Educators Need to Research Admissions and Expulsions Policies

I have just read an interesting comment from one "LaborLawyer" on the fine educational blog Eduwonk. It was written in response to a summary of the findings of a recent national study on charter management organizations.

The comment focuses on inherent advantages unscrupulous charter schools abuse with regard to "skimming the cream" (as usual this metaphor regards students and their families as mindless inanimate objects waiting to get picked up) and credible expulsion threats. Also predictable is the comment's failure to recognize traditional public schools' inherent advantages with regard to capital facilities and operating budgets. But, coupled with an interesting PBS segment on the effects of Indiana's new voucher law, issues of admission, exclusion, and expulsion are once more rising into consciousness, whether in the contexts of public, chartered, or private schools.

As one still working on starting a school, and reluctantly admitting that we had better focus on opening our first school as an independent school still demonstrating the effectiveness and potential of the charter it will operate under, these issues are seen in a new light. And a first principle I would like to lay down in this regard is this one: our school's charter and practices should be entirely consistent with best regulatory practices worldwide in these matters, so as to encourage those policies and regulations to come into existence in jurisdictions all over the developed world.

And We Need Professional Principals, Too

There is a scene in Waiting For Superman in which Superintendent Michelle Rhee fires a principal. While it is extraordinary that the dismissal was filmed, it may well be the kind of action that is inevitable if we are going to meaningfully improve our schools. Good schools recognize the importance of accountable, dynamic school leadership and compensate it accordingly.

But some in the education blogosphere bemoan a dearth of talented school leaders willing to supply the need, and small-school models inherently call for the creation of far more principals' positions than the traditional comprehensive school model requires, so where are all these education superheroes supposed to come from?

One place they have not been coming from, so far, is from special principals' academies like the one set up in New York City in the last decade to fill the need. A very interesting story in The New York Times showed that schools headed by typically young (early 30s) Ivy League types with minimal educational experience but special academy training were being outperformed on the city's accountability measures by more experienced leaders who rose through the ranks in the old-fashioned way, contrary to the academy's expectations.

If we were to genuinely empower principals, as independent schools often do, and not bestrew them with the kind of regulations that have strangled the traditional public schools and led to such intense frustration on the part of those schools' principals (see my post of 8 July for this),  we might make education in general a more enticing career for young people, and draw more much-needed talent into schools of all kinds.