Portland turns down four charter schools

Displaying an unyielding commitment to the status quo, the Portland School District board denied four separate charter school proposals at their board meeting this week.

Now, PPS hostility to charters is not really news, but there were some interesting - and revealing - aspects to the whole process. Two of the proposals were rejected unanimously. I know nothing about these proposals - for all I know they were horrid, and should have been rejected.

Two of the proposals, however failed on a split vote, and only after the board subcommittee recommended that the proposals be approved. In the testimony and discussion over these two proposals, some educators and board members made some pretty revealing comments.

During the testimony a teacher from Madison High School, Tom Conry, spoke against the proposal to start a "Leadership & Entrepreneurial High School" not far from Madison. Conry and others are in the middle of trying to reform Madison High, and they are afraid that if they let a new charter school open nearby, it might hurt their efforts. I've met Conry - he's a nice fellow. Here's what the Oregonian reported:

He said charter schools, even though they are public, are in a larger sense part of the movement toward privatization because they turn schools into commodities that cater to a few rather than institutions that whole communities support for the benefit of all.

This is the kind of statement that we get all the time from people opposed to charters. How does providing choices in the form of charter schools turn schools into commodities? What does that mean? The funny thing is that Mr. Conry's objection is completely irrelevant. He was trying to convince the school board to deny a charter school, which they can do only for specific legal criteria. These criteria don't include his handwringing over school commoditization.

Conry went on to say:

"This devaluing of the common good is the cancer that will kill us all if we let it," Conry said. "To believe in public schools . . . you have to believe that our lives are important to one another on some noncommercial, nonmarket-based level."

Again, totally irrelevant. But revealing. He's clearly a collectivist. I've read the statement a dozen times and still don't know quite what it means. But what I do know is he is spreading this gobbledygook in his classrooms.

Now, onto the board members. There is good news here: apparently, new board member Sonja Henning has a lot on the ball. Not just because she supported the school, but because she was the one board member who seems to understand that they are dealing with a statute that has specific legal criteria for how they deal with charter proposals.

New member Dan Ryan also seems to get it. He voted in favor of the school, brushing aside concerns that the charter school would hinder plans to reform Madison, saying that high school students not being served don't have another two years to wait to see how reforms take hold at existing schools.

But the old guard on the board; they are hopeless as ever. Doug Morgan admitted that he was "confused." Well, I can't argue with that. He voted no, fretting that the new charter school might "undermine the flexibility and creativity that the board is already trying to encourage at existing schools."

They offer this stuff up as if it has some meaning. How on earth would one school undermine flexibility at another? It doesn't even come close to qualifying for a valid reason to deny a charter school.

I guess what he is saying is that he is against this school because he is afraid that some students might choose to go there.

Later, Morgan told everybody that he has training as an "ethicist," and that this charter proposal presents him with a moral dilemma, presenting him with "two equally compelling goods." He wanted everybody to know how tortured he was about his no vote, saying that in all of his years serving on boards and advisory committees, "None of the weightiness and moral conflict equaled the moral conflict I personally felt in voting on some of the charter proposals."

Oh, brother. It's all about you, Director Morgan. He casts the deciding vote against a charter that would give a choice to students who desperately need it. He willingly sacrifices these kids, for what? Because of some imagined decrease in flexibility and creativity in the other schools.

Sorry, Director Morgan, that doesn't even come close to meeting the standard for a valid reason to deny a charter school. And I doubt that the students you are denying a school they and their parents want care very much about how much moral conflict you personally felt.

In fact they might point out that we all feel moral conflict when we do something we know is wrong.