Charter Schooling & Citizenship
by Frederick M. Hess • May 20, 2011 at 7:58 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareI'm an advocate for charter schooling. Regular readers of RHSU know that this is not because I'm convinced they're the answer to the "achievement gap" or to driving up math and reading scores, but because chartering offers an opportunity to rethink how we go about teaching, learning, and schooling. In that context, I've long been concerned that our rethinking is almost entirely focused on reading and math scores and graduation rates and the result can yield a reflexive, frail conception of schooling. If we're going to reinvent schools, I'd like us to do so in a manner that respects the broad purpose of the schoolhouse, which means paying due attention to the arts, to a rich curriculum, and, perhaps most important of all, to helping students develop as moral individuals and citizens.
As part of our ongoing effort to explore and promote citizenship education at AEI (see, for instance, here), we had the pleasure of convening an array of terrific charter school leaders and teachers in San Francisco
