If I were looking for someone to destroy the Evil Empire, Marilyn Keller Rittmeyer wouldn’t be my first pick. After all, she works for the Evil Empire.
She teaches 6th grade at a public school in Schaumburg. She’s been a teacher for more than two decades. She’s working on a doctorate in education at Northwestern University.
She sent two of her children to a public school for several years until she got frustrated with what it was, make that wasn’t, teaching. “I believe, as do many parents, that there needs to be a more structured approach for some children,” she told me. “If parents want a more traditional approach, that ought to be offered.”
Rittmeyer doesn’t think public schools are the Evil Empire. She just thinks that the people who run them don’t listen very well to parents.
When you look at what has happened to her and some cohorts in the northwest suburbs, though, it sure smacks of rampant Evil Empire protectionism.
A few years ago, they came up with an idea to get back to basics in the public schools. They wanted a school where the students would wear uniforms. When other kids observed Columbus Day and Martin Luther King Day and Lincoln’s Birthday and Presidents Day and Pulaski Day by sleeping late and playing Nintendo at home, their kids would be in class learning about the people who get a day named for them.
Their kids would learn a curriculum known as “core knowledge,” which means they would be drilled the old-fashioned way in reading and math and writing skills, they’d learn the basic facts they need to know, along with how to question and analyze.
This would be a great little story if the parents who run the local school boards had listened to the parents who wanted a back-to-basics school and tried to work something out. But that didn’t happen.
The parents went to one school board with their ideas and were told to go away and leave the educating to the pros.
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But then the Illinois legislature passed a law to create charter schools in the state. These are schools where you can experiment, break some rules, and see if there is a better way to educate children. They’re doing this in about 30 states now. Pretty soon there will be more than 1,000 charter schools in the country. But there are none in Chicago’s suburbs.
The back-to-basics parents in the northwest suburbs went to the school board again, this time to ask for a charter school. But they were told the same thing: Go away, we know how to teach your children.
So they went to 10 other districts seeking a charter school, and each one told them to leave the educating to the pros. They kept after one school district based in Arlington Heights, and three times the school board there rejected the charter school.
Last week the Illinois State Board of Education did an amazing thing. It went up against the Empire. It ordered that the school board in Arlington Heights must give up some of its power and money and control so a bunch of parents can set up their own school under their own rules. It will be the Thomas Jefferson Charter School.
The parents have a private company ready to operate the school. They have stacks of resumes from teachers and principals who want to be involved.
As far as I can tell, the charter school poses only one legitimate danger for the public school bureaucracy. The danger is that it will be wildly popular.
If it is wildly popular, it will draw people back to public education. That could mean lots of children who go to private and parochial schools. Nobody knows how many children in the first classes of Thomas Jefferson Charter School will come from private and parochial schools, but my guess is, quite a few.
The charter school has a seven-member board, and only two of them have children in the public schools. One mother on the board teaches her children at home. The others have children in parochial schools.
Now, this gets to one of the secrets of public education. It is vastly subsidized by the parents who don’t use public education.
Some 320,000 children in Illinois go to private and parochial schools. Their parents pay taxes for the public school they don’t use and pay tuition for the private school they do use. That’s their choice.
But if all those parents showed up in September to enroll their kids in the local public school, taxpayers would have to come up with a cool $1 billion to educate them.
That’s the only problem for the school board in Arlington Heights. For every child who wants to go to Thomas Jefferson Charter School, the board will have to give the school about $7,000 a year. But for each of those kids, the state will give the board only $218 a year.
That’s not a typo. Suburban schools don’t get much money from the state.
If that kid is moving from a private school to Thomas Jefferson, then the board has to come up with $7,000 it didn’t have to spend last year.
So I can see why the people who run the school board feel some resentment toward the state board of education for ordering them to set up this school. The state won’t be paying for it.
That’s something for the legislature to think about as charter schools get more popular. Somebody has to pay for their success. The state should help school districts that are growing because of the popularity of charter schools.
But it’s hard to feel too sorry for the educators in Arlington Heights, not when they’re talking about one last-ditch effort to save the Empire and slay Thomas Jefferson. The school board members say they’re outraged that this school is being forced on them. There’s talk that the board will haul everybody into court to fight the state’s decision. Rather than try to make this school successful, they’re talking about preserving the status quo.
It used to be that the Chicago Public Schools bureaucracy was the Evil Empire. But Chicago has embraced charter schools. There will be 15 of them in the city this fall, all that the legislature allowed. There isn’t a single charter school in the suburbs. Every bid for one has been rejected.
And all this time you thought that the Evil Education Empire in Chicago was dead and buried. Not a chance. It just packed up and moved to the suburbs.