Charter schools in the news

And if you're following the debate on the expansion of charter schools, then you'll want to read today's front page story in the New York Times on Imagine Schools, which is a charter school company of some national weight. There is no question that any school run by Imagine Schools is NOT answering to the local community.

Per the request of charter school parents, State Senator Bill Perkins, who represents part of Harlem were one of every five charter schools in NYC is located, has been holding hearings on charter schools in New York. He's been getting lambasted in the press for it. Diane Ravitch testified at the hearing and gave some historical perspective on charter schools:

Charter schools were first envisioned in 1988 by two men who didn’t know one another. Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, had the idea, as did Professor Ray Budde of the University of Massachusetts.

Both of them thought that public school teachers could get permission from local authorities to open a small experimental school and then focus on the neediest students. The school would recruit students who had dropped out and who were likely to drop out. It would seek new ways to motivate the most challenging students and bring whatever lessons they learned back to public schools, to make them better able to educate these youngsters.

The original vision of charter schools was that they would help strengthen public schools, not compete with them.

By 1993, Shanker turned against his own idea. He concluded that charter schools had turned into a form of privatization that was not materially different from vouchers. From then until his death in 1996, he lumped vouchers and charters together as a threat to public education and a distraction from real school reform.

Going back to the Bakkes and Imagine Schools, the part that jumped out at me was Mr. Bakke's message regarding whose schools they are:

Mr. Bakke cautioned his executives against giving boards of schools the “misconception” that they “are responsible for making big decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal and dozens of other matters.”

Instead, he wrote, “It is our school, our money and our risk, not theirs.”