Inequity Enablers: Politicians Who Support Charter Schools
Politicians who support charter schools are inequity enablers.
The proliferation of charter schools is indicative of a toxic environment due to our nation’s planned neglect of public schools and the intentional failure to mediate inequity. Politicians who have advocated for and abetted the rise of charter schools are complicit in a ploy in which an experiment with competition among a few students for entry into privately governed schools is substituted for a systemic effort to improve the education of all students.
I am a science educator, so of course, I have an affinity for science experiments that try to make sense of how the natural world works. What we learn may help us solve human problems. My disposition toward social science experiments is far more wary. These often begin with contentious, values-driven, “I wonder if…?” questions. But too often, the policies that align with hypotheses get implemented with a much wider audience before the results of the smaller experiment are analyzed and sometimes even when the findings are negative. That is the case with the current national experiment with charter schools.
To paraphrase, in 1988 Albert Shankar, former American Federation of Teachers president, famously asked, “I wonder if we remove bureaucratic and administrative restrictions, whether it could unleash often squelched teacher-led innovation and creativity?” Shankar wanted to empower teachers’ voices. Needless to say, anti-union folks and those who did not want to give up administrative prerogatives were not thrilled. The result of that short-lived experiment was creativity in some places. In others, different people made familiar decisions: Old wine in new bottles, just with CONTINUE READING: Inequity Enablers: Politicians Who Support Charter Schools