CURMUDGUCATION: Do Public Schools Take Everyone

CURMUDGUCATION: Do Public Schools Take Everyone:

Do Public Schools Take Everyone

Hillary Clinton said something bad about charters this week, and a whole lot of people lost their bananas.

What Clinton said was that charters neither take nor keep any or all students. This is pretty self-evident at this point, as we have all just emerged from a dust-up over the most recent time that Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy got caught pushing another charter student to the curb. This was followed by Mike Petrilli arguing, again, that charters should be in the mission of rescuing the deserving few from being trapped among the "disruptive" throng.

This has led us to the odd hybrid argument that throwing out problem students is a privilege of the rich. Depending on who's articulating this argument, the bottom line is either "charters that serve poor strivers should have the same privilege" or "neener neener neener."

Robert Pondiscio articulates the argument at the Fordham blog under the headline, "No, Hillary, public schools do not 'take everybody'."

He starts with the story of a student forced out of an affluent school district, and provides the budget line item of another well-to-do district that spends roughly $63K per student for various CURMUDGUCATION: Do Public Schools Take Everyone: