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Saturday, February 16, 2013

From Portfolios to Parasites: The Unfortunate Path of U.S. Charter School Policy « School Finance 101

From Portfolios to Parasites: The Unfortunate Path of U.S. Charter School Policy « School Finance 101:


From Portfolios to Parasites: The Unfortunate Path of U.S. Charter School Policy

I recall several years ago attending an initial organizing meeting for a special interest group on Charter Schools at the American Educational Research Association. Note to outsiders – AERA has several special interest groups, some research oriented, some advocacy oriented…  many somewhere in between. These are member organized groups and many are very small. If I recall correctly, there were a handful of us at that meeting, including Gary Miron, Katy Bulkley and a few others. If memory serves me, I think Rick Hess may have paid a visit to the meeting to argue that this new group should really just be a part of the school choice special interest group. All of that aside, I and others attended this meeting out of our interest in studying this relatively new concept of charter schools. Most of us were intrigued by the possibilities of alternative governance structures that might provide opportunity for innovation (what might now be referred to a disruptive innovation).
I didn’t spend a whole lot of time researching charters in my first few years after that, but eventually I did start to