Response to Menino Charter School Shift

The intial internet reponse to Mayor Menino's shift on charter schools is pretty harsh, but not from the usual sources. Typically, calls for more charter schools get out a fair mix of charter supporters and naysayers. This time, though, the response has been mainly anti-mayor, with only a little serious discussion of the merits of his proposal.

Here are the major lines of attack I'm seeing after perusing the web:

1. The mayor is doing this purely for political reasons. He's responding to positions taken by Yoon and Flaherty earlier in the week.
2. The mayor is a flip-flopper.
3. This isn't a serious proposal; he has no power to change state law and has no intention of actually pushing this idea. We're supposed to forget about this by 2010.
4. Why would new schools under the Boston School Committee do any better than the schools currently under their jurisdiction?
5. If the mayor is the incumbent and he's all about education, how come he's only taking this position after 16 year?

I think his biggest mistake is this quote: “The status quo doesn’t work in education.” The mayor's going to be regretting that one for a long time. Flaherty and Yoon will surely jump all over it, since they're campaigning on the fact that Menino has been around too long. Now, it seems like he's admitting that his tenure has not done enough for the schools.

I'm not sure who the mayor is trying to reach with a proposal that seems like either a more restrictive form of charter schools or a less restrictive form of pilot schools. It seems a little like Governor Patrick's Readiness Schools: a political calculation that admits the need for school choice but doesn't run the risk of losing teachers unions support by supporting existing, non-unionized charter schools.

In this case, it seems like none of the vested interest groups are particularly impressed. It's clear from Richard Stutman's quote in the Herald that the BTU is opposed. Supporters of lifting the charter school cap will be unimpressed by the "in-district" limitations.

From my point of view, it seems silly to try another type of school choice when we have a well-tested model just itching to expand and a copy-cat model that's been less successful.

UPDATE: The Globe article, an update on the orginal boston.com posting, includes quotes that echo some of the comments above. I find it interesting that Menino wants to allow the lowest performing schools in BPS to be turned into charter schools. I wonder which schools will be tapped for this program if it ever happens? A charter school in the building that currently houses Mildred Avenue Middle School would be awesome, though you know that will never happen. To echo Jim Stergios in the Globe article, why doesn't Menino move ahead with a plan to turn low perfoming school in BPS into Horace Mann charter schools?