Gov. LePage
New Hampshire: The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State file suit against the state's new tax credit scholarship program (New Hampshire Public Radio). More from Associated Press.
Maine: State Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen points to problems in the process after the state charter school commission rejects four of five applicants (Bangor DailyNews). Gov. Paul LePage tees off on the commission and the teachers union after the rejections (Portland Press Herald). Supporters of virtual charter schools are also upset (Portland Press Herald). The teachers union blasts LePage for wanting to lift the cap on charter schools (Portland Press Herald). Public school administrators say charters should have to feel effect of education budget cuts too (Bangor Daily News).
Kansas: Vouchers, tax credit scholarships and an expansion of charter schools are all expected to be part of the legislative discussion this year (Wichita Eagle.)
Kentucky: A bill is filed to allow a limited number of charter schools to open in the state for the first time (Kentucky Public Radio).
California: Parents at Desert Trails Elementary School finally succeed in using the parent trigger law to get a charter school to take over their school (Los Angeles Times). More from Hechinger Report and Education Week.
Georgia: A state representative is planning to file a parent trigger bill for the session that begins today (Associated Press).
Mississippi: Business leaders are backing the legislative push for charter schools (Associated Press). Racial divisions and mistrust are at play in debate over charter schools (Hechinger Report). (more…)
The belief that a society or a nation can be unified - its barriers of religion, class, and race broken down - by bringing its children together in common schools that express a lowest-common-denominator vision of national life is a persistent theme throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and has especially been evoked against schools created by immigrant groups to teach their children within their own religious tradition.
Critics like Jeff Spinner-Halev counter that pluralism is a positive social good, and allows individuals freedom to shape their own lives in terms of real choices:
A relentless diversity flattens the pluralism of society. … A pluralistic society is not a place where every institution mirrors the ethnic, racial, and gender composition of society. A pluralistic society has different kinds of groups with different kinds of memberships. … This kind of society will offer its members more choices than one that is diverse “all the way down.” … the irony of a diversity that is taken too far: eventually it makes society more homogeneous rather than heterogeneous. ... A society that has different institutions with different audiences, customers, clienteles, or students will be more pluralistic than a society where all the institutions are composed of the same people.
Advocates for an educational system that encourages non-government schooling argue that freedom in educational provision and the pluralism of the education provided requires the flourishing of alternatives to the schools operated by government, but only if these alternative schools are not compelled – or seduced – into adopting a pédagogie d’état which makes them essentially similar to government schools.
For the sake of freedom of conscience and of expression – itself founded on the principle of tolerance as well as ideological and philosophical principles of non-discrimination – no educational monopoly by the state can be justified within the democratic order. Freedom of conscience and expression are meaningless if children are subjected to mandatory indoctrination in a particular viewpoint selected by the state. (more…)
