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Chapter 17 Pushing Back: How an Environmental Charter School Resisted Test-Driven Pressures Paul Skilton-Sylvester Who would believe that Albert Shanker, the late, controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), was one of the original backers of the charter school concept, publicizing the name and idea in his weekly “Where We Stand” column of July 10, 1988? Charter schools, unions, and public schooling were not always enemies. But, more than two decades later, the teams have changed, and the debate over charter schools has become so polarized as not to be productive. Critics on the left tend to lump charter schools together and include them with the voucher movement as a threat to public schools (even though charter schools are public schools—albeit ones that function with considerable autonomy from districts). The right, for its part, uses charter schools to beat up unions and demonize teachers. As one who works at a charter school despite complicated feelings about them, I’d like to take you inside the Wissahickon Charter School in Philadelphia , where I work as Lower School Director, and show you a way I believe charter schools can use their structure to succeed. What makes our charter school different from other non-charter urban public schools where I have worked is a shared sense of purpose—a common set of commitments about what school should be and the kind of world we are trying to create. Without those shared commitments, the priority of many schools in the era of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) often gets narrowed down to high test scores, creating a race to the bottom in which only reading and math skills count; the rush to meet too many objectives Pushing Back 169 then interferes with deep learning and a meaningful connection to the outside world. The autonomy given to charter schools has, in our case, fostered a unique and unifying mission that has allowed us to resist the prevailing mechanistic and reductive view of learning while still staying part of the public system. Charter schools are the focus of endless debate. Even the term is complicated , meaning anything from “start-up charters,” created when sufficiently likeminded people write an application to their state Department of Education to receive funding to start a school; to “conversion charters,” created when a public school in a district petitions to become a charter and have increased autonomy; to charters affiliated with for-profit or nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs), often in chains of similarly run schools. The data on student achievement in charter schools are similarly complicated . One recent review of the literature in the Journal of Educational Change (2009) by Lea Hubbard and Rucheeta Kulkarni, of the University of San Diego and Arizona State University respectively, summed up whether charter schools are raising achievement in a frank, four-word statement: “We still don’t know.” Wissahickon is a “start-up charter.” In 1999, in a living room in Northwestern Philadelphia, a group of twenty or so parents and educators fashioned a statement about what our school would be and applied to the State of Pennsylvania for a charter. “To start a school is to make a claim about the purpose of life,” I read somewhere long ago. In writing the mission statement for our school, that living room group made such a claim. They felt so strongly about it that a number of them put liens on their homes to secure additional funding, and the legacy of this commitment pervades the room whenever someone suggests that the only thing that really matters is the test scores. The school that grew out of their vision opened its doors in 2001 and is located in what once was the world’s largest radio factory. It sits at the border of a residential neighborhood of row houses and a deindustrialized wasteland , with enormous empty factories and weedy lots, but also some recent signs of revitalization, such as a new super-modern Salvation Army athletics center. Being in a converted factory, our classrooms have walls made of those multi-pane factory windows that downtown designers covet for their lofts. The sun shines into the rooms onto rugs and reading areas, and then into the hallways through the picture windows in the interior walls. There, kids read GMT) 170 Paul Skilton-Sylvester on old sofas or gather for small-group work around a table. Across the street is a sixty-acre park. Of our student body of four...

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