"It's terrible what they are doing to these schools."

Who will charter schools help? We are being told by legislatures in many states this is a valid choice for students caught in failing systems. Missouri has Educated Citizenry 2020 which touts parental choice and charters are a large part of the plan.

This is from the Washington Post and one parent's experience with a Washington DC charter school:

Something wasn't right at the high school that Darwin Bridgers' son attends, so he sat in on the class to see for himself. All morning long, the instructor at the Washington, D.C., charter school pointed to a list of ground rules, a detailed list of rewards and punishments posted on a wall near the front of the class filled with black and Latino students.

Then the students filled out worksheets. That's how it went: rewards and punishments, then worksheets. No instruction, just worksheets. At the end of the class, Bridgers, who works as an exterminator, pulled aside the teacher, a young white male and recent graduate.

"I wanted to know when he was going to do some, you know, teaching," Bridgers explained to me recently. "You know, like, how we used to have in school? She would stand in front of the class..."

But in the name of reform, it's as if somehow the goalpost has been moved without our realizing it. Now education -- for those "failing" urban kids, anyway -- is about learning the rules and following directions. Not critical thinking. Not creativity. It's about how to correctly eliminate three out of four bubbles. The whole messy, thrilling, challenging work of shaping young minds has been reduced to a one or a zero. Pass or fail.

Is this what the version of charters will look like under the new plans called Race to the Top or Educated Citizenry 2020? Maybe so. They will operate under the same mandates and assessments as public schools. The same tests, the same curriculum. The same mandates from the Federal Government to show how well students do on standardized testing. It's about how to correctly eliminate three out of four bubbles. The whole messy, thrilling, challenging work of shaping young minds has been reduced to a one or a zero. Pass or fail.


This is what has happened to the Washington DC parents:

...they are required to navigate the education marketplace, choosing between neighborhood schools that have been creamed of their best students and the new experimental start-ups that on average perform worse than traditional public schools. "This strategy plays a shell game with low-performing students, moving them out and dispersing them, pretending they don't exist," Ravitch wrote.

Did you catch that phrase in the above paragraph? "Experimental start-ups that on average perform worse than traditional public schools". Why should Missouri start-up schools fare any differently than those in Washington, DC? Is this really a valid choice for Missouri parents? Is this an educational plan taxpayers believe will really help children?

As Darwin Bridgers said about his son's charter school:

A week after Bridgers visited the school, his son told him that the young teacher had left and never come back. So Bridgers sent his son to live with his mother in Pennsylvania. "I coach football Little League," he told me. "This is what we talk about on the sidelines. It's terrible what they are doing to these schools."

The charter experiment is failing children in DC. Will it work here? Will hedge fund investors and venture captitalists who have no experience in education be able to find the answer to reach failing children?