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Agenda Shear: Privatization of Schools and Public Oversight

The News-Press: Education - Charter threatens parents with lawsuit.  [Via slashdot]  In the world of on-line forums (wait until the blogging kicks in), there is an odd problem in our experimentation with privatization of public education: the folks who make commercial ventures of charter school operations seem far less inclined to accept public — not public- official, public-citizenry — oversight, scrutiny, and observation than the schools we love to complain about.

It’s now all about reputation of the company, and the lawyers are caravaning their way to Southern Florida as we speak.  What strikes me about this is that when organizations behave in this manner, observers become even more suspicious of their legitimacy than before.  I’m thinking of the brilliant move by sms.ac sending a hilarious Cease & Desist letter to Joi Ito (Joi Ito! what were those guys smoking?) when he publicly withdrew from his experiment with the “free service,” apologizing to all of his contacts that he had inadvertently arranged to spam everyone in his contact list with invitations to join him, and that he was finding it difficult to turn it off. 

Why, when engaging in an activity that has high public visibility and cannot escape scrutiny, do organizations go out of their heavy-handed way to demonstrate that maybe there is indeed something they need to be scrutinized for?  If transparency, open-ness (and, yes, thick-skinned tolerance and patience) aren’t qualities of organizations that propose to provide effective education for our kids, yes I think they can expect a certain diminishing of reputation.  And lawyers won’t help. They can hasten the end of course, so we should be grateful for the unintended public service.

Not living in South Florida, I turned to GreatSchools.net, a resource mentioned on Robert Heiny’s The Tablet PC Blog. I am already pop-up bludgeoned and and annoyed by the premium-content barriers and nagging by that “non-profit” resource.  I wondered whether there was an agenda there when I first learned of the site, but I can’t decide if it is worth $17 to find out.   Oddly enough, you’d never know from this service that there is any Gateway Charter school in Florida.  Charter schools and private denominational schools are located by their school-comparison searches, but not Gateway Charter.  I wonder how many other schools are simply not listed and how useful that is going to be.

With regard to Charter Schools USA, this page freaked me out!  It turns out that the school district and other organizations list Gateway Charter as a public elementary school.  So we learn that the school has uniforms and there is a lottery for placement in the entering grades.  I love this part:

Any student who has not previously attended a Lee County Public School or who is a new Kindergartner must must provide the following documents: Florida Immunization Health form, Florida proof of physical within previous 12 months, birth certificate, social security card, and proof of residency to include a driver license and utility bill.

Man, those are precocious kindergartners.  I want to know how they are able to drive from the mandatory kiddie car seat.  I guess there’s more to worry about on South Florida highways than all us geezers.

Now that I’ve located the school, I see that the only Gateway Elementary that GreatSchools has a listing for is the wrong school (for this purpose).  They’ve got Gateway Magnet (also calling itself Gateway Elementary), a public school down the road from Gateway Charter.   Gateway Magnet is the only one in the education directory of the News-Press as well.

I wonder just how many axes are being ground here.  Not having any skin in this game, I think I will quietly return to my regularly scheduled schoolwork.