Across the Country, a New Type of Partnership Between Charters and Districts Emerges
Increasingly, I’m hearing a question that drives me crazy: “Are you for or against charter schools?”
There can only be one legitimate answer to that question: It depends.
Are you speaking of the situation in Michigan, in which four out of five charter school operators are for-profit entities? Or the overall tendency for charters to be even more segregated than their public school neighbors? Or the reluctance by some charter leaders to hold themselves to the same standards of transparency and openness as traditional public schools?
If so, thumbs down.
But if you’re talking about places like Baltimore, where all charter school teachers are unionized (and the charters themselves are almost all locally conceived and teacher-led), or if you’re pointing to the growing movement among some charters to intentionally enroll and serve integrated student bodies – by way of the National Coalition of Diverse Charter Schools – the picture takes a very different shape.
And then there’s what’s happening with Summit Basecamp – a new sort of partnership between charters and traditional public schools that may very well offer the best evidence so far of what Al Shanker first called for back in 1988, when he imagined a new kind of school in which teachers could experiment with different ways of reaching students, and then inject that wisdom back throughout the public school system.
That’s what Diane Tavenner has done at Summit Public Schools, a successful network of charter schools in California and Washington that represent the bleeding edge of innovative approaches to personalized learning.
Unlike other models – I’m looking at you, Rocketship – whose efforts to leverage technology seem to be more concerned with creating magic in the balance sheet Across the Country, a New Type of Partnership Between Charters and Districts Emerges :