F2 Sunday, March 6, 2011 • THE BULLETIN
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Charter students see less funding
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ake a look at the picture below. Those are students at Crook County’s Powell Butte Community Charter School attending a Forest Service program on snowshoeing.
Those students may look pretty much the same as any other students at a public school. But in terms of funding, they are eight-tenths students. They are worth 80 percent of other public school students. That’s all the state requires. Charter schools sponsored by a district serving K-8 students must get funding at least equal to 80 percent of the money a school district gets from the State School Fund per student for what’s called ADMw, which is basically attendance. For students in grades through 12th, the schools get at least 95 percent of ADMw. House Bill 3397 would increase the funding to 95 percent of ADMw, no matter what the grade level, and 95 percent of the money from federal and state grants. Charter schools are public schools. They can’t be private or religious schools converting to public schools. The schools get public funds under their charter to meet state educational standards and offer a different educational experience. They do not have to meet some statutes and rules that other public schools do. For instance, only half of the teachers and administrative staff at a charter must hold a valid teaching license. Enrollment at a charter school is voluntary. Why are charter students worth less? Teachers who do not have state licenses can be paid less. And the sponsoring district provides services to charters. But do charter schools get the full 100 percent funding in the end? That answer is not clear. Districts are not required to spend the other 20 percent on the charter. They also aren’t required to delineate where that money goes, according to the state’s Department of Education. Powell Butte was a district school. When the district made the difficult decision to close the school, communi-
ty members in Powell Butte mobilized to keep it open as a charter this school year. Powell Butte is now funded at the 80 percent level, or $4,483.20 per student for its ADMw of 141, according to Principal D.C. Lundy. It also got a start-up grant from the state for $500,000. The school serves K-6 students. Next year it will expand to seventh grade, as well. All the teachers at the school hold valid teaching licenses. In general, the teachers make less money and don’t have as good a benefit package as other teachers in the district, Lundy said. He described running a charter as like running a mini-district. The school develops its own curriculum. Its school lunch program is parents making a few lunches every day for children who might not have one or just forgot. The charter has its own bus that it uses for field trips and for taking children home in the afternoon. Lundy has been a teacher and/or principal at the school for 30 years. He appreciates all the school district has done for him and the school. He emphasized that the district has been supportive and helpful, but he said the school does not get the 20 percent of its funding back in services. Ivan Hernandez, the superintendent of the Crook County School District, was out sick last week and not available to comment. There’s no question that enrolling in a charter school is voluntary and that giving charter schools more money would hurt other public schools. And it would be foolish to extrapolate based only on the situation at Powell Butte. But if districts are not funding charter school students with that other 20 percent, parents and students deserve to know why. If the reasons aren’t good enough, charter school students deserve passage of HB 3397.
A woman’s role in today’s economy
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n honor of Women’s History Month, President Barack Obama ordered up the first report on the status of American women since the one Eleanor Roosevelt prepared for John F. Kennedy. It’s chock full of interesting bits of information. For instance, did you know that the median marriage age for collegeeducated women is 30? I should have figured that out because I can barely think of a single college-educated woman under the age of 30 who is married. But somehow it still came as a surprise. I got married when I was 25, and I felt as if that was extremely late in the game. Of course, that was in the Mesozoic era, and we had no end of trouble keeping the stegosaurus away from the wedding cake. Additional reports from “Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being” include information on everything from volunteering (women do more) to housework (go ahead and guess). It has some findings I don’t quite know what to do with, like: “While male students are more likely to be victimized with weapons, female students are more likely to experience electronic bullying.” Electronic bullying is definitely a bad thing, but I can’t help feeling as though we’re getting the better end of that deal. We’re a long way from the Eleanor Roosevelt Commission on the Status of Women, which was formed when there were no women on the White House staff doing anything more impressive than typing or cake decoration. “Men have to be reminded that women exist,” Roosevelt tartly told reporters when the all-male list of top Kennedy administration appointees was released. At the time, there were 454 federal civil service job categories for college graduates, and more than 200 were re-
GAIL COLLINS stricted to male applicants. It was perfectly legal to refuse to hire a woman for a job because of her failure to be a man, or to refuse her credit unless she had a husband to co-sign her loan. The median age for marriage for a woman was 20, and the only job open to most women that involved a chance to travel was flight attendant. We’re in a different world, but this latest report highlights the one glaring gap: Working women still make, on average, much less than men. Among people who work full time, women make an average 80 cents for every $1 that men take home. There has always been a big difference: In 1979, women made only 62 percent of what men did. And the report suggests that part of the problem is that women tend to pursue the lowest-paying professional careers, notably teaching. Perhaps part of the answer is just to increase compensation for people who devote their careers to education. Perhaps the governors could take that up next time they get together to discuss public employee unions. I’ve always believed the other big factor is the strain of balancing work and family. Women do better in school — now all the way to graduate school, where they get the majority of doctoral degrees. And young single women tend to make higher wages than young single men. The change comes at the point when many women have to consider their children. Perhaps the House of Representatives could take that up next
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Su b mitted photo
Students from Crook County’s Powell Butte Community Charter School recently attended a Forest Service program.
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time they get together to discuss whether they really want to eliminate federally financed child care programs. “The thing that we’re hoping men will focus on: This is not a woman’s issue; it’s a family issue,” said Valerie Jarrett, who leads the White House Council on Women and Girls. That’s really the big story for today. Americans are so used to the fact that women are capable of doing anything that we hardly ever discuss it. It’s been a long time since the leader of NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.” A change that happened later, and the one that’s going to be driving the future, is that women’s ability to succeed in their work life is now a matter of concern for both sexes. The turning point for American women really came on the unknown day when the average American couple started planning their futures with the presumption that there would be two paychecks. In a country where no one has real power without a serious economic role, we entered a time when, whether we liked it or not, all hands were needed to keep the economic ship afloat. Even women who get the opportunity to stay home when their children are young have to be ready to jump back into the work force if their partner is suddenly laid off. A while back, I was visiting a college in Connecticut where most of the students were the first in their families ever to go beyond high school. I was talking with a group of young men and women, and I asked the men how many of them felt it was very important that their future wife be a good earner. All of them raised their hands. Gail Collins is a columnist for The New York Times.
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The emergence of a great nation from a continent’s tragedy WASHINGTON — ver the last few decades, the obituaries of World War I veterans have come, according to historian Martin Gilbert, “like a muffled drum.” With the recent passing of Frank Buckles — the last doughboy — Pershing’s army has finally retired from the field. The drum is stilled and put away. What was once called the Great War is largely forgotten, obscured by the vivid moral clarities of the greater war that followed. Confused schoolchildren are left to ponder the question posed by Andrew Roberts: “Why should a Maori New Zealander have died in Turkey and been buried in Greece because an Austrian had been shot by a Serb in Bosnia?” Actually, the first war was a preview of what would follow. Machine guns. Civilian bombing. Unrestricted submarine warfare. Poison gas. All were technologies that allowed killing without aiming, applying the tools of mass production to the business of slaughter. Death became impersonal, mechanical and vast.
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Some of history’s most malignant ideas got planted in the churned earth of that struggle. “Jews and mosquitoes,” wrote Kaiser Wilhelm II, “are a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or another. I believe the best would be gas.” The German government put Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train from Zurich toward Russia, hoping to destabilize an enemy. Adolf Hitler, a soldier in the trenches, vowed vengeance. From laughably trivial beginnings, World War I shaped history on a massive scale. A whole continent suffered nervous collapse; another rose to unprecedented prominence. Europe’s failure of nerve was understandable. A million Britons died. Among French men who were 19 to 22 at the outbreak of the war, more than 35 percent were buried by its end. France was left with 630,000 widows. The trauma was deep. Constitutionalism and liberalism appeared weak and discredited — a contrast to totalitarian confidence and purpose. The very idea
MICHAEL GERSON of human progress was overturned. In France and England, ideals of glory and courage seemed obscene beside the images of bodies on barbed wire. But the United States, in contrast, was at the beginning of innocence. The European tragedy was the American arrival. At the start of 1917, the American Army had a little over 100,000 men, lightly armed with no large-scale combat experience since Appomattox. By August 1918, America had deployed more than a million soldiers to Europe. It was the energy of a rising nation. Frank Buckles remembered himself, in those days, as “a snappy soldier ... all gung-ho.” The Army he joined established durable impressions of Americans
— fresh off farms, gawky, wide-eyed, singing, violent. The Germans, wrote John Keegan, “were now confronted with an army whose soldiers sprang, in uncountable numbers, as if from soil sown with dragons’ teeth.” British and French officers saw the arriving Americans as enthusiastic but inefficient. Americans saw themselves as cleaning up the messes of a tired civilization. Europeans thought the United States claimed too much credit for minimal sacrifices — about 50,000 battle deaths in total, compared to Britain’s loss of 20,000 men on the first day of the Somme offensive alone. A pattern of awe and resentment was established. John Maynard Keynes called President Woodrow Wilson a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” Wilson argued, “If America goes back upon mankind, mankind has no other place to turn.” Perhaps both were right. In the following decades, America lost the innocence of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but not the
sense of national purpose that brought Americans to the Argonne Forest. It was the same spirit found on D-Day and in the long defense of Europe from Soviet aggression. That enthusiasm, in some quarters, has waned. Economic self-doubt turns a nation inward. Global engagement is often difficult, expensive and thankless. Some long for America to be, once again, merely a nation among nations. But the forces that led the United States into World War I were not random or unique. America moved beyond its shores on the momentum of its founding principles along with a growing recognition that our nation is not immune from the disorders of the world. Times change. Old battles, once fresh in their horror, are forgotten. But America still produces men and women like Frank Buckles. And sometimes mankind has no other place to turn. Michael Gerson is a columnist for The Washington Post.