Measuring Charter Success

The charter business is going to boom soon. Let's imagine how we could become really successful in that industry.

Let's imagine a world where schools are judged on how healthy their students are. And since overall health is a complicated metric, let's choose an easily-measured metric as a proxy. We'll say that the students' height will be the measure of student achievement.

We'll start advertising our charter school. We'll advertise spacious rooms with nice high doorways. We'll highlight our larger-than-average student desks and our room arrangements that allow for extra leg room. If that advertising doesn't really appeal to smaller children of smaller parents, oh well. That's the free market for you-- you can't sell to everyone.

Parents are free to stop by the office and pick up an application-- right off that top shelf over there in the corner. Too short to reach it? That's okay-- we have a step-stool for your kind. No reason to feel awkward or out-of-place at all. Yes, when you've finished filling out your forms, just put them in that basket on that other top shelf.

Once we've selected students here at Top Shelf Academy, they can begin to start their program of scholastic growth. Our specially designed classrooms feature shelves mounted six feet off the floor. If your child has trouble getting the assignments, well, we encourage him to reach higher, and if he can't, well, maybe he's just not a good fit for Top Shelf Academy. See ya later.

At the end of the year-- yay! Our students have an average height several inches above other students in our city. Clearly we have surpassed the health ratings of other schools. We have shown we know how to make students healthier.

Well, yes. I suppose you could check to see if we contributed to the overall height of students in the entire city. If we checked the average height of all students, we'd know whether Top Shelf actually increased overall height in the city, or we just moved the tall students around, into our school.

But never mind that. Look! We made our students taller than everyone else's! We must know the secret of how to entallify students. No, don't ask what it is! Just honor us for showing up everyone else.