Update: Joe Williams at The Chalkboard responds. 

I want to point out two posts for you to ponder. The first is part of Joe Williams' excellent look at the conflict between parents and New York city school administrators in the NEST+M school. The second is a post at From the Trenches about a new neighbor, a KIPP school that doesn’t quite match the demographics of the school district its in (an issue I’ve taken up here before).

Despite the fact that he blogs for a union-busting organization representing charter management, Joe has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the tensions within a school system. He’s getting at some of the issues in the democratic (small d) accountability structure of school districts. That the City, in order to see that resources are properly allocated across the system, would have to come down hard on a particular school for pushing some envelopes on its program is interesting. Joe’s point seems to be that when a school is acting in a way that undermines the broader good, there is reason to rein it in.

My question to Joe is, what is the analogous cure for the district dealing with the new neighbor in the From the Trenches post? This question isn’t meant to be an attack on charter schools or the people who sail in them. But its clear there are a lot of unresolved issues in resource allocation and management, that Joe and I have blogged about before, and I think this real-life scenario might be a good way to pick up that thread. In the case of NEST+M, the challenges are ones that can be resolved through the political process. In the From the Trenches case, this isn’t so.

I’ve written before that we should try to see public education as an ecosystem.  In this perspective, there are likely tradeoffs that will come from the creation of new schools. The idea is to make those tradeoffs explicit, rather than implicit as they are now, and to try to minimize the harmful effects. But how to do that fairly is a different question, which I'm hoping we can get to at some point.