Clive McFarlane: There's more to education reform than charter schools - telegramcom

Clive McFarlane: There's more to education reform than charter schools - News - telegram.com - Worcester, MA:

There's more to education reform than charter schools

Gov. Charlie Baker’s bill to add up to 12 charter schools annually outside the existing cap on such schools shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Ask conservatives to speak on public education and 95 percent of the time two words are all they will need to open, expound on and close their remarks: charter schools.

Back in the early 1990s, when business leaders, educators and policymakers were wrestling with reforming the state public education system to provide all children an opportunity to learn at a high level, it was one of Baker’s predecessors, Bill Weld, who introduced the poison pill, charter schools legislation, into the 1993 Education Reform Law.

If we are magnanimous enough to ignore the unsustainable financial burden of a dual education system, one in which the charter school, like a parasite, feeds on the lifeblood of the regular public schools; and if we were to ignore the selective enrollments of most of these schools, we could say some charter schools have been successful.

But even then, when we also consider that a number of them are not doing any better than regular public schools, and indeed that a number of them have failed, sometimes miserably, there is simply no overwhelming evidence to support creating more charter schools.

My suggestion to Mr. Baker, then, is that on the subject of public education he ought to diversify his current two-word repertoire, and that he doesn’t need to doff his business cap in order to think outside the box.

It would perhaps help if he would sit down with the good folks over at the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy, and would talk to them about the work they have been doing around labor management collaborations, an initiative that they feel has the potential to help educators improve student learning and success.

From facilitating interest-based bargaining to helping districts create capacities to collaboratively advance student learning, the initiative is pushing the premise that collaboration among districts, unions and community leaders can promote higher-quality learning, enable a greater range of Clive McFarlane: There's more to education reform than charter schools - News - telegram.com - Worcester, MA: