Charter Schools And Their Enemies — My Review | Gary Rubinstein's Blog
Charter Schools And Their Enemies — My Review
Thomas Sowell is an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His lengthy career has spanned six decades and he is a well respected conservative scholar.
He has recently published a thin volume called ‘Charter Schools And Their Enemies’ (Basic Books 2020)
Though charter schools have been around for about 30 years, they started getting a lot of attention with the release of the documentary ‘Waiting For Superman’ in 2010. The premise of that movie was that American schools are failing and producing mainly illiterate students and that the blame falls on teacher’s unions. The remedy, according to the movie, is non-unionized charter schools. Charter schools, it claims, prove that in-school factors can overcome out-of-school factors as long as teachers are not protected by their unions.
Waiting For Superman coincided with the rise of education celebrities like Michelle Rhee who was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 2008. The pro-charter / teacher union bashing movement helped fuel the Obama-Duncan Race To The Top agenda which continues to be influential today.
But Waiting For Superman is not taken seriously anymore. The premises in that movie CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools And Their Enemies — My Review | Gary Rubinstein's Blog