It’s Charter Scam Week again—time for the annual corporate Charter School Week P.R. campaign. Time to point out how that charter advocacy has revealed itself in the following ways:
- Charter advocacy cannot be about improving student achievement since charter schools consistently have a range of outcomes similar to public schools.
- Charter advocacy cannot be concerned about resegregation of schools by race and class since charter schools are significantly segregated.
- Charter advocacy is a thinly veiled attempt to introduce school choice as “parental choice” despite the U.S. public mostly being against channelling public funds into privately run schools.
- Charter advocacy is tolerating at best and perpetuating at worst schools for “other people’s children”—a system that subjects minority and high-poverty children to limited learning experiences, extensive test-prep, and authoritarian/abusive disciplinary policies.
- Charter advocacy chooses to ignore that charters eject some the most challenging students, ELL and special needs students.
- Charter advocacy also ignores that nothing about “charterness” distinguishes charter from public schools.
- Charter advocacy has committed to the (dishonest) “miracle” approach to demonizing public schools, and abandoned the original ideal of charter schools as pockets of experimentation (means and not ends) for the improvement of the public school system.
The problem for charter advocacy is that the evidence is overwhelmingly counter to nearly every claim in favor of charter schools.
Charter Scam Week 2015: A Reader
Conservative Talking Points Wrong for SC Education
Should SC Increase Charter School Investment?
Public School, Charter Choice: More Segregation by Design
No Excuses for Advocacy Masquerading as Research
Idealizing, Misreading Impoverished and Minority Parental Choice
NPR Whitewashes Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism in New Orleans
“Other People’s Children” v. “They’re All Our Children”
The Charter Sham Formula: Billionaires + Flawed “Reports” + Press Release Media = Misled Public
Twitter Truth (and The Onion Gets It Again)
Listening to a Teacher from a “No Excuses” Charter School
Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam
Segregation and Charter Schools: A Reader
Pulling a Greene: Why Advocacy and Market Forces Fail Education Reform [Redux]
Anatomy of Charter School Advocacy
On Children and Kindness: A Principled Rejection of “No Excuses”
It’s Time to Stop Treating Black and Brown Kids Like ‘Other People’s Children’
Racial Segregation Returns to US Schools, 60 Years After the Supreme Court Banned It
Why Charter Schools Are Foolish Investments for States Facing Economic Challenges
The Similarities Between the Charter School Movement and the War on Drugs
Why Sending Your Child to a Charter School Hurts Other Children
“No Excuses” and the Culture of Shame: The Miseducation of Our Nation’s Children
P. L. Thomas, EdD. is associate professor of education at Furman University. Prior to working in teacher education he taught high school English in South Carolina. He is currently a column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English) and author of Ignoring Poverty in the U.S. (IAP). He blogs at The Becoming Radical.