You're seeing APS stripped naked now in stark fluorescent lighting. Pretty scary, isn't it? The budget mess, the OIT debacle, the running-aground of the SpEd program....oh, and the lying, cheating, lawbreaking administrators.
So why would it be your default position--your unexamined yet deeply held premise--that APS ought to be allowed to continue to own and run schools like SPARK and even MES?
There is no reason to continue to allow thoroughly mediocre (on their best days) municipal employees to drag down schools in neighborhoods where parents expect--and can afford--excellence. The underlying assumption parents make is that we can't expect our public schools to be too good, because that would somehow be unfair to neighborhoods where the parents aren't as engaged or affluent.
It's not a zero-sum game. If you force your local school to get better, that doesn't mean its improvements must come at the cost of some other school somewhere else. And if you work hard to give your local school every advantage, and that creates a huge performance gap between it and the less successful schools, you are not the bad guy. The parents who allow their children to attend the underperforming schools are the bad guys. Every community has enough parent talent to run a school. Just not the will.
What does it take to run a school? Obviously it's work than parents want to add to their already overflowing plates (or they'd be taking it on in greater numbers than they are), and yet less than you'd think. You have to manage a budget, hire a great headmaster (a combination of principal and executive manager), find the fine line between oversight of the process and micromanaging day-to-day decisions (and stay on the proper side of it); rigorously and continuously evaluate teachers, and report all business transparently to the parent group. That's pretty much it.
Let your headmaster hire a staff and worry about things like the cleaning service and the tree pruning service. Let the parents worry about funding, HR snafus and a developing a fair but exhaustively thorough method of grading teachers. (This is the magic potion: find a way to make your school a paradise for gifted teachers and pure hell for substandard ones).
It's not rocket science. It can't be that difficult, because a thoroughly mediocre and demonstrably corruptible bunch of municipal employees to do it for us now--so how tough can it be?
