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Chapter 6: Charter Schools, School Choice and Poverty on Amazon
Charter schools arrived on the scene with support from conservatives (like President-elect Trump's nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos) who hated the powerful and selfish teacher unions and the bloated administrative bureaucracy of urban schools and from many urban liberals and leaders in the African American and Hispanic communities who were ready to try anything to improve failing urban schools.
These new rogue invasive species charter schools were given freedom from state regulations and union contracts for teachers and administrators to create entrepreneurial educational ventures designed to put staid, failing urban public schools to shame.
They were also afforded longer school days and longer school years and organized around themes or instructional approaches, all of which are out of reach for traditional public schools.
Charter schools and the market principles they're designed to epitomize are reasonable ideas, but like many reasonable ideas in the social science/political/economic arena, charter schools, especially as they were implemented in New York State, had unintended, catastrophic consequences, not something we want to see repeated nationwide. Read more.
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Chapter 2: Politicians Need Not
Apply on Amazon
School superintendents who rely exclusively on their political skills, while ignoring important data, delegating critical leadership tasks and failing to communicate effectively with the school board and the public about these issues, set the stage for chaos among school board members. Think of the most ridiculous day on the floor of the U.S. Congress. You get the idea, in microcosm, multiplied by far too many school districts in the nation. Read more.
If you've already purchased the book - thanks!
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Betsy DeVos's Theory of Market Education
Trump's nominee for Education Secretary
"(DeVos's) theory is that if schools are doing a bad job, parents will not select those schools and will pull their children out of those schools and go to other choice schools. She's
basically saying government has no obligation to close down those bad schools. I would liken that to saying, 'Okay, instead of having FDA approval for drugs and monitoring of drugs working, we’ll just see who dies and then not take that manufacturer's pills because people who take their pills die.'" Click here.
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"Failure is success if we learn from it." - Malcolm Forbes
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