Michael Vaughn of @edu_post Responds To My Criticisms
Last week, I published a response to a piece by Michael Vaughn at Education Post (Vaughn is their Director of Communications). I found the piece to be, frankly, little more than a collection of reformy bromides. Vaughn responded to me personally via email and asked me to post his reply on my blog.
In the interest of fairness, I post Vaughn's response here in its entirety without comment. Vaughn quotes from my original post in italics. I'll publish whatever I have to say about it in a separate post.
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I appreciate Jersey Jazzman’s very close reading of my blog on teachers unions and the common good. He raises some very good points.
Except it's not a "common" good when those charter schools clearly serve a different student population than their neighboring public district schools: fewer Limited English Proficient students, fewer students with disabilities (particularly the more profound disabilities), and fewer in the deepest level of economic disadvantage. Further, there is more and more evidence that charter school students differ from the neighboring schools' students in ways that can't be measured in the data, including parental involvement and motivation.
I agree that there should be a discussion about access to charter schools and the demographics they serve. And the latest CREDO study shows that urban charters, in some cases, serve more students from low-income families and higher percentages of English-language learners and students with disabilities. I’m all for having a conversation about how to get those percentages higher across the board, and I’m all for shutting down bad charters that are not serving the public well. But unions don’t want to talk about increasing access to charter schools. They want to limit access to them.
Is it wrong to point all this out? To insist that charter[s] be held to higher standards of transparency and accountability? To question whether the use of public monies to fatten the wallets of Wall Street investors is good public policy?
Absolutely not wrong. Very productive conversation. Let’s acknowledge that charters can be very powerful public school options for parents and figure out ways to hold them to higher
- See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/09/michael-vaughn-of-edupost-responds-to.html#sthash.ytqW3Pgs.dpuf
