by Wednesday, it was too late; two students and two teachers suffered gunshot wounds and Coon, after going on an armed rampage through the school, shot and killed himself.

I’m not trying to beat up school administrators who have their hands full with the day-to-day operations of a school, but this seems like an incident that should never have happened.

A 1999 joint report by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education found that in 80 percent of student-led attacks on schools, at least one person had knowledge of what was going to happen. In Coon’s case, it sounds like he broadcasted his intentions loud and clear. Those should’ve been words, given Coon’s history, school officials took seriously.

School safety experts routinely state that good intelligence and awareness is one of the best ways to prevent school violence. In this situation, it seemed like while those were in place, administrators failed to act on them in a timely manner. It’s a lesson for us all.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor

I love to shop, especially on the Internet. And as much as I love a good bargain, I’m also a stickler for customer service. And that was one reason I was very happy to see the Utah voucher program go down in flames last week.

Yes, online shopping and school vouchers are indeed related, thanks to Patrick Byrne, the president and chairman of Overstock.com. Byrne’s been throwing money at the pro-voucher campaign in Utah. As the head of First Class Education, a lobbying group, he hawks the “65 percent solution” to states, a mandate that 65 percent of education funds must be spent in the classroom.

I could spend the rest of this blog hashing out my thoughts on vouchers and school finance, but I’d rather defer to NSBA’s positions and rant about Overstock.com instead.

When I first discovered Overstock.com several years ago I was smitten with its vast selection and $2.99 shipping. A couple purchases brought me coupons and daily e-mails with specials, and I often couldn’t resist a quick browse through the site.

But one thing quickly became apparent: Nearly everything I ordered was slightly damaged—not horribly, but just enough so that it wasn’t worth the effort of sending it back. Value was OK, but not great. My final straw, though, came when I ordered dining room chairs from Overstock.com, and of course all six were damaged. This time I sent two back and asked for replacements.

And then I spent the next two months calling and e-mailing customer service reps based overseas trying to find my replacement chairs. Nobody could answer my questions. In short, I eventually demanded my money back, sent all Overstock.com e-mails to my spam folder, and vowed to only buy from companies (Costco, Nordstrom, REI, etc.) that have a clue about customer service and quality. Since my debacle last year, I’ve heard similar complaints about Overstock.com from friends and colleagues, and a quick Google search for Patrick Byrne and Overstock.com has turned up some even more interesting stories.

So I’d like to send this message to Mr. Byrne and the Overstock.com reps -- just in time for holiday shopping: Shut up about education and focus on your company’s customer service and quality control issues instead.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

It’s been more than a week since Utah voters overturned the state’s voucher law, and now that voucher proponents have had a chance to lick their wounds, I’d like to offer them a piece of advice: Give up.

It’s not just that I think vouchers threaten to drain taxpayer dollars from public education, or that I’m concerned that research still hasn’t show voucher programs are any more successful than the public schools in raising student academic achievement.

No, I think voucher advocates should throw in the towel for a more pragmatic—and cynical—reason. Making taxpayer money available to private and parochial schools threatens their unique and independent status in American education.

As I see it, once private schools begin to accept taxpayer money, they’re in trouble. A few headlines about misspent public funds, unsafe school conditions, and biased student admissions policies, and lawmakers will spring into action to “right the wrongs.” Within two decades, private and parochial schools will be as regulated as the public schools.

Some private school supporters already have voiced this warning. But the lure of state and federal dollars is strong. It will be a bitter irony if the voucher movement ever “wins” the fight for taxpayer dollars and destroys private education as we know it.

And, alas, it does damage to public education as well.

Del Stover, Senior Editor

The move to create publicly funded vouchers in Utah got shot down by voters last fall, but the political ramifications within the state may still be playing out in some very interesting ways.

Two Republicans are now running as Democrats for the state legislature in Utah County, the state’s second-most populous area just south of Salt Lake City. It’s also considered one of the most solidly Republican areas in one of the reddest states in the country. In a typical election, any Democrat who dares to run gets slaughtered, but this year they might be more competitive.

What’s going on out there?

Paul Rolly, a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, believes those two candidates might be part of a sea change in Utah politics related to the GOP-backed voucher legislation, which narrowly passed the state legislature but became a ballot referendum that was rejected by voters.

In a recent column, Rolly points to Steve Baugh, a former superintendent of the Alpine school district, who was registered as a Republican but is now running as a Democrat against Rep. Steve Sandstrom. Apparently, Baugh supported Sandstrom in the last cycle because he ran as an anti-voucher candidate against a man who had profited from a charter-school enterprise, but Sandstrom later voted in favor of the voucher legislation, which passed the House by one vote.

Then there’s Gwyn Franson, a city council member and Republican-turned-Democrat who Rolly says cited the voucher legislation as one piece of evidence in her argument that the GOP party has simply lost touch with the desires of its constituents. And there are likely other prominent Democrats that will run for the legislature this year, Rolly says.

Even if they win, does it really add up to a sea change for state politics? “If so, chalk it up to last year's tsunami over private school vouchers,” Rolly writes, but cautions, “whether it turns out to be a ripple or a flood remains to be seen.”

Yet another sideshow to watch in this wacky political year…

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

When I was once a reporter covering the White House during the Clinton years, someone told me, “When the going gets tough, Clinton visits a school.”

Sure enough, he dropped by school after school during the Monica Lewinsky and ensuing impeachment scandals, sometimes proposing a new program, sometimes hawking one of his many initiatives, sometimes just touting public education. Those visits were a temporary distraction from the bad news—somehow, being in a school made everyone feel better.

I thought of Clinton’s woes when President Bush actually mentioned education in the first 15 minutes of the State of the Union this week. Many analysts believe Bush’s speech brought up past victories such as No Child Left Behind in hopes of deflecting attention from his dismal approval ratings and desperate attempts to stay relevant in his last year of office.

“Six years ago, we came together to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, and today no one can deny its results,” he said to applause mainly on the GOP side.

Problem is, if Bush tries to take that message to public schools, he might hear from the many school administrators who want the law changed, or scrapped entirely. Sen. Ted Kennedy, a top supporter of NCLB when it first passed, appeared to wince at his words. (And in another irony, Bush also touted the D.C. voucher program and called for more vouchers for students in failing schools, even though D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was a guest of honor of First Lady Laura Bush.)

But even if Bush had to bear a few critics, wouldn’t it be better to fix the law now and leave office with a significant accomplishment? Since most Democrats in Congress want to hold off on the reauthorization, my completely unsolicited advice to the president would be to take a cue from his predecessor and stage some school visits, talk to folks there, and push hard for changes this year. There’s still time to build a better legacy, at least in the eyes of school officials.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

Educators and journalists love a good "war story," and Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, did not disappoint. She spoke with reporters and writers at the annual conference of the Education Writers Association in Chicago last week.

One war story involved the all-too-common failure of the D.C. schools to put textbooks in the hands of students at the beginning of the school year. Last fall, Rhee made headlines by touring the school system’s book warehouse with D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and finding pallet after pallet of untouched textbooks waiting for delivery.

Highlighting the problem didn’t prevent some foul-ups last fall in getting books to kids, and Rhee shared one shared one little-known incident.

A parent complained by e-mail that high school textbooks had ended up at a nearby middle school. That was bad enough, of course, but making it worse was that the central office had rejected the offer of parents to load up the books in their cars and personally deliver them to where they belonged.

The reasoning of bureaucrats? District rules insist that the textbooks be delivered by the school system. So the textbooks had to sit at the middle school until district personnel picked them up. Then they’d be sent back to the warehouse, processed, and eventually delivered to the right school.

That mentality, Rhee said, revealed the dysfunction within the district bureaucracy. She told the parents "to go ahead, so that kids had their books on the first day of school."

The 38-year-old chancellor, who had never served as a school administrator before now, also shared a war story about one of her biggest political fights—closing 23 underutilized schools.

Rhee wasn’t surprised that school closings would be controversial. Nor did she doubt that the decision was correct. With nearly one-third of the city’s school-aged children in charter schools, the D.C. system had many schools filled to only half capacity—and they were wasting vast sums in salaries, energy costs, and security and maintenance resources.

What was interesting, though, was how strongly neighborhoods identified with their schools—without regard to their academic performance, she said.

During one school visit, Rhee said, she stopped to talk to residents on the street, and they all begged her to save their school building from closure. They loved the school, she said. They thought it was a great school.

The only problem, she noted, was that it was anything but a great school. "Only 9 percent of the kids were testing proficient." That compared to a charter school only a few blocks away—serving students from the same neighborhood—that boasted that 90 percent of its students were scoring proficient.

For all the controversy involved, closing those schools was an early success for Rhee. So much money will be saved that each city school next year will have an art teacher, a music teacher, and a physical education teacher.

That might not seem all that remarkable for educators in more affluent communities, she added, but in D.C., such staffing is "almost unheard of."

Finally, Rhee spoke a little about the City Council granting her unprecedented authority to terminate district employees, which she promptly used to cut 100 jobs in the central office. As it turned out, it wasn’t all that difficult to decide who should stay—and who should go.

For example, she recalled, she found a staff of nine serving teen mothers at a cost of $1 million annually. But the program only served about seven students each day, and it turned out that $700,000 of the program was spent on salaries.

That just didn’t cut it in Rhee’s judgment. "How do we make sure dollars actually have an impact on kids in the classrooms?" she asked. "We have to look at every program. Even if the people are nice people, if the program is not having a dollar-for-dollar real impact on kids, it has to be seriously looked at."

These are only a few of Rhee’s stories. But they all emphasize how the new chancellor is fighting "the good fight" on behalf of D.C. schoolchildren. Such a fight ensures that we can expect Rhee to share even more war stories to share in the years ahead.

Del Stover, Senior Editor