Resisting Fatalism in Post-Truth Trumplandia: Charter Schools and the End of Accountability
Bill asks Mike Campbell how Mike goes bankrupt, and Mike answers: “‘Two ways….Gradually and then suddenly.'”
This conversation in Ernest Hemingway’s sparse dramatization of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises, also serves as a chilling characterization of how the U.S. finds itself in post-truth Trumplandia.
The paradoxes multiply for those of us in education because we can not only see but also live the reality that our post-truth U.S. is both a consequence of a country’s negligence of universal public education and the cause of that negligence—notably the uber-corrosive accountability era of the past three decades.
It seems like a distant memory, but just months ago, there appeared to be light at the end of the tunnel, a crumbling of support for charter schools on the heels of rising resistance to standards and high-stakes testing.
And then the election of Donald Trump.
And then Trump’s apparent selection of a Secretary of Education with zero experience in public education and a harsh school choice agenda.
This feels not like passing dark clouds, but a potential permanent eclipse of the sun.
However, we must resist the alluring fatalism of Trumplandia upon us even though truth and evidence have been declared defunct.
In a time of post-truth, truth becomes Kryptonite.
The Crack in Charter School Support Must Be a Harbinger of the End of the Accountability Era
“What exactly is the position of charter school supporters?” ask educators and activists Adrienne Dixson and Andre Perry, writing at The Hechinger Report. For some, the time to question charter school advocates and commitments to charter schools is well past due because the evidence is substantial that charter advocacy fails against miraculous claims and erodes community public schools.
Nearly three decades ago, charter schools began as educational experiments designed to benefit, not Resisting Fatalism in Post-Truth Trumplandia: Charter Schools and the End of Accountability | the becoming radical:
