California's Charter School Revolution

Alan Bonsteel, president of California Parents for Educational Choice, comments for the San Francisco Chronicle about what he sees as the coming impact of the Los Angeles school system’s recent mandate to convert almost a third of its schools to either charter or magnet schools:

This is public education’s fall of the Berlin Wall. The old model of the compulsory, one-size-fits-all, factory-style public school is being tossed on the scrap heap of history, to be replaced by upholding the U.N. Charter of Universal Human Rights, which guarantees the right of parents to direct the education of their children.

Someday soon, all of our children will be enrolled in schools that their families have freely chosen and that give them the sense of community, even of family, that will keep them in school and get them safely to graduation day.

Some bold hopes, and I do want to believe a “fall of the Berlin Wall” moment is close at hand for education.

As always, though, the capacity for positive change is up to the overriding philosophy of education behind such efforts. The Charter School Movement may or may not provide such a breath of fresh thinking; it is, in a sense, philosophy-less – at its core simply a mechanism to hand over control from a centralised structure to local bodies. If you were an optimist, you could say that charter schools are an attempt to tear down bureaucracy, empowering local schools, their administrations and finally their teachers to do what they think is best given their own unique context. Theoretically this could indeed allow for a broader diversity of educational approaches and philosophies, like the use of emergent curriculum and project-based learning methods – teaching philosophies that are far more child-centred and process-minded, and I believe the key to real innovation and reformation in America’s Education.

That said, there’s a certain wariness toward charter schools that comes when folks such as Bonsteel portray them not as laboratories to experiment with innovative educational approaches, but as bastions of parental choice in education.

In order for them to be successful, there needs to be some differentiation for society-at-large between the Charter School Movement (as a mechanism to allow for broader philosophic diversity in education) and an educational system based on vouchers (which allow for parents to theoretically “choose” what they see as their child’s best education). Vouchers turn education into an economic good and encourage parents and communities to treat it as a commodity, whose value is derived from test results and academic achievement; charter schools allow school administration and faculty a relative degree of autonomy, and a sense of permission to experiment with educational structures and approaches to see what best fits the community of kids they serve.

Really, it comes down to this question: Who is education about?

If it’s about society and the desire to maintain the status quo, then the standardized one-size-fits-all public education model we have now is the way to go.

If it’s about parents and what they want, then implementing a voucher system will do the trick in delivering the goods there.

But if education is going to be about the children themselves, then we need to come up with a system where their voices are heard and incorporated into the process, and where teaching practices and school structures are immediately responsive to their needs. And that’s no easy thing to pull off, even if you have the charter school mechanism helping you out.

Jan 10, 2010 :: Tagged under: charter schools, education, education reform :: #