Teacher in a Strange Land: Brave New (Charter) World:
"Let’s get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools.
If I lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically, I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had."
One more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about charter schools.
Public school academies—charters—seem to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by tearing someone else down.
I have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit, a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,” a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12 Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.
"Let’s get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools.
If I lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically, I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had."
One more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about charter schools.
Public school academies—charters—seem to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by tearing someone else down.
I have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit, a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,” a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12 Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.
