A tale of two schools

Charter schools, that is. One is the Tarik ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA) in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota; the other, the Ben Gamla Charter School in Hollywood, Florida. Both are controversial for allegedly functioning, at taxpayer expense, as religious rather than secular institutions.

TiZA, named for the Muslim general who conquered Spain in the eighth century (although the Academy's website describes him only as an activist, leader, explorer, teacher, administrator and peacemaker), opened in 2003. In the intervening years, TiZA has thrived. Its example inspired the founding of the Ben Gamla Charter School, named after a Jewish high priest in the first century who encouraged education (according to the AP). It opened in August 2007.

TiZA is housed in the same complex as the Muslim American Society of Minnesota (MAS-MN), an organization identified by the Chicago Tribune in 2004 as belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, and its executive director is an imam. MAS-MN certainly has a political profile; in 2006 it was a proponent of a fatwa telling taxi drivers not to accept travelers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport who were carrying duty-free alcohol. See here.

The Ben Gamla school, like TiZA, offers religiously mandated food in the cafeteria, and its executive director is an orthodox rabbi. Reports of terrorist connections have yet to surface.

As this Wall Street Journal article says (thanks to Campus Watch), these and other charter schools are probing the limits of what publicly funded schools can do. That is a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed in the context of American tradition and experience. But there is another issue: whether what a school is teaching supports or undermines the American system. We won't be able to answer that question until we decide what the limits are to such behavior in general.