The Charterization of Teacher Ed: Relay Moves into Connecticut
By Lauren Anderson.
Just last week in Cincinnati, the NAACP voted in favor of a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools and a ramping up of regulation on existing charter schools.
A few days later in Philadelphia, the Relay Graduate School of Education proudly co-hosted its “Grit + Imagination” summer institute, right around the same time that sessions kicked off at some of its newest campuses nationwide.
On their surface these events might seem disconnected, and yet they couldn’t be more intertwined in ways the public should understand. How so?
First, civil rights groups are increasingly opposed to charter schools, given their uneven and troubling record and disproportionately negative impact on low income youth and youth of color. And yet, at the same moment that one of the nation’s leading civil rights advocacy organizations is making an historic statement cautioning against privately-managed charter schools, the same kind of privatization–what we might call “charterization”–of teacher education is rolling forward on seemingly greased rails.
In fact, while requirements placed on traditional teacher education programs have intensified over recent years, alternative non-university providers have benefitted from fewer constraints. Federal initiatives such as Race to the Top and now the Every Student Succeeds Act include incentives that to effectively increase The Charterization of Teacher Ed: Relay Moves into Connecticut - Living in Dialogue: