Thomas: Charter schools aren’t the right answer
- Guest Columnist
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One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools.
Let’s start with a clarification: The overwhelming problems contributing to poor school quality in South Carolina are pockets of poverty across our state and school policies and practices that mirror and increase social inequities for children once they enter many schools.
Children who live under the weight of poverty attend buildings in disrepair, sit in classrooms with inexperienced and unqualified or underqualified teachers and suffer through endless scripted instruction designed to raise their test scores. Citizens of a democracy share the responsibility for eradicating both the out-of-school and the in-school failures often reflected