Christopher Bauer’s Weblog

Greetings,

I have just finished reading this article from the Washington Post.  It basically reports that the Maryland Board of Education has decided to put several public schools, which are consistently underperforming, in the hands of private contractors and charter schools.  The plan is that the private contractors and charter schools will be better trained and motivated to improve the schools and thus put them on track to pass the NCLB deadline.

I am not sure how I feel on this issue.  On the onset it appears to be a logical plan, if the current administration doesn’t do the job properly, get new administration.  However, I am not sure how the private contractors will fare relative to the old administration, or even why this type of step is taken.

It seems to me that another logical plan of action would have been to hire new administrators in those public schools.  Although I do not know if they have done this, the article seems to give hints that this has not.  From this, I am forced to think of a reason why the BOE has decided to take a large step, such as this, so early.  The only one I can think of at the moment is Politics.  They could be trying to say “Hey, look at us, we are really trying to get our schools on track, we are special.”  This would be a huge vote-getter if someone on the BOE wanted to run for office.

Website:

Anderson, Nick.  “Control of 11 Schools Seized.”  Washington Post.  30 March 2006. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Personal Readings and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.