Friday, September 14, 2012

District Charters as a Triage Mechanism

I don't really know what's going on with the PPSD district charter push, but I have long thought that given the pressures put on the district and its limited support resources, letting successful schools (regardless of why the school is successful, demographics or organizational performance) pretty much run themselves made sense. This is often framed as "rewarding" high performing schools, but it is also just triage.

Site-based schools made more sense for this than charters, because they distort the enrollment patterns less, and that was pretty much the strategy when Lusi was here before under Diana Lam. Brady crushed site-based management, but this is pretty much the same thing.

2 comments:

Sean said...

What happened under Lam? I think you wrote about this before- Bishop or Gregorian basically ran themselves?

Is there a side-by-side somewhere that compares the governance of Traditional PPS to Providence District Charter to Charter that happens to reside in Providence?

I wonder if it's like the Horace Mann schools in BPS.

Thanks for reporting on this.

Tom Hoffman said...

Basically site-based schools were encouraged, particularly all the new small high schools started with Gates money.

Regarding the differences between the different types of schools, I'm not sure anyone actually knows at this point, as there have been so many changes at the state and district level since the original district charters (Textron, Times2) were created.