Lisa, I’m with you. Let me remind everyone that charter schools are different across the city, with different approaches and philosophies, student populations and level of compliance with IDEA.

I’ve seen charters that basically say, “We don’t do special education here.” Yikes! On the other hand, you have schools that actually ARE doing innovative things with ELLs and students with disabilites. In my district, over-referral to the CSE is not only common but rampant.

Charters allow for the opportunity (not saying all or even MANY but at least SOME act this way) to actually use RTI and follow the mandates in IDEA.

(Kitchen Sink says:) “The charter law includes a few ingenious advantages that could be a model for public school governance going forward.

It allows for local control, by de-centralizing decisions such as budgetary allocations and staffing decisions.”)

The Site-Based Budgeting system was implemented here in the San Francisco Unified School District 7 or 8 years ago (by then-Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, now Philadelphia schools chief — Ackerman was controversial here and is controversial in Philly, but even her detractors here praise Site-Based Budgeting).

For a bureaucratic term, Site-Based Budgeting is relatively self-explanatory. The School Site Council — an elected state-mandated governing body with representation by parents, school staff and sometimes outside community members — does the school’s budgeting. Here in California that’s a tough situation because our school funding is so shockingly low — New York’s is so high by comparison that it almost looks like a joke to us — but the fact is that in San Francisco, budgeting decisions are not centralized.

That may or may not be connected with the fact that our district is the highest-performing urban school district in California.

You are mistaken. Not all schools have a parent coordinator. Many of the smaller schools do not.

When they first created the parent coordinator position, it was supposed to be on a trial basis and if needed they would do away with the position. It’s not fair for anyone to lose their jobs, but they can teach the school aides to handle some of the work that the parent coordinators do. Schools ran without parent coordinators for years, but a school can’t be run without school aides.

The DOE can have 2 or 3 parent coordinators per district instead of one per school. The parent coordinators can be located at the district offices and make visits to the schools in the district that they work for. This way they can keep the school aides and parents can still receive information that they need.

In my experience, school aid quality varies far more than teacher quality. Of course, that’s should not be too surprising, given the lack of regulation/certification. I have no doubt that some schools have worked hard to include them as part of the faculty, worked hard to select them and worked even harder to help them be valuable members of their communities.

But we shouldn’t universalize either good experience or bad experiences.

The DOE can save a lot of money if they stop creating all these small schools within a school. It appears that every time they close a large school because it is failing, they open 4 or 5 small schools within that one building. That means 5 principal salaries that they have to pay now instead of the one that they paid before. Why does the DOE just spend the extra money to help the school improve.

The layoff of the 500 school aides is just the first round of cuts. Who is going to be next on the chopping block? Why doesn’t the DOE do away with some of the AP positions in a school. Some schools have 3 or 4 AP’s and deans, but not many school aides or even secretaries.

If the DOE is laying off aides this year what kind of mess will next year be like when principals have to cut 5 percent off their budgets for the next school year? There won’t be anybody left to cut except to cut teachers and that will just increase the number of ATRs.

The mayor should just invest some of his millions into the school system that he already controls.

Article 56 – NYS Charter Law
NYS Charter Law indicates that the purpose of creating new charter schools across the state is to:

Improve student achievement

Increase learning opportunities for all students, with an emphasis on at-risk students

Encourage use of innovative teaching methods/educational designs

Create new professional opportunities for teachers, administrators, school’s staff

Provide families with high quality choices

Change from rule-based to performance based accountability

It allows for local control, by de-centralizing decisions such as budgetary allocations and staffing decisions.

I don’t want it both ways; I want control, by my school community, of our staff and our budget. Charters aren’t affected by this chancellor’s decision to cut school aide positions. When we have to deal with budget cuts – as we did with the state legislature’s senseless and politically motivated freezing of our per-pupil allocation this spring while using stimulus money to continue to increase district funding – each school makes the best decision for its mission, its team, and its families.

In response to the quote that I assert that “charters are public schools bound by the requirements of state law, etc., – laws that in practice no one seems to enforce upon them – and then when its convenient extolling their independence”: Charters are bound by a brilliant state law that allows for independence.

Which is it? It can’t be both.

What’s the logic? Charters are the answer to school aides being cut, but UES parents can’t pay for school aides? Charter money can pay for aides but not non-charter money?

I’m on record here as PRO-AIDE regardless of who pays. I’m just having a hard time finding the principle hidden in your pro-charter pragmatism.

Autonomy? When the charter-lovin Bloomberg announced that aides would be cut MONTHS ago? Sorry, the word that comes to mind is autocracy. Or hypocricy.

It’s the autonomy, stupid!

Do people who work in schools work for the school or for the system? Are they employees of their individual schoool, or employees of the Department of Education?

This is related to the question of whether principals should be viewed like CEOs or like branch managers.

It’s a big question with lots of implications. This situation is just one of them.