Word: charter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Another potential headache for Democrats is a recent New York Times story reporting that Daschle "intervened" to reduce government inspections of a South Dakota airline-charter company cited for its poor safety record. One of the company's planes crashed last February, killing three physicians working for the Federal Government. Daschle denies any wrongdoing, but several Senators fear that an ethics inquiry could prove especially embarrassing if Daschle is the Democratic leader at the time...
...maybe not. Minnesota doesn't have many charter schools, but it does have the longest experience with them. Educators there say the schools have had an influence well beyond their numbers. In several towns and cities, education officials have been spurred to reform by the mere prospect that a charter school would open in town...
...Forest Lake, a suburb of St. Paul, after facing down a group of parents who wanted to charter a Montessori program, the local school board decided to form such a program of its own. In the small college town of Northfield, the threat of secession by a charter group led the district to create a Spanish- language immersion program for first- and second-graders, introduce multiage classrooms and enrich the math program for middle-schoolers. "The charter made it easier to change things," admits Northfield superintendent Charles Kyte. "If we weren't progressive enough and didn't change, then somebody...
Such change is inevitable in the view of Ray Budde, a retired University of Massachusetts professor of school administration who is credited with inventing the charter-school idea. "If you see kids leaving you and money leaving you and you're criticized about the job you're doing, you're going to respond," he says. "This is a wake-up call for the Establishment: the old organization doesn't fit the times. It's like the Berlin Wall -- it's got to come down. But it's going to take 10 or 20 years for something new to emerge...
...meantime, parents want better schools now. And in spite of the obstacles, they are organizing charter schools in droves and flocking to what few exist. Principal David Lehman of West Michigan Academy of Environmental Science, near Grand Rapids, has a sheaf of applications several inches thick for the year 1997, though his school has no track record. This summer he got a letter from Amy and Ron Larva of Grand Rapids. Their child was not yet born, they wrote, but they wanted to reserve a kindergarten spot for the year...