GLOUCESTER — The Gloucester Community Arts Charter School’s brief and turbulent existence will come to a halt next Friday afternoon when the school will officially close.
Citing a weak financial ledger and an inability to pay its staff and already set to close in June after making a deal with the state last month to avoid having its charter revoked, the school’s board of trustees voted unanimously Tuesday night to shut down early.
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Would it be fair to ask the Globe to mention it's own latent role in this disaster? The Globe editorial page has been one of the most vigorous advocates for the ill-founded charter school political movement. The movement blames teachers who work with kids living in poverty for the kids' academic performance problems, and agitates in favor of shifting public monies into private charter operating companies. The Globe trumpets as a public policy success the creation of schools which effectively filter our the most challenging students, creating a school-based tracking system. The Gloucester charter was only created to appease the Globe's hunger for charter schools. According to then Education Secretary Reville, in an ill-advised written communication to the Commissioner of Education, unless the Gloucester charter was approved, "we'll get permanently labeled as hostile and that will cripple us with a number of key, moderate allies like the Globe and the Boston Foundation." Now, in Gloucester, the effects of this particular corruption of public education driven by the Globe's campaign is playing itself out--a school closing mid-year, dumping its educationally neglected students into classrooms in Gloucester public schools whose students are far ahead of them, but which must now undertake large scale remediation programming with the charter kids. Will Scott Leigh take notice and rethink his anti-teacher pro-charter campaign? Don't hold your breath.
Well said. The public schools are paying the price for this failed venture both ways - loosing the funding in the first instance, and having to accept the students back after the Charter School blew all the money it siphoned off the public schools budget.
It is interesting to note, that one of the causes of the failure was declining enrollment.
The same thing is happening in UP Academy in Boston. Their attrition rate is the same as the regular district schools, but they are not filling the seats with new students! Even the pro-Charter Globe apparently thinks these high rates of student withdrawal at UP Academy "raise some questions".
Who is it that is leaving at UP Academy? Seemingly the students that are in greatest need of services - the special needs students.
I feel sorrry for the students from this failed charter school. The disruption to their lives and their education is a cautionary tail for all future attempts to blindly expand charter schools at all costs as a pancea for the alleged failures of Massachusetts public education.