A Note on the Politics of Charter School Co-Location
I'm back from my Alaska jaunt refreshed and renewed, but can't help making one last point about Steven Brill'sClass Warfare, this fall's big ed reform book, which I reviewed in The Nation. A hallmark of Brill's education journalism for the past two years has been that he visits charter schools, never traditional public schools, when he wants to demonstrate what an excellent school looks like. In Class Warfare, the only traditional public school on which Brill reports at any length is PS 149 in Manhattan, which is co-located with one of the Harlem Success Academy charter schools.
Brill paints PS 149 in an unflattering light, and I won't go into depth here on the debate over whether his portrait isaccurate and fair or not. What I will say is that visiting only co-located public schools would bias any reporter against traditional public schools. Why? More successful neighborhood schools are typically able to resist co-location with charters, both because they tend to be oversubscribed--more parents want to enroll
