Norma Cantu Strikes Again
Vanourek, Bruno Manno and Gregg
Norma Cantu Strikes Again by Bruno Manno and Gregg Vanourek President Clinton is supposedly a staunch supporter of the nation's charter schools—independently run, but publicly funded, institutions...
...But every drop of freedom that a charter school enjoys is a threat to some interest group's regulatory regimen and some bureaucracy's raison d'etre...
...As a result of this ordeal, special education could become the means by which the education establishment and regulatory activists tie charter schools in knots...
...No matter...
...The Education Department investigates hundreds each year...
...OCR determined the school had acted in violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which deals in part with disabilities in education...
...So much for the idea of independent charter schools, free from the regulatory micromanagement that plagues conventional district schools...
...Operational freedom in exchange for improved results is the central concept of charter schools...
...After switching to a charter school, parents of special-ed youngsters reported a 21 percent increase in children performing at "excellent" and "above average" levels and a 33 percent decrease in children in the "below average" and "poor" categories...
...Accordingly, the school is now required to "submit to oCR for its review and approval a plan for mandatory training for school employees on the subject of racial and ethnic sensitivity...
...Thomas Mela, OCR's senior attorney in Boston, is a former employee of the group that sued the school, the Massachusetts Advocacy Center...
...12 percent are disabled...
...She also sought, in an episode that embarrassed the administration, to compel universities in Texas to disobey the Supreme Court following a recent decision...
...If what happened in Massachusetts last month becomes a precedent, we might as well bid farewell to charter schools as a viable education-reform strategy...
...Cases like this are not uncommon at regular public schools...
...Ironically, the main reason families choose to enroll disabled children in charter schools is that the rule-bound and procedure-heavy regular schools are not meeting their needs...
...For example, Renaissance failed to notify the parents of their rights under federal law (although it did notify them of their rights under state law...
...Thus it is all the more important to resist the assault on charter schools from Cantu's Education Department and the education establishment...
...Bruno Manno is a senior fellow (on leave) and Gregg Vanourek a research fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...OCR used the act to force Renaissance into an agreement that gave the department effective oversight of the school's entire special-education program...
...Norma Cantu Strikes Again by Bruno Manno and Gregg Vanourek President Clinton is supposedly a staunch supporter of the nation's charter schools—independently run, but publicly funded, institutions now numbering around 700...
...Furthermore, special-education students appear to be making academic gains in their charter schools...
...Indeed, he has called for the creation of 3,000 of them by decade's end...
...While the school had bent over backwards trying to cope with the extremely disruptive student, it made a few minor procedural mistakes...
...So charter schools are caught between a rock and a hard place—between families seeking alternative strategies for educating their children and rigid federal requirements...
...But during its investigation, oCR agents concluded nonetheless that the school's staff was insufficiently sensitive to racial diversity...
...School officials did not consult them about the boy's classroom transfer until after the fact...
...After thorough investigation, oCR found no evidence that the transfer was racially motivated...
...Department of Education), warned all charter schools nationwide to take note of the precedent established by this case...
...That so many special-education students appear to be thriving in charter schools is encouraging...
...Re-regulation poses as great a danger to charter schools as does political opposition to their creation...
...It's one of the country's largest and most celebrated charter schools...
...Indeed, its assistant secretary for civil rights, Norma Cantu, is becoming famous for her witch hunts and fishing expeditions...
...In response to such demand, the state legislature recently agreed—over teacher-union protests—to raise the number of charter schools to 50...
...But the question arises whether Clinton appointees at the Department of Education— egged on by disability lobbyists who cannot abide the possibility that some schools might approach special education differently from others—are on a seek-and-destroy mission when it comes to charter-school innovation and independence...
...No regulatory agency in America is more determined to keep all the nation's schools and colleges under its thumb than the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights, which has embarrassed the Clinton administration on several earlier occasions...
...The latest example of the department's hostility came a few weeks ago, when the Boston office of the department's civil-rights division took action against the Boston Renaissance Charter School...
...The school, which is managed by the for-profit Edison Project on behalf of the non-profit community group that obtained a charter from the state in 1995, enrolls over a thousand students from kindergarten through 8th grade...
...Virtually every one of Massachusetts's 24 charter schools has a waiting list, including Boston Renaissance (which has a waiting list of 1,700...
...Schools chancellor Rudy Crew has said that if the Education Department imposes its will on the school, "We'll just take this to court...
...They're meant to be different from regular public schools, and from one another...
...And on several occasions the school improperly shortened his school day (i.e., sent him home at noon) because of his "aggressive or dangerous behavior...
...Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Advocacy Center filed a disability-discrimination complaint with OCR, charging that a family was forced to withdraw its son from the school after a teacher transferred him out of her classroom without notifying the family...
...In a Hudson Institute survey of 2,978 charter-school parents in 1996-97, we found that two-thirds of the parents of disabled youngsters said that their charter school's curriculum and teaching were better than those of the school their child would otherwise be attending...
...And in an interview with the Boston Globe, Tim Sinde-lar, a senior lawyer with the Disability Law Center in Boston (partially funded by the U.S...
...Meantime, his administration's Education Department is doing all it can to derail the charter-school movement...
...As in all these cases, in the Renaissance School dispute, Cantu had plenty of accomplices...
...It's subtler and more pernicious, not least because it can often be presented as a response to some complaint, shortcoming, or inadequacy...
...Last spring, the Education Department's office for Civil Rights (OCR) received a complaint from a family that the school had transferred a misbehaving 5th-grade girl from one class to another because she was black...
...Three-quarters of its students are minority...
...Parents opt for charter schools precisely because they do things differently, yet the latest revision of the federal special-education law—passed overwhelmingly by the GOP Congress and gleefully signed by President Clinton—says that charter schools must "serve children with disabilities in the same manner as other public schools...
...In New York City, where an all-girls school has just opened, she has admonished the Board of Education either to admit boys or to establish a separate program for boys only...
...Surveys and interviews make plain that they're enormously popular with teachers, students, and par-ents—notably the parents of disabled youngsters, many of whom seek something other than the cumbersome, formalized, label-crazy procedures of conventional special education...
...But overall, Renaissance appeared to be in compliance with federal and state special-education law, and in any case the boy's parents wouldn't let him be evaluated for eligibility for special-education services...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 7
