Charter Schools & Teachers Unions

In my last blog post, I was going to go out and buy Ravitch's new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The book has been bought & read. If you are a teacher or in education, you need to buy this book now.

Ravitch touches on a variety of issues in her discussion about what ails American education. One of those issues has to do with charter schools. Al Shanker the founder of the United Federation of Teacher (UFT) was one of the originators of the concept of charter schools. Shanker's wanted charter schools to be a place where teachers would run a school within school. The students they would serve would be those students in need in extra interventions. His idea was that by creating these schools, teachers would be able to develop innovative techniques that then could be shared with other teachers.

Charter schools were never meant to be a wedge issue. The original intent was not to create competition between public schools and charter schools. It is a plan that I think many of us in education would have fully embraced under its original concept. One of the problems that I have with charter schools is the idea that those who choose to work in a charter school are somehow more committed to their students that those who choose to work in public schools.

I do not believe that this is the case. I have worked in public education for ten years now. My colleagues work in adverse conditions every day and are subject to criticism and ridicule from an uncaring public who seem to believe that if you are a teacher in public education then you must be lazy and inept.

When we create systems between the haves (charter schools) and the have nots (public schools), we create rifts. Some like this idea of competition because they believe that by having competition it will force public schools to become better. Ravitch clearly shows why this has not been the case. What has happened instead is that parents who want better for their kids and have the means to do so pull them out of struggling schools and put them into charter schools. Charter schools are then allowed to create rules by which children and their parents must abide by or they are kicked out. This is not the case in the public schools.

This competition between charter schools & public schools does not have to exist. Most of us in education want to do a good job in educating our students. We want to have the means to hold our students accountable for when they create a disruptive learning environment. We want to have the means to be creative and try different strategies and techniques. We want to have the means to hold our colleagues and our administrators accountable.

Instead what has happened is that charter schools get to be creative, do not have to abide by the same laws & regulations as public schools, and are allowed to remove disruptive students. Teachers who are not doing their jobs should be removed & can be removed as long as administrators are conducting evaluations on a regular basis and are not lazy & inept themselves. (Seriously the joke among many teachers in my district is that those who can't become administrators.)

Personally I like Al Shanker's vision of charter schools instead of the current system of creating rifts between educators - many of which became teachers because they wanted to make a difference.