Charter school pablum: Hillary Clinton misleads on education
The Tribune-Review
November 22, 2015
Hillary Clinton took an uninformed swipe at charter schools while on the stump. And she necessarily was smacked in a fusillade of criticism.
“Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one — but most charter schools don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or if they do, they don’t keep them,” said Mrs. Clinton, taking a page from her teacher union brethren.
How curious, this coming from a former first lady whose husband was a vocal proponent of charter schools. Even Politico didn’t miss the reversal: “Clinton sounded less like a decades-long supporter of charter schools … and more like a teachers union president.”
Her dig is pure boilerplate from unionized teachers who simply cannot tolerate any incursions into their public school monopoly. But besides that, it’s wrong.
“There is no difference in the percentage of English language learner students served between charter and non-charter public schools,” said Nina Rees, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Moreover, most charters “serve children who were not succeeding in their traditional public schools,” said Jeanne Allen, founder of The Center for Education Reform.
Clinton’s charter school charge is the pablum of an educratic statist who, if elected president, will perpetuate the sorry state of public education.
