Is the Charter School Experiment Working?
The New York Times’ Sam Dillon had a nice piece this week on public schools trying to act more like charter schools. To which I say: Wasn’t that the point?
Charter schools were always supposed to be incubators of the Next Great Idea in public education, allowing seeds of innovation to flourish without the perceived distractions caused by those pesky collective bargaining agreements and district regulations. The idea was that with charter schools shining the way, public schools could follow.
Instead, what many states got were well-meaning parents making haphazard efforts to run a school. They came with the best of intentions, only to discover the business of education is a lot more complicated than they ever
