Camp Schools for All & School Choice

Follow-up based on feedback

Dear Readers,

In my last post, Camp Schools for All, I wasn’t clear about something: Camp Schools will probably be charter schools. Through personal experience and lots of education reading, I know the data

Thom Markham

so thoughtfully pointed out in his comment on that post:

…the verdict is clear: You're much more likely to get nature based programs in charters. They are far more flexible and open to innovation.

So, today’s post is mostly a departure from nature-based learning to explain what I meant when I wrote:

wielding “school choice” and “parents’ rights” (concepts that have been adopted and weaponized in an attempt to dismantle public education) to convert every nature-based summer camp into a year-round PK-2 elementary school.

(In this quote above 👆🏻, my original reference to a single polarizing politician has been removed because it’s not useful to the mainstreaming of nature-based learning cause.)

Thanks

Thom Markham

and

Benjamin Katz

for letting me know this didn’t come out right and could have detracted from my goal to mainstream nature-based learning. Appreciate the feedback. ❤️

I have also amended my original post, Camp Schools for All to not reference any specific politicians at all. Because, nature-based learning is not political. So I shouldn’t make it so.

-B

Tl;dr (Too long, didn’t read)

What follows is a letter explaining the fears I have about the way charter schools are being leveraged for increasingly ideological, anti-democratic, and anti-public good purposes.

I’m grappling. Because I really like charters. I have worked at two. I’m just alarmed at the real risk that charter schools could become privatized and, as such, wouldn’t be required to serve all students.

I want to be sure Camp Schools stay firmly on the “public” side of the line to serve all students, abiding by essential rules from the Office of Civil Rights. That’s all.

My Love Affair with Charters

I've worked at two incredible charter schools. One, Animas High School in Durango, CO, is a Project-Based Learning (PBL) school modeled after the amazing High Tech High. The other, Rimrock Expeditionary Alternative Learning Middles School in Bend, OR is an Expeditionary Learning (EL) school.

At each of these schools, I learned from and collaborated with inspiring educators, innovative school leaders, and students who challenged me (in *mostly* good ways ;). Although I left REALMS in 2008 and left Animas in 2013, I still reference my learnings as an educator from each of those schools on a regular basis.

At REALMS, I experienced how learning could be connected to place and community. I saw my colleagues develop water monitoring citizen science programs where students literally got their feet wet collecting real data to document water quality in Tumalo Creek and the Deschutes River watershed. I marveled as colleagues - master teachers @Eric Beck and

Karen Holm

braided together art, science, and writing into an authentic, real-world product. Their students produced a glossy booklet about the Deschutes River, complete with data and advocacy bits and poetry and visual artwork.

In fact, I just googled to try to find that beautiful magazine and came across this from 2019, long after my tenure at REALMS ended. Eric and Karen -- both mentors when I was in my first year teaching -- worked with students to create these incredible educational kiosks on the Deschutes River Trail.

At Animas High School, I learned to "Do the project first" (Credit to jeff robin). This mantra is a fundamental tenet of project-based learning design and, as it turns out, design-thinking in general. It represents the critical prototyping phase touted by IDEO U in its Foundations of Design Thinking course. It has served me well across educational roles, especially as an eduprenuer (though I'm often building in public there, too — so haven’t exactly “done the project” first 😬).

I believed we were pushing innovation. Our work was helping to ensure students who were often left behind in traditional schools could find a home. I believed these schools — less hampered by thick layers of local, state, and federal bureaucracy plaguing other public schools — would push all schools to be better.

And, I know this is happening in many cases and places. Some charters have done right by marginalized students, by students in poverty, by neurodivergent students — and I know innovations from charters have percolated into other public schools.

But, yikes…

So, I was stopped in my tracks listening to "U-Turn: Charter Schools Go Private" episode of the Have You Heard Podcast.

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, accompanied by Preston Green and Bruce Baker explore the question:

Are charter schools public or private?

In just 38 minutes and 49 seconds, this team sounds an alarm about the charter school movement run amuck -- about choice instead of rights, about charters as wolves in sheeps' clothing or as trojan horses who have ushered in a whole host of incredibly frightening and problematic roll-backs by which charter schools — receiving public tax dollars — are poised to be able to offer religious education and even to deny students education on the basis of their identity.

This discussion has massive implications for students' and educators' rights. If found to be private — and therefore liberated from those pesky laws that guarantee students' CIVIL RIGHTS (i.e., IDEA - Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Equal Education Opportunities Act), we could actually end up in a nightmare scenario where charter schools don't have the duty to educate all students. If you follow this logic, this means if the ONLY school available is a private charter school funded by public dollars without the obligation to educate all students, then families who want their students to have a secular education and, more concerning, families who have child(ren) with special needs or specific identities (e.g., LGBTQ+), then there is the real possibility for some families that there will be NO school for their child. This is very concerning, especially in rural districts where these schools could become the only show in town.

This worry about how this will adversely affect individual families and students is really bad. Worse still is the damage done to our society when students in a privatized public system are indoctrinated in values that have very little to do with the public good in a pluralistic democracy.

This is not how it has to be

This is a far cry from the charter school experiences I have had. And I know tons of incredible innovators in the charter school space who are deeply committed to equity, innovation, and improvement of our public schools.

So, I'm inviting a dialogue here. I don't have all the answers; I do want to make sure those of us who have been advocates for charter schools as a vehicle for positive change in public education make our voices heard.

Per Jennifer Berkshire's advice, first, we need to:

Acknowledge that this question of whether a school is public or not really matters.

Then, policymakers at the state level can tip charter schools toward the public side by maintaining control of these schools through things like codifying into law that charter schools must accept all students. Berkshire explains, "because charter schools are statutory creations, it's within the power of lawmakers to actually make them part of the public system."

Bruce Baker challenges us further asking,

When will the progressive advocates of chartering finally accept that they might need to go there?

[There = instituting specific laws and protections that clearly put charter schools on the public side of the line]

During my years as an educator, I've definitely been exposed to the thorny questions and uncomfortable evidence around charter schools and if they really deliver on their promise to be sources of innovation and positive change for more equitable education for students who are not well served in traditional public schools. I know the report card on these topics is far from "straight A's." I also know there are many charter schools, networks, and educators within the charter school movement that have made huge, positive impacts on their students and in communities around the country.

This manipulation of the original premise of charter schools to achieve increasingly anti-public good, anti-democratic, ideological, and exclusionary purposes is deeply troubling.

If those of us who have seen the positive impacts of charter schools don't raise our voices now, the real gains and positive innovations yielded by the charter school movement may also be lost.

We need to act as if our basic rights depend on it.

Be well,

Becca