The Washington Post has published a good article which asks pointed questions about the proposed Turkish-Gulen charter school in Loudoun County, Virginia.
The questions do not center around the Gulen Movement per se, or its mysterious founder, Fethullah Gulen, but, rather, around the curiously slip-shod way in which the administrators of this proposed school are already conducting themselves. It’s almost as if the education aspects of the school are an afterthought.
But an afterthought to what? That is the key question.
…it turns out, questions about ties to the influential preacher, Fethullah Gulen, are not the most immediate issue facing the board…
What is most pressing is the fact that the Turkish men applying to open the school have had trouble answering, to the satisfaction of board members, questions about budget, curriculum, student transportation, and other basic elements that go into running a school. Recent hearings before a three-member select committee of the board revealed gaping holes in the planning of this proposed school.
A look into one area, curriculum, reveals the problem. At one of the hearings, applicants were questioned in part about a seeming incoherence in their proposed curriculum. Then, a week later, the applicants junked that curriculum plan and presented a new one: using Loudoun’s own “scope and sequence” (which allows consistency of instruction in each subject through the grades) along with curriculum they said they would purchase from Pearson, the world’s largest education company. This new “vision” was delivered at a hearing last Thursday, a week before the select committee is set to decide on its recommendations to the full board.
The applicants say that the curriculum won’t really be developed until well after the full Board of Education is likely to make a decision on whether the school can open, sometime in February. That’s a problem, said board vice president Jill Turgeon, a teacher and, it is worth noting, an enthusiast of charter schools — at least those with fully drawn-out plans.
To understand just how fluid the vision for this school is, consider that it was only last Wednesday that the applicants dumped on the board members 400 pages of information related to the application. (The new data within those pages was not, it was noted at the hearing, red-lined for the benefit of the board members.) Inexplicably, about half of the 400 pages were documents directly related to the charter school in Anne Arundel that the Loudoun applicants run and are using as a model for the Loudoun school. Many of the documents don’t seem to have any application to the Loudoun school.
The Anne Arundel school, the Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, has had academic success but has clashed repeatedly with the Anne Arundel education officials on big issues. The school is suing the district, alleging that it has been underfunded. Meanwhile, the school won a three-year extension on its contract this past summer though it’s not entirely clear why, given all the problems cited by the county superintendent, Kevin Maxwell. In a June post I noted:
Maxwell wants the school, among other things, to hire qualified and fully certified teachers, allow parents to elect the board of directors “to reflect the community it serves,” use appropriate procurement and bidding processes for outside contracts, use the same data system that other public schools in the country use, follow board policy for the hiring of foreign nationals, and agree not to allow any of its contractors or subcontractors to “knowingly employ” anybody who has been investigated for criminal activity.
Those are pretty serious problems.
Gulen Watch 