Rocketship Charter Schools may not provide the magic silver bullet for our schools, but the Morgan Hill Unified School District should have the school in its arsenal of options for parents and students.
Why? It’s simple: 1. plenty of parents are demanding that choice and 2. when all cooperate to educate the children and achieve the goals the community wants education improves.
Presumably that’s what everyone wants.
Yet, the Board of Trustees continues to ignore that clarion call from the community thus adding to the likelihood of an ongoing exodus from the public schools and fueling the foment that is slowly reaching a boiling point.
Many parents are fed up – not only with the poor performance numbers, but with an aggressive administrative culture that battles not to address those shortcomings, but to preserve the system’s status quo.
They have come to believe that there is plenty of lip service paid to “improvement” but little substance and even less in implementation.
While in some regards that perspective may be over the top – and certainly Rocketship Schools will not immediately birth a utopian education system – added competition will force MHUSD to compete AND pay close attention to best practices and the importance of technological integration into the classroom.
Instead, MHUSD trustees have refused to listen to their constituents and allowed the administration to engage in pre-emptive strike tactics. Only Trustee Rick Badillo is listening to the parents.
While it’s incumbent upon the district to review charter petitions thoroughly, MHUSD machine-gunned the recent petition by Navigator Schools to open a charter school, producing a thick treatise that nitpicked the petition apart like a vulture working over a dead roadside opossum.
Despite the aggression, there is no ducking reality: Morgan Hill schools, especially given the demographics of the community, are magnificently underperforming as a whole and the numbers are even worse for Latino students.
If trustees were thinking about what’s best for students they would work with Rocketship through the application process – as they should have with Navigator Schools which had its charter petition rejected a few weeks ago – and formed a partnership to work together.
That didn’t happen. And, unfortunately, it clearly will not. MHUSD has chosen to the all-out war route.
For the students, parents and community’s sake, hopefully the Santa Clara County Board of Education will approve the Rocketship Charter application after the MHUSD Board of Trustees rejects it.
System preservation still trumps innovation in Morgan Hill schools. But that’s a curriculum that will not stand for long in a community with many parents who are roundly disappointed in public education.
