Charter schools test church and state boundary
Walk into any Waldorf-inspired charter school, and you enter a different world of public education where students sing songs, stamp out math with their feet, carve wood, play recorders and draw maps.
You'll also find students outside. "If you are going to learn about science, the best place to do it is outside," said Allegra Allesandri, principal at a Waldorf-inspired public high school in Sacramento, Calif. "Nature is our textbook."
Based on the work of an Austrian mystic philosopher named Rudolph Steiner, there are now more than 1,000 Waldorf schools in more than 90 countries. Waldorf-inspired public charter schools are also booming in the U.S., with more than 40 now operating, mostly in Western states.
The emergence of a public Waldorf movement has some critics less than charmed. Lurking behind the Waldorf method and permeating its classroom, they argue, is a mystical philosophy that amounts to a religion. They