With help from Kimberly Hefling, Mel Leonor, Mike Vasquez and Michael Stratford
NAACP TO VOTE ON CONTROVERSIAL CHARTER MORATORIUM: The NAACP
is set to vote this weekend on a controversial resolution calling for a
halt to charter school expansion. It’s not exactly a new stance for the
NAACP, which has passed numerous resolutions critical of charters since
as far back as the late 1990s. But charter schools have seen rapid
growth in recent years and are under increased scrutiny, so this vote is
attracting a lot more attention — and resistance — than those in the
past. “Now people are really asking harder questions. It’s no longer a
boutique kind of thing,” Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of
educational leadership and policy studies at California State
University-Sacramento, told Morning Education.
— The fight over charter schools is a sort of “civil war in the black community,”
said Heilig, who researches charters and is a member of the NAACP, as
well as a charter school critic. The NAACP vote is significant, in part,
because charters are popular among many black parents — more than a
quarter of students attending charter schools are black, whereas black
students make up just 15 percent of the nation’s overall enrollment.
Pro-charter groups have long held up charters as a better option for
low-income and minority students who have been let down by the public
school system, so if the NAACP takes an even stronger stance against the
schools, it could be a blow to the charter movement.
— The battle over the NAACP vote reflects a broader rift in the Democratic Party. To the dismay of the education “reform” community, the Democratic Party platform language adopted this year in Philadelphia was far less friendly toward
charter schools than in previous election cycles. The Clintons are
longtime charter school supporters, but late last year Hillary Clinton
seemingly took a page from critics’ playbook when she stated
that most of these schools “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or,
if they do, they don’t keep them.” The comment was praised by teachers’
unions, who are among the loudest critics of charter schools. (Hillary
Clinton’s remark in July at the NEA convention that traditional public
schools and charter schools should share ideas was met with boos.) The tug-of-war within Democratic circles is also playing out
in the blue state of Massachusetts, where charter supporters and
opponents have spent millions of dollars in a clash over a ballot
initiative that would lift the state’s cap on charter school expansion.
Click here for the full article.
Source: Politico
No comments:
Post a Comment