Cut charter school red tape for innovative schools

Downtown School backers have been doing their homework - holding public meetings, answering parent questions, honing their vision.

Cedar Rapids teacher Gretchen Price and other local educators have been putting in the time and energy to develop an inquiry-based prekindergarten through fifth-grade learning environment - a place where kids can learn by doing.

But almost as if they were themselves children, the Downtown School has to get permission to put those innovative ideas into practice.

Cedar Rapids school officials say they're not ready to talk about a charter school because they don't have the necessary policies in place. Yet they've known about the project for months.

Organizers want to open the Downtown School in the fall of 2012. To do that, Iowa law requires them to get approval from Cedar Rapids school officials. To do that, they'll have to comply with whatever as-yet-unwritten application the district cooks up.

It doesn't sound like a recipe for innovation to me; it sounds like a sticky mess of red tape.

It's just not a good time, board President John Laverty said in a prepared statement at a board meeting this week (I'm paraphrasing here), what with enrollment numbers up in the air, all these outstanding facilities studies, the budget - just too many balls in the air, you know?

The board directed administrators to give the charter school folks only the barest of attention - just that required by law - nothing more.

Which is exactly why that law must change to force school districts to work with communities on serious, viable charter school ideas - or to take districts out of the decision-making process altogether.

It seems that every educational administrator these days is paying lip service to school reform - to the idea that we need to shake up our 19th-century classrooms and ideas about how to teach and learn.

But when it comes time to put their pencils to paper, school boards chicken out. Cedar Rapids isn't the only board to give would-be charter schools the runaround.

Are charter schools the answer to education reform? Not by themselves.

But other neighboring states are home to hundreds of charter schools, which can serve important roles as educational innovators - a way to try out new ideas.

Not in Iowa. We can count the number of charter schools on two hands - not because people aren't interested enough or motivated enough to make them happen.

Just because they can't get permission.

Comments: jennifer.

hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net; (319) 339-3154.