What Chartering Could Have Been -

Deborah Meier.
Because charters are now an organized "movement" on behalf of ending public education (plus every other public enterprise?) without any interest in carrying out a nearly 60-year-old U.S. Supreme Court mandate (to integrate schools), it's important to expose them. They are also strong supporters, as a movement, for testing, high stakes, merit pay, and ending unions. I suspect it's a hopeless task to fight that agenda within the charters movement, but I admire those who do.

The part that scares me most is that this attack on public education goes along with an assumption long held by public school educators, too—an education philosophy that provides encouragement to those who've always said that those kids learn differently than more favored white and/or wealthy students. They encourage a dumbing down of education for precisely those whom earlier choice models argued should get what every rich man wants for his child, only more so. The only feature today's Deformers borrowed from the old reforms is choice, usually different choices for charters serving middle-class white students vs. those educating mostly poor African-American children. Too many have abandoned what we in New York City (and Chicago, Boston, etc.) saw as our real secret weapon: schools built around respect across lines of class, race, role, and age; built around curriculum, personalization, and accountability usually associated with the education of the ruling class. (The schools to which our presidents send their own children, for example.) The "Ten Essentials" were Ted Sizer's way of summarizing that spirit, which we expanded upon in our five Habits of Mind. They can't be reduced to a formula. But Ted believed, as I do, that we know respect when we see it even if it's hard to rate it numerically.

SOS: Save our Schools

by Deborah Meier,
Dear Diane,
HELP!!! SOS!!! "Reformed" schools are literally becoming reform schools for the poor. It's a sign of "the future" as some people envision it. Although, of course, these are not the schools for the reformers' kids.
Mitt Romney "declared that this century must be an American century," and President Barack Obama insists that "anyone who tells you that America is in decline ... doesn't know what they are talking about." Well, it's hard to argue with Romney since his "must" is a preference, not a prediction. But I do worry about Obama's statement because it contains truth, and it covers up a potential falsehood. (See "America's Place in the New World," by Charles A. Kupchan in The New York Times.)
But why should we care if we're first? (See last week's letter!) If the first is a nation we respect, being second is just fine. What we care about is the health and welfare of our nation's people and their future prospects both economically and politically, not our place in somebody's ranking system. We might also like a president who hopes for the best for other nations' people, too. And, while American business may not be in decline, it has the advantage of transferring its own future health and welfare to almost any nation it chooses. The American people have a harder time following suit. Indeed, global business has no country. Our inventiveness won't help if we off-shore the production of the inventions "made in America"—to nations that operate with 19th century sweat-shop wages and working conditions.

On Leadership, democracy, and schooling

Deborah Meier on Leadership, democracy, and schooling

http://deborahmeier.com/index.htm