This op-ed by Nina Rees appeared in The Tennessean on January 20, 2016. Hillary Clinton’s recent assertion that “most charter schools … don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them” tapped into a vein of criticism all too familiar to charter school supporters.
Confronted with statistics and studies showing that charter public schools do a better job than district-run schools of helping underprivileged students raise their achievement levels, charter critics try to explain away the results. One go-to criticism is that charter schools cherry-pick their students, even though charter schools are open to all and assign seats by lottery when demand exceeds space. Another is that charter schools don’t serve students with special needs, even though evidence shows that charter schools are more likely than district schools to help special-needs students assimilate into regular classroom settings. To continue reading the op-ed, click here.
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