Sherman Dorn: Democratic Politics and Charter Schools, Brief Gloss
Tl;dr version: don’t waste your energy on trying to suss out The Position on National Charter School Politics. But why it doesn’t make much difference is different from the details of charter-school debates.
Bernie Sanders’s education plan has gotten quite a bit of press since its mid-month release. The bulk of attention was taken up by the single section on school choice, which focused on charter schools.1 Thus far, I think the most interesting response has been on Vox’s The Weeds podcast episode at the end of the week. Are charter school policies designed to advance civil rights or destroy public education? And what do we make of the fact that there are many pro-charter Black community activists at the same time that the NAACP has a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter-school expansion?
Very briefly, at the level of politics: if you say that all Black parents have the same view of charter schools, I’m going to laugh at you, because you deserve it. The best evidence currently available is that Black Democratic voters are more likely than white Democratic voters to approve of charter schools (in general, as in polling questions), but that means that only a significant minority disapprove of charter schools in surveys (as opposed to a majority), and disapproval or skepticism or what have you has not grown among Black Democratic voters in the same way as it has among white Democratic voters.
The Weeds episode linked above has a reasonably-accurate summary of the research on charter schools:
- While there are a few notable exceptions, charter schools as a whole have not created incredibly innovative schools. (Unlike Matt Yglesias, I don’t think we should judge charter school policies just by how well they fulfilled the original utopian justification — because most education policies that are CONTINUE READING: Sherman Dorn: Democratic Politics and Charter Schools, Brief Gloss | National Education Policy Center