Ron Russo, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Caesar Rodney Institute, wrote a blog post yesterday with a BOLD PLAN for Delaware schools. By even mentioning former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education in the very first sentence, it was hard to lend any credibility to this piece. But I read the whole thing out of morbid curiosity.
…Governor Jeb Bush, the keynote speaker, told the attendees that they had to, “Be big, be bold, or go home.”
I would have left at that point and proudly went home. Jeb Bush has made a ton of money capitalizing off the backs of schools and students. He is the very essence of corporate education reform. I give anything he says zero weight.
Russo seems to view former Red Clay Consolidated Board President William Manning as the Messiah of Delaware education:
He recommended a confederation of independent schools each locally managed and free of regulations about who to hire and how to teach. The schools would be evaluated only by performance data that would be shared with the public.
Manning’s vision created charter schools that do not serve the populations within their district boundaries. Quite a few Delaware charters have selective enrollment preferences that seem to further segregation and push out kids with high needs. Manning was the lead attorney in the lawsuit against the Christina School District when charters that serve Christina students sued the district to get more money per student. Eventually the lawsuit wound up becoming a settlement that further stripped funds away from the district. Russo’s BOLD PLAN is modeled after the original charter school bill, Senate Bill 200:
The Caesar Rodney Institute is supporting a systemic change to our education bureaucracy called the “BOLD PLAN”. It significantly alters the way the current education system operates by empowering the individual schools to make operational decisions to best serve their students.
In theory, this would be a great idea. However, Russo lost me yet again when he brought up the VERY controversial priority schools as a potential model for this plan:
CRI’s BOLD PLAN incorporates the best features of the 1995 Charter School Law and the Memorandum of Understanding designed by Delaware’s DOE for Priority Schools. If the changes proposed in the MOU were expected to raise the performance of the state’s lowest performing schools, why wouldn’t those changes be offered to all public schools?
Sorry Ron, but the priority school Memorandums of Understanding were absolutely horrible and did more to create parent backlash in Wilmington than anything seen before. So what would this plan consist of? Therein lies the rub:
BOLD legislation would specify areas of local decision-making. Such areas would include: 1) Authority to hire and dismiss all staff; 2) All programing inputs (school calendar, schedule, curriculum aligned to Delaware standards, instructional practices and methodology, textbooks, technology, etc.); 3) Marketing and planning; 4) Support services including transportation, food, and maintenance; 5) Budget preparation and expenditure control with surplus operating funds retained by the school. Schools will have autonomy from any district or Delaware DOE requirements not mandated by state or federal law.
This legislation has more holes than a donut shop.
- What happens if the board membership or the Superintendent of the district is not operating under normal parameters of their function? What if personal grudges get in the way of a sound decision to hire or dismiss all staff? Delaware is a small state and conflicts of interest are well-known in this state.
- You lost me at “Delaware standards”. If you truly want to give local education authorities the coveted local control, they would be free to set their own curriculum without being tied to any type of standard pushed down from the state or federal government. I have yet to see any indication Delaware will get rid of Common Core which was created under false pretenses.
- Don’t they already do this anyway?
- See #3
- That would not be a good thing. Delaware charter schools already keep their surplus transportation funds in a sweetheart deal with the General Assembly and there is no apparatus to make sure those funds are being used with fidelity. What is the point of even having a district or charter board if the school can do whatever it wants with extra money? This proposal sounds like anarchy.
Russo’s logic becomes even more confusing when he casually drops the Rodel Visionfests and Race To The Top into his conversation:
The BOLD PLAN complements Delaware’s other education improvement efforts (Visions, Races, etc.). In fact, it may even complete them.
I don’t think completion of those plans is something anyone in Delaware really wants. Race To The Top was an unmitigated disaster with funds going to the state Department of Education more than local school districts. The Vision Coalition goals further perpetuate many bad corporate education reform policies. It is hard to take anything they do seriously when the CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware, Dr. Herdman, makes over $345,000 a year.
Ironically, Russo channels Dan Rich who has been very involved with the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission’s proposed Wilmington redistricting. But Russo doesn’t bring him up in any way related to that endeavor but rather his involvement with the Vision Coalition:
At the very first Vision 2015 meeting hosted by Dan Rich, then Provost of the University of Delaware, he ended the meeting by telling the attendees that if they wanted to improve Delaware’s public schools they had to be bold and, if they didn’t want to be bold, they should get out. Hmmmm, it seems that Dan was way ahead of Jeb.
Comparing Rich to Jeb Bush almost seems insulting. Of course, any education push should be bold. But by telling people if you don’t like it to “get out” or “go home” it is essentially saying if you don’t agree with us we won’t give you the time of day. That is NOT the way education issues should be ironed out and only creates more of a divide. The Delaware charter school experiment, now well into it’s third decade, has met with very mixed results. It has not been the rousing success the forefathers of the original legislation thought it would be. Why would Delaware even entertain this idea based on that? And lest we forget, all this imaginary “success” is based on standardized test scores, of which Delaware has gone through three different state assessments since then. Sorry Ron, but this is not a BOLD PLAN. It is an old plan, that just plain doesn’t work.
I have to wonder about the timing of this article. The Caesar Rodney Institute has long been a fierce supporter of school vouchers. Delaware has been very resistant to that system under Democrat control but under the Trump administration and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as the U.S. Secretary of Education, it is not surprising to see Russo coming out with this type of article. President Trump and DeVos want a federal school voucher system that has already met with disappointing results in several states.
The Season Of Myths 