Oh my goodness – “A coordinated effort to decimate public schools” – did I read that right?
I get it – it’s difficult to see public school districts that have struggled for decades with declining enrollment and increasingly disadvantaged student populations. During the last half of the last century, many of our urban districts in cities like Detroit, DC, and Los Angeles were unable to find a way to meet the needs of their students to produce anything more than dismal results. We all can agree that it is patently unfair to the hundreds of thousands of children who moved through those districts during those years. It was their one shot at education and they were not well served. Fortunately, a former president of the AFT suggested that schools and, the teachers in them, are in the best position to figure out how to right the ship. Al Shanker suggested giving schools a time-limited charter to find innovative ways to educate. Charter school opponents have clung to the word “innovate” to suggest that anything other than a research lab-like environment should be prohibited from existing. However, much of the substantial innovation that has come from the charter school sector addresses how to provide a high-quality education to disadvantaged students. And giving schools the freedom to find a way to do that may not result in crazy cage-busting ideas, as much as a back-to-basics approach with high expectations for all students, regardless of background. And it’s working. In suggesting that there is a vast conspiracy with sophisticated coordination towards the sole purpose of taking down public education, critics point to the fact that overall charter schools do no better than non-charter schools, conveniently ignoring the fact that urban charter schools do dramatically better than urban non-charter schools. Students in urban charter schools gained an additional 40 days of learning in math and 28 days of reading over their non-charter peers. And they cite a biased study on federal funds going to schools that closed, disregarding the fact that closing a low-performing school is an inevitable and responsible part of the accountability agreement. But there are ways beyond academic research to know if these schools are working. Parents have to choose them. If the schools are no better than the neighborhood school, they won’t have many students. Apparently, the coordinated effort to “rig the system” includes “predictable press releases highlighting long wait lists as proof that parents want charters,” which charter school opponents dismiss as the “herding” phenomenon in urban communities. Tell that to Myesha Williams, who spends six hours per day getting her child to and from a highly regarded charter school that is more than 25 miles from her Detroit home. In her words, “I have to do this to make his dreams happen. If he’s passionate about it, then I’m going to do whatever it takes in rain, sleet, snow, bus and bike. I’m going to make it happen.” And then there’s Maritz Leal, a full-time housekeeper and mother of three, who lives in northern California. She and her husband commuted 100 miles roundtrip to their daughter’s Rocketship charter school in San Jose until they took on the activist role of convincing Rocketship to open a charter school in their community of Redwood City. These are not sheep. These are parents of the new education majority who will do whatever it takes. And we know that there are not enough high-quality charter schools to serve them. So you can cherry pick research and dismiss the fact that 20,000 parents applied for 3,200 seats at the charter school system that has become the whipping post for the opposition. But to imply that 7,000 schools with nearly 150,000 teachers and 3 million students, plus a lengthy and growing list of support organizations, have somehow all come together for the sole purpose of killing public education is offensive. Charter schools are public education and they’re one of the parts that works incredibly well.
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