(Alexander Russo of This Week in Education sent your editor a blog item from Sara Mead at EducationSector, probably as an effort to incite the following and prompt that long-promised link to his blog.)

Greg Richmond, President of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and the former head of Chicago's charter school office, has an essay in the April 18 issue of Education Week (download below) based on a speech he gave to Louisiana's Board of Education on bringing charter schools to the Recovery School District in and around New Orleans.

It's a well-written proposal to establish "high-quality charter schools at scale."

This new system includes organizations such as New Leaders for New Schools to develop and support new principals, Teach For America to recruit and train a new generation of teachers, the Local Initiatives Support Corp. to provide facility-funding solutions, and the NewSchools Venture Fund to provide investment capital to education entrepreneurs. Charter school management organizations, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Lighthouse Academies, Uncommon Schools, and High Tech High, provide an array of ongoing support services to the schools that operate under their umbrellas... [T]he pivotal New Schools for New Orleans, which is helping attract talent and resources to rebuild that devastated city....

In Louisiana, the state’s Recovery School District...  is at the center of this new system, which must now assume a proactive role in creating a vision, planning, and establishing predictability and stability. The people who want to create high-quality new schools need to understand the state’s long-term vision and plan, and how the new system will work....

If the state and city follow this recipe, I am confident that New Orleans will become a beacon for the finest educational talent in the country and, in less than five years, will have the best public schools in America.

If all it took to solve huge social problems were great speeches and good writing, the system of public education in New Orleans would be as good as fixed.

As someone involved in the charter movement from the early 1990s, your editor would like to see it transform New Orleans.

Unfortunately, the article reminds him of nothing so much as the start of "Operation Market Garden," World War Two's "most tragic blunder" examined by historian Cornelius Ryan in the 1974 book A Bridge Too Far.  Most edbizbuzz readers will remember the classic star-studded war movie of the same name released in 1977 (Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, James Cann, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Maximillian Schell, Hardy Kreuger). Both explain the failed attempt of the Allies to capture one narrow road and several bridges across major rivers in Belgium, Holland and Germany with a combination of paratroopers and light armour, end run the German Army, and so finish the war by the end of 1944.

The book and the movie revealed in painful detail the vast overconfidence of a handul of rather clubby British Army officers, and the price paid by the brave American, British and Polish troops they sent to death - to say nothing of the Dutch underground and innocent civilans. The opening scenes show the officers discussing the plan, brushing aside the concerns of one intelligence officer and the Polish commander, and end with the British general who will parachute in with his troops asking his valet to "pack the tuxedo."

The parties named by Richmond constitute the charter movement's de facto leadership. The higher the profile this group adopts in touting charters as the answer to New Orleans' public education challenge, the higher the probability that the effort will be  a failure. And aside from KIPP, its reach has consistently exceeded its grasp.  Moreover, the political ramification of failure will be felt not by this group, but by state charter groups and local activisits in their struggles to build the credibility of local charter schools, end state caps, and increase charters' per pupil payments.

Then again, Lord Cardigan's senseless cavalry charge on 40,000 Russian troops and their artillery ringing a "valley of death" during the Crimean War, made famous in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, might be a better military metaphor. Operation Market Garden was plausible. The resources were available to complete the task, if a number of very questionable planning assumptions proved true - which of course they didn't.  But, consider the succinct, well-written orders handed to Cardigan: "Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns....Immediate." The "six hundred" lacked the capacity, but went ahead and failed gloriously. Richmond's group also lacks the resources required to give "New Orleans in less than five years... the best public schools in America." The only question is whether the failure will be equally noteworthy.

The bottom line is a lack of expertise and capacity on the part of the charter developers, supporting organizations and foundation financiers that Richmond lists. (Listen to relevant Letters from the Editor in New Education Economy® here and here).

New Orleans is no task for "on the job training" and frankly, literally no one in the movement has done anything close to what is being proposed. There isn't enough capacity for the movement to do what it is attempting by way of scale now. Where does this band propose to find the experience required for this gargantuan effort in a physically and psychologically devastated community and, at the same time, keep the existing struggling charter expansion efforts going in dozens of  communities where the only real obstacle is politics? Even KIPP is overstretched by its recently announced plans to grow from eight to 42 schools in Houston alone. The folks in charge of the smaller scale efforts are well behind plan, in over their heads, or barely above water as it is. 

Indeed EMOs (with a business model not exactly favored by your editor) are in a far better position to fill the gap than the charter movement. They have been built to scale up and have been frustrated in their efforts to do so. They have far greater resources than Richmond's band. The Recovery School District could work with them without setting up the sophisticated charter authority proposed by Richmond - again more or less from scratch, and again from a national pool of experienced authorizing agency staff that is barely able to do its job with its own schools as it is.

However, were I an EMO CEO, I'm not sure I'd be prepared to take on the job because I couldn't afford to do poorly academically and there are many reasons to be concerned about whether I could. The exception would be Edison, which needs the next sale badly given what is happening in Philly, regardless of the academic risks.

Sure, the charter movement is part of the answer in New Orleans, but a very small part. Setting out grandiose visions - like General Montgomery's promise that Market Garden would "have the boys home by Christmas," raises expectations to unrealistic heights. Doing so with resources that cannot begin to accomplish the task only turns the effort into a senseless,  or worse still gratuitous, gesture. The harm done to the movement itself will pale in comparison to the false trust and dashed hopes of devastated parents and students who have already been let down by the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, Halliburton, insurance companies, their own local and state politicians, and this Administration. These people deserve to be more than the background of meaningless, or even well-intentioned but unrealistic, announcements promising help.

Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was humiliated because he correctly pointed out that the occupation of Iraq would take 500,000 men rather than the 100,000 promised by Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. Instead of becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was shown the door. Shinseki didn't want the military to fail in Iraq, he wanted it to succeed. But the combat veteran recognized that great rhetoric and good writing doesn't "make it so."  He called it as he saw it, and the nation is better for it.

As your editor sees it, Richmond has vastly overpromised what the charter movement can do for New Orleans. If we really want the charter idea to succeed there, we'll need a far more realistic review of planning assumptions, or about the same increase in resources as Shinseki argued the military needed to win the peace in Iraq. As in World War Two, the Crimea, and Iraq, good writing here simply hides the fact that the movement lacks the resources, capacity and expertise  to give that disaster-torn city the best schools in America. And like Shinseki's statement of doubt of war plans for Iraq, this is not an attack on the movement, but a critique of leaders who would make such unfounded promises.