Un-credible -er

My last post about Patrick and Lisa Mieritz and their dishonest campaign to destroy charter schools contained a copy of an email exchange between me and D11 CFO Glenn Gustafson. In his email, Gustafson said that the DAAC and school board empowered the Mieritz's to charge forward on their anti-charter campaign. First of all, I certainly never voted to have staff waste time on the "cost" of charters. D11 charter students are D11 students, so their "cost" is the same as every other student. The fact that they cause state dollars to be directed away from the central administration bureaucracy does not mean that they "cost" more than other D11 students.

The claim that the DAAC somehow empowered the Mieritz's to wage their anti-choice campaign is not entirely true. Wendy Chiado is the chairperson of the DAAC Budget Committee. She agreed that her committee would look at the impact of charters if time and resources allowed. Chiado and her committee determined that time and resources were not available to the committee, so they declined to research the impact of charters on the district. For the record, Chiado ran against the reformers in 2003, so she is no right-wing mouthpiece for reform. Since the Budget Committee did not feel that this charter impact study was a top priority, the Mieritz's decided to concoct their own unilateral report. Neither the DAAC nor the DAAC Budget Committee approved or endorsed this phony report. Lisa Mieritz actually attempted to force her report onto the Budget Committee record, but Chiado refused to allow this. When DAAC Chairman Patrick Carter backed Chiado's decision, Lisa Mieritz threatened to sue them both! The Mieritz's appeared together at the May 2006 DAAC Executive Committee meeting where they threatened to file a lawsuit because the committee would not endorse their untruthful and "uncredible" report. Here you had the Mieritz's using the standard liberal practice of threatening a lawsuit to force people to give credibility to a report that they simply made up.

As a friend with a deep understanding of economics wisely asks, what would be the cost to society if these charters did not exist? How many of these kids would have dropped out of school altogether? What would that economic impact look like? If D11 is so "efficient," as Mieritz claimed, then why is the district a closed monopoly instead of a competitor in an open education market?

Another question that the Mieritz's avoid like the plague is this: Why do charters exist? Are they being created out of thin air and then are kids being forced into them? Are D11 students being taken from their neighborhood schools and are they being dragged into charters, or do charters exist because parents are demanding alternatives to their existing (and inefficient) neighborhood schools?

The Mieritz's are not fighting against some faceless entity called "charter proponents." They are fighting against parents who are fighting for the future of their children.