The school in Oklahoma City at which I first taught during my sojourn in that city has an interesting and uneven history.
When the school was first planned, in the late 1920s, the state and city were in their infancy, and beyond the downtown area and its immediately surrounding development, the area above 10th street on the West side was undeveloped plains.
Originally the land developers, bankers, and city planners had seen this area as the future home of the city’s aristocracy as it was close to, but not as entwined in the downtown area as was Heritage Hills, the original high end neighborhood where the big mansions and stately homes perched on the hill above it looked down on it. But the city was slowly spreading and swallowing the areas around it like an amoeba in mid meal.
In light of this plan, Taft Middle school was built in what at the time was the middle of nowhere as the seed of the grand plan.
The building was designed by Solomon Layton who had designed the state house and many of the art deco buildings that dot the downtown area, and it features large friezes on its façade extolling learning and hard work, a library with parquet flooring and a reading area that featured a fireplace, ceilings throughout the hallways painted ala the Cistine Chapel but with Egyptian inspired art work in place of the nudes, stained glass in the transoms, and intricate brickwork on all exterior walls making them works of art in their own right.
Upon completion, it earned the designation as the most beautiful school building in the United States.
But corresponding with the time of its completion, land speculators has begun establishing Nichols Hills, an area further north and on a long rolling rise, as the area for the rich and well to-do that could be close to the city, but could also existed as its own municipality, like a borough of New York City, so the area around Taft was given over to the growing middle class who inherited the school meant for the upper class.
Because of its location on the only road that completely crossed the city from its east end to its west, when desegregation of the public school system began it was perfectly located to get the Black children from the East Side of the city where the Black Community existed for years without them having to go through any neighborhoods. It was a straight shot from where they were to where they needed to be, and a straight shot back.
The school was the first to be integrated.
Because of this, and because of the anti-desegregation attitudes of the city and the parents of the children who attended it, the school was referred to as a bad school both because of its being integrated and because of the actions undertaken by those who objected to this.
The school itself, however, not only remained a highly performing school, but by the time I was there it had become the highest academically performing school in the city. But, in spite of this, and without remembering why, it was still considered in the minds of most people a bad school.
In spite of it academic record, the many accomplishments that garnered media attention and praise, and it innovative programs, some award winning, people could not give up on a reputation birthed 25 years before I had arrived because of integration not the school itself or its students.
Not having been there when the false reputation was bestowed, I never saw anything that would have made it the bad school some friends had warned me about when I told them I would be working there.
When the charter school movement began, the mischaracterization of the school was the hook upon which the claim for a need for charter schools was hung.
While ignoring its being the highest performing school, but relying on anti-desegregation memories, those promoting the charter school asked parents if they were comfortable with a school infested by gangs whose members threatened the nice kids.
There was no gang activity.
They were asked if they were comfortable with their children attending a school defaced with graffiti throughout its hall, effectively misrepresenting the murals students had painted on stairwell walls as part of an art class project that was funded with a government grant with none of them containing tang references or graffiti, but were middle school art class depictions of school related activities with a certain Primitive school of Art quality.
Parents were encouraged to just drive by at the close of any school day and they could see the problem. What they would have seen was the most integrated student body in the city leaving the building at dismissal.
When the charter school opened, it siphoned off most of its first students from that school, giving preference to those students who had tested highest on standardized test.
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The test scores of the charter school were the highest in the city the first year, mainly because the school had admitted the top 10% of the middle school students while the standing of the middle school slipped for that same reason.
Although the first standardized tests came within the first semester, the charter school leaders boasted about its success in having the programs that produced those scores while ignoring, for obvious reasons, that those students had come to them after having been educated for two years at the middle school and had gotten the high scores based on those two years not the first two months at the charter school, and would have most likely gotten those sores if they had remained.
The charter school then used the test result slippage at the middle school as evidence of its ineffectiveness as compared to its own.
Almost immediately after the false proof that the charter school was as effective as it claimed to be and using the test scores as its proof, students who, although being smart and who did well on the test, but who were discipline problems, were involuntarily un-enrolled because of “academic concerns”, and returned to the middle school to be discipline problems there.
They had supplied the desired statistics and were no longer needed.
In its early years, the charter school would refer to those initial test scores to justify its existence, even as its test scores slipped over the subsequent years while those of the middle school began to rise.
The public was just as reluctant to abandon the charter school’s false reputation for being the success it actually wasn’t in spite of the realities as it had been to abandon the false reputation of the middle school being a bad one based not on its reality but the community’s initial aversion to integration.
In spite of a 2016 ballot question that sought a massive charter school expansion in Massachusetts being overwhelmingly defeated by Massachusetts voters, State Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley seeks to allow expansion of the Alma del Mar charter school in New Bedford that would hand over public assets at no charge to a private company and create a neighborhood district within the city that will feed students into the charter school.
By handing over a school building and its campus to a for profit business, $15 million will be drained annually from the New Bedford Public Schools.
Charter schools are private businesses, and they have no oversight by democratically elected officials as they take public funds from the public schools which means there is no transparency about what is happening in the school supported with public funds.
The existing charter school that will be getting the campus, the building, and the public money has a very high suspension rate with many of its needy and misbehaving students being sent back to the city’s public schools just as I have seen done in my experience.
The obvious question with a for-profit school with a built in student population as a neighborhood school is how it will handle these students and if the handling is the standard ones will these kids have to be bused to another school outside their neighborhood.
The formula used to fund public schools is in need of and is slated for an update for the first time in 25 years. What is not needed is to create a system that takes money away from city wide school districts to the benefit of a for profit private industry with no accountability.
The attitude I have seen expressed many times when it come to those wanting to open a charter school has been,
“We can do a better job than public schools. All we need is to be given a city school building and public school funds with no accountability requirements or the requirement to do better than the public schools, and as we make a profit, just watch us soar.”