Twenty years ago educators believed charter schools could be hothouses of pedagogical innovation outside the normal confines of public education. As with many other good ideas aimed at encouraging diversity of thought, corporate America appropriated the charter school movement as their own and even advertised louder about innovation and letting a thousand flowers bloom. By the end of the Bush reign, however, the charter movement had established a major beachhead with over 4000 schools in 40 states, mostly in urban America. And so by the time Duncan had been anointed by Eli Broad as Secretary, it was time to kill most of the thousand flowers and to scale up the penal pedagogy model based on total compliance that uses unlicensed and unqualified teachers to drill math and reading test prep in schools without libraries or real curriculums. Containment schools based on total compliance and psychological neutering that no parent in the leafy suburbs would dare send their children to.
According to Duncan, "This is not let a thousand flowers bloom. We only let the best of the best open schools. It should be a very rigorous, competitive process. The chance to educate our children is really a sacred obligation." Yet according to the only national