Keep Calm and #Drink #Charter #Kool-Aid
Are charters headed for the same long-term, low-result arc that has plagued No Child Left Behind? I remember about fifteen years ago when Bush and Paige went to Washington that almost everyone was drinking the Kool-Aid on the Texas-style accountability and high-stakes testing bandwagon. There were some that weren’t. Early on Linda McNeil, Angela Valenzuela, Walt Haney, Linda Darling-Hammond, David Berliner, etc warned of what was really happening with accountability at the school level (gaming, teaching to the test, etc). The idea that NCLB didn’t work and was harmful is now part of the common discourse. The failure of high-stakes testing and accountability policies to do what was promised after more than two decades (close achievement gaps, college readiness, etc) is no longer under debate— it’s 2014 and our nation is not 100% fully-proficient. I believe that most have come to believe that NCLB was a failure. Except Arne Duncan who strangely both acknowledged the failure of NCLB with the waivers and at the same time doubled down on similar approaches.
I suspect that charters are heading for the same long-term, low-result arc. There is lots of empirical peer-reviewed data out there (as opposed to data and rhetoric released by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools etc.) for communities to mine on what is actually going on in charter “sector” (More soon about community audits of charters in an upcoming Cloaking Inequity post). Will we really have to wait two decades for people to tune in to the data and reality of charters and “choice” as we did with NCLB?
The recent passage of HR 10 in the US house sends the signal that our policymakers are now drinking Kool-Aid on the charter bandwagon.Keep Calm and #Drink #Charter #Kool-Aid | Cloaking Inequity: