ED Charter Abuse, DC Is No Atlanta, & For-Profits in Court
by Frederick M. Hess • Jul 5, 2012 at 8:18 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
 Print |  Send |  RSS |
Share
After tomorrow, I'll be taking a four-week summer blogging break--I'll introduce your impressive line-up of guest stars tomorrow. Meanwhile, things have backed up while I finished the Cage-Busting Leadership manuscript(which went off to Harvard Ed Press on Tuesday). So, today, I want to hit on a couple stories that I've really been meaning to touch upon.
Charter Abuse at U.S. Department of Ed: First up, people sometimes ask why I'm a little nervous about the Gates-sponsored urban "charter compacts," pledges by charters to ensure their students are demographically representative of the community, or state efforts to apply teacher quality legislation to charters. Well, the problem is that each step along this path does a little more to import into the charter sector the pathologies and pettifogging bureaucracy that so hinder district schools. In an astonishing (but, unfortunately, not altogether uncommon example), one Peter Gelissen, an attorney with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education, has initiated a classically burdensome and bizarre witch hunt against charter schools in Washington, D.C. In a note sent my way by one DC charter school, Gelissen