This week, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute examined the national debate over charter schools:
These political contests hinge on two competing narratives about what charters are and who they serve. Opponents often paint charters as public-privates that skirt public accountability and select the most advantaged students for their schools. Clinton played to that perspective last year, saying, “most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.” Supporters often view charters as hope-filled alternatives to traditional public schools for historically disadvantaged students. As Democrats for Education Reform President Shavar Jefferies put it, “In communities of color throughout our country, public charter schools are providing pathways to college and careers that previously were not available.”
And we continued to see new reasons why monolithic national narratives about charter schools make little sense:
- A new charter school study finds higher test scores don’t always lead to higher wages. But the data are still quite limited. And they seem to vary from one state to the next, and among different types of charters.
- Ohio, home of an embattled, and often-criticized charter school sector, is also home to some high-performing charters that received much-needed money for facilities.
- Charter opponents try to invoke Michigan’s woes in the debate over a charter school cap in Massachusetts, where charters are higher-performing than almost any other state but political opposition is mounting.
- A new review of district-charter school collaborations by the Center on Reinventing Public Education found: “Many well-intentioned partnership efforts fall short of their full potential because districts see and treat the charter sector as a monolith, rather than a group of distinct, independent actors with diverse motivations, interests, and perspectives.”
Attempts to nationalize the charter school debate inevitably distort the picture of a movement that varies state by state, community by community, and school by school. And they obscure real lessons about how to serve children better under the new definition of public education.
Meanwhile…
Another legal victory for Florida tax credit scholarships (but the case is not over yet).
Pushing back against criticism of his group, Shavar Jeffries of Democrats for Education Reform makes a vital point about power:
Even more, parental choice is, in fact, the opposite of external appropriation of community decision-making. Parental choice is black empowerment embodied. No longer will families of color accede to a policy regime in which local politicians dictate which schools serve their children. In fact, those who support the amended platform language, which undercuts parent choice, are the ones who seek to impose their ideology on black folk by seeking to substitute their choices about school options in place of the decisions of individual black parents.
“I am one of those parents who chose a charter school and my choice was deeply personal, and practical.”
“Splintered” oversight may undermine California charter schools.
The majority of New York parents seem to favor charter schools for their own children.
Michelle King, L.A.’s school district superintendent, wants to expand access to her district’s school choice programs.
Louisiana Superintendent John White has a plan to keep students from being kicked off his state’s voucher program. School choice advocates are relieved, and say the budget cuts that created the problem were misguided.
Louisiana Federation for Children President Ann Duplessis says Superintendent White’s proposal provides a viable solution for hundreds of families whose scholarship awards were not honored after Governor John Bel Edwards chose not to fully fund the Louisiana Scholarship Program.
“This is what happens when you try to balance a budget on the backs of children,” Duplessis said. “Cutting this program does not save the state money. It merely shifts the expense of educating a child from a school of their parents’ choice into a traditional school that’s currently not serving that child.”
Research notes:
- Many families in New Orleans choose among public and private schools; they tend to prefer private institutions, but favor public schools with strong academic performance.
- Income segregation between school districts is on the rise, but income segregation between individual schools is rising even faster.
- Shutting down the Louisiana voucher program would cause harm public school budgets in most school districts.
Tweets of the Week
1st DCA decision tossing challenge to 70,000 poor kids' scholarships puts our kids & the Constitution 1st #FlaPol pic.twitter.com/MWmX7uld5j
— Richard Corcoran (@richardcorcoran) August 16, 2016
MA charter results: https://t.co/zHVme79tVo
MA charter politics: https://t.co/FRO2H51CcR
It's all about what's best for the kids!
— Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) August 18, 2016
This Week in School Choice is our weekly compendium of news and notes from around the country. Sign up to get it in your inbox, and send tips, feedback or pushback to tpillow[at]sufs[dot]org.
