Charter Networks

USAT editorial board gives some props for high-performing networks of charter schools including a couple that are not household names, for instance Mastery in Philly and IDEA in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Alfie Kohn offers the boilerplate response and twists a few facts about charter performance and context in the process (while missing some actual issues around scale, quality, finance, and theories of change in education). He is right, though, that charter schools have not led to a lot of innovation around teaching and learning. But while that should concern us in terms of R & D in education more generally, I’m not sure it’s such a concern in terms of just increasing the supply of good public schools in underserved communities.

One Reply to “Charter Networks”

  1. The policy of school choice for parents and closing the achievement gap does not mix. You can’t have it both ways. As a teacher, I can tell you that the success of low-achieving students in the Fordham Report is directly due to the sacrifice of time for high-achievers, which is why they are “languishing.” If you allow school choice, parents of high-achieving students will leave schools like mine, and low-achievers won’t get the extra time they’ve been getting over the last seven years because they’ll have to share it with more low-achievers.

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