Nashville Stands Up to Powerful Charter Industry, Sets New Accountability Standards
Since he was first elected to the Nashville Board of Education in 2012, Will Pinkston has been a vocal and tenacious advocate against the proliferation of charter schools. According to the operators who have rolled into the city over the past couple of years and their allies in local government, he is unapologetically “anti-charter.”
Not so, Pinkston insists.
“I’m not anti-charter. I have voted to approve some charter schools,” he says. “Now, what I am against is these new schools chewing up every dime of available new revenue at the expense of traditional public schools, their students and their teachers – especially when they are not held to basic, common sense standards of accountability.”
Pinkston attracts a fair amount of local press for his outspoken and often blunt criticism of the way charters do business in Nashville, but he is hardly alone in sounding the alarm over the consequences of unabated charter growth. His colleague on the board, Amy Frogge, has worked tirelessly to spotlight what she calls“charter school games” that obscure shoddy fiscal and academic records. And a thriving movement of educators, parents and other members of the community are standing up to demand a greater level of charter school accountability.
“Charters aren’t going away,” says Amanda Kail, a teacher at Margaret Allen Middle School. “But we need to do everything we can to help make them the best schools.So the public needs to bear in mind that many of these schools are not working for students and are wasting taxpayer money and we need to figure out ways to make them better.”
This past spring, Kail testified before the school board to urge adoption ofaccountability standards created by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Under each of the seven Annenberg standards is a set of concrete policy and practical recommendations applicable to state legislatures, charter authorizers, and communities. The target is the waste, fraud and abuse in the charter sector. The goal is greater transparency, equity and other forms of Nashville Stands Up to Powerful Charter Industry, Sets New Accountability Standards - NEA Today: