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Candidates stump for school choice
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If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, Americans will have two presidential candidates who are open to school choice measures.
Barack Obama went on Fox News Sunday this week and said, “We should be experimenting with charter schools” and “different ways of compensating teachers” — beliefs he’s long held but not always trumpeted, The New Republic’s Josh Patashnik says. Obama advocated charter schools and performance-pay for teachers in Illinois, and has even hinted that he wouldn’t rule out the idea of school vouchers.
John McCain visited New Orleans Thursday on his “It’s Time for Action” tour, stopping in cities the campaign said the federal government has forgotten, but where local solutions are working.
New Orleans has become a proving ground for charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. According to the campaign, it has the highest percentage of students in charter schools among U.S. Cities. Most of the city’s students now attend charter schools. Last year, students in New Orleans charter schools out-scored their peers in traditional public schools on a standardized test.
A president friendly to charter schools could spur the already-growing charter school movement. The number of charter schools nationwide grew by 11 percent in 2006, serving a student body that is on average 53 percent minority and 54 percent low-income, according a survey from the Center for Education Reform.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., J.C. Huizenga, the founder of National Heritage Academies, a national chain of 55 K-8 charter schools located in six states, recently announced plans to started a college prep high school to go head-to head with a new public college prep school.
Chicago school teacher Will Okun recently described his frustrations with traditional city schools in an blog post entitled “The Mire.” The Chicago Public Schools have 27 charter schools on 48 campuses. Hundreds are on the waiting lists, and the city plans for more by 2010.
Okun, while cautioning parents and policy-makers to remember the students left behind in the public schools, describes parents desperate to pull their children from traditional schools:
Charter-school parents speak of higher graduation rates, better facilities, more extracurricular opportunities, caring teachers, and stricter discipline. Most importantly, these parents speak of charter schools with a sense of hope and purpose that no longer exists in most public high schools on the West Side. … I do not blame parents for wanting to surround their children with other children and parents who give education top priority.”
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Topic: Campaign 2008, Front Page, The Nation |  |
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Keywords: barack-obama, charter-schools, education, John-McCain, school-choice |  |
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Don’t blame racism
“Hinting” is not enough. Either these guys are in favor of school vouchers or they’re not. They should let the teachers’ union know where they stand.
Teachers’s union? What about the parents? Let the parents know where they stand!
I don’t recall Obama ever doing anything the least bit favoring school choice here in Ilinois.
Could someone point out any specific thing he has ever done in that regard? Other than “believing” in the “hope” for “change” that we can “believe” in “hoping” to “change”, Obama has never had much tendancy to actually do anything that the Illinois Democratic Machine hasn’t been behind.
Without any hint that he’s ever done anything out of lockstep with the NEA owned Democrats here, I would be inclined to write it off as rhetoric on a par with his being supportive of reducing abortions.
Make It Man, if they let the teachers’ union know, not only will the parents know, but we’ll ALL know!
KRM gives us the “history” in Illinois.
The thing with ALL politicians is they hem and haw and won’t answer yes or no questions. And they think we don’t know that they won’t answer yes or no questions. When will they learn that we are not stupid?
When we quit forgetting and voting for ‘em anyway?
MIM - Good point! If we never get around to hurting them at the bllot box, they will have no incentive to address our concerns.
I say we blitz Congress with emails about everything.
New Orleans has become a giant experiment for the privatization of basic gov’t services. After allowing the gov’t to fail through its own mismanagement, the Republicans washed their hands and gave the city away to corporatization.
http://tinyurl.com/4yw4sb is a short explanation of what happened to NO’s school system. http://tinyurl.com/3vpcds is a longer in-depth look at the experiment from an African American perspective.
The whole concept of privatization and economic “adjustment” is discussed in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine in which she outlines the use of disasters to strip away the social state and install neo-con economic policies.
Have we forgotten that education is not a Constitutional function of the Federal government?
HRW - I read the articles. I don’t see a real, inherent problem with the charter system. And it offers some possibilities for giving the motivated students an acceptable education.
Yes, a lot of the workers lost their public jobs. But workers in failed businesses lose jobs all the time (and the NO schools were failed by any reasonable standards). Good employees should have been able to find work in the charter schools, or in school districts elsewhere. Bad employees should have had to find more suitable employment.
Yes, the failed culture of urban poor blacks were in for a large dose of culture shock when tranisioning into a charter set up where academic failure was tactly enouraged and the students were not merely warehouse and moved along without having to be responsible for doing anything themselves. But even in the upheaval, the system was not actually performing much, if any, worse than before Katrina hit.
jsingletary — bingo!