Hillary Clinton on charter schools: “They don't take the hardest-to-teach kids”
One of the big, undecided policy issues of the post-Obama Democratic Party is whether education reformers or teachers unions and their allies will control the party's education policy. Hillary Clinton said something over the weekend that made unions very happy and reformers very worried.
"Charter schools can have a purpose, but there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools, just like there are good public schools and there are bad public schools," she said at a Congressional Black Caucus event in South Carolina:
The original idea behind the charter schools… was to learn what worked and apply them in the public schools. And here's a couple of problems. Most charter schools, I don't want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don't take the hardest-to-teach kids. And if they do, they don't keep them.The public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do thankfully take everybody, and they don't get the resources and help and support they need to take care of every child's education. I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system. Not outside of it, but within it.I am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy, and it is a path for opportunity. But I am also fully aware there are a lot of substandard public schools. But part of the reason for that is policymakers and local politicians will not fund schools in poor areas that take care of poor children to the level they need to be.
This is a very different tone than you'd hear from the charter-friendly Obama administration.
Nationally, charter schools students perform about as well as public school students. In most cities, charter schools educate a smaller proportion of kids with disabilities and kids learning English than public schools in those cities. It's much more tenuous to argue that "most" charter schools deliberately push out kids who are hard to teach, although, as the New York Times recently reported, a branch of the wildly high-achieving Success Academy charter school chain kept a list of students who had "got to go."
But Clinton's remarks — which were in response to a charter-friendly question that noted black parents are heavily in favor of such schools — signaled whose side she was on in the contentious Democratic Party education debate.
On education, 2016 is not 1996
Teachers unions and other groups skeptical of reform make the same argument Clinton is advancing here: that charter schools have an unfair advantage due to the students they Hillary Clinton on charter schools: “They don't take the hardest-to-teach kids” - Vox:
