CURMUDGUCATION: Field Guide To Choice Advocates

CURMUDGUCATION: Field Guide To Choice Advocates:

Field Guide To Choice Advocates

The world of choice/charter/voucher advocacy has always been a barely-tacked-together quilt of varying interests and goals. The elevation of Betsy DeVos to Secretary of Education under His Royal Trumpness has stretched-- and in some cases snapped-- those bonds. When choicers appear in your neighborhood, you could find yourself dealing with select sub-species of the breed; you can use this handy field guide to determine what, exactly, you're dealing with.



Concerned Parents

In the charter-choice world you will form time to time encounter parents whose frustration and bad experience with their local school district has driven them to seek alternatives. They want charter schools because they want to put their child in one. Many of these choicers spend only a short time in the movement, lasting only about as long as it takes them to discover that their charter presents all the same problems they encountered in public schools, except for communication and responsiveness, which is worse.

A key identifying feature is that these choicers actually have actual children in the local system. This is the only choice variety that cannot be faked. It is always appropriate to open a dialogue with Concerned Parents-- they have real issues, real concerns, and the highest sincerity index of anyone we'll encounter on this list. They have something to say about your local public school, and you should listen to them.

Social Justice Advocates

Similar to the concerned parents, but without the actual local children. They have noticed on the federal, state or local level that systemic racism and neglect can cause, in particular, major urban school districts to fail the non-wealthy and the non-white, and they have concluded that an CURMUDGUCATION: Field Guide To Choice Advocates: