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Tom Neumark: Change Maryland Law to Let Charter Schools Innovate

An open letter from Tom Neumark, President of Frederick Classical Charter School in Maryland.

June 18, 2013

Delegates,

In case you hadn’t seen this, this report on teacher preparation is one of the best and most important ever released, and has implications for you as elected officials. Having read more than my share of education reports, I can tell you that this one is worth your time. Most teachers in this country are not selected or trained very well, which is a big reason why our schools trail other countries.

The bottom line is that schools aren’t screening out candidates who lack academic skills and aren’t training them in the practical skills of what works in the classroom. Our teachers are drawn disproportionately from the bottom third of college graduates, and we fail to train them in scientifically-based reading instruction, solid math content, history (we teach “social studies” instead)–and the other subject-matter preparation lacks content as well. A lot of what is taught in education schools is trendy pedagogy that tends to not work very well.

The training we are providing at the Frederick Classical Charter School is exactly what this report is calling for. If Frederick had allowed us to create an alternative certification program as we had requested, ours would have met or exceeded all the criteria in this report. Because Frederick County was unwilling to let us use the existing Resident Teacher Certificate program to do this (as other Maryland counties allow), we had to go to the legislature to try to get a law passed to allow us to stop being blocked by our local district. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it out of the Ways and Means Committee this year.

I hope you will change the law to let charter schools innovate in this area. The entire point of charter schools is to allow them to bring innovative practices to the state and not be blocked by the local district from doing so. Right now we are being blocked by our local district and Maryland’s weak law from innovating. The fact that local districts can block innovation is one reason why Maryland’s charter law has been ranked as the second worst in the nation.

Most other states give charters much greater freedom to innovate. Maryland’s charter schools don’t really function like real charter schools do, which means we don’t qualify for both public and private grants that require applicants to be within the mainstream of charter laws. This puts our charters at a disadvantage both financially and operationally. Anything you could do to improve our law to allow Maryland’s charters to function more like real charter schools do would be greatly appreciated. Charter schools will be a part of the solution in this area, if you will let us.

I’d like us to aim to have the best law in the nation. Is this something you would be interested in considering?

Tom Neumark
President
Frederick Classical Charter School