Charter/Magnet/Choice/Small schools

I went home to Minnesota for a wedding last weekend and due to timing had to stay through Monday. With all of the talk of charter and small schools recently in our class, I decided to visit my high school, a “choice” school for 400 total 11th and 12th graders in a suburban school district of the Minneapolis area, called the School of Environmental Studies. I have not been there in 12 years since I graduated in 1997. In fact, my now married friend and I were members of the first full class at SES, so I convinced her to come with me. It was interesting to see what had become of the school after 14 years of experience now, and to look at it from a teacher’s viewpoint. While the school has evolved some, its mission and core values have remain unchanged; the school has found its niche in the community to be effective. I had a great experience there and thought that I gained much more than I would have at my traditional high school that I opted out of.

Opening charter/magnet/choice/small schools is visibly on the agenda of BCPSS. We will have 27 charter schools in Baltimore City by next year when the first opened in only 2005. However, the validity of charter/magnet/choice/small schools is questioned because of the students that they attract, and the individual differences that makes them succeed or not. As Sara Neufeld reported in the Baltimore Sun, charters do tend to attract students from better backgrounds. As Teresa Mendez writes in the Christian Science Monitor, small schools cannot be blanket labeled as effective. I agree, we cannot take the effectiveness of charter/magnet/choice/small schools as gospel, but need to critically evaluate what is and is not working for them.

Nonetheless, charter/magnet/choice/small schools represent evolution in education, something that we desperately need. American students, especially those in Baltimore City, are lagging behind the rest of the world in achievement, a detail that we cannot afford to ignore. We must find ways to improve our schools. Evolution on the smaller scale of a 100 student per grade charter/magnet/choice/small school is easier to implement and refine than in a 500 student per grade monstrosity. Meeting the needs of our different students in every community is at the core of the issue. If we must differentiate instructional methods to meet the needs of individual students, then we should also differentiate individual schools to serve the community as a whole better. Implementing more charter/magnet/choice/small schools is the logical step to accomplishing this.