Proposed Variant of the Public Service Academy

By way of the Panama City Renaissance School blog, I’ve learned that an executive director of a teachers’ union in Nevada wants to start a charter school for the purpose of preparing future teachers.

The proposal has some characteristics in common with the apocryphal public service academy:

1. Its goal is to teach high school students how to be teachers, and most teachers work for public schools. Teacher training is de facto public service training.
2. It’s based on the premise that if you want to work in the public sector, you should go to school with people who all have the same career plans as you do. That means schools for future public leaders, schools for future civil servants, and schools for future teachers.
3. The proposed course of study concludes with a college scholarship, conditional on the student’s agreement to teach in the local traditional district for four years.

And here are a few reasons why this could actually be a good idea:

1. A new teaching charter would compete with existing high schools. If students choose the new charter over traditional schools, that’s a good indication that they’re better off attending the charter. And the competition could spur traditional public schools to make improvements to retain students.
2. Some people know they want to be teachers from an early age, and they might want to start preparing before college. A teaching charter may turn out to be as popular as charters dedicated to environmental science or the arts.
3. The scholarship program could be redesigned so that graduates choose between work in traditional public, charter, and private schools. That way it wouldn’t be biased toward any particular sector.