E-Mail To Gadfly - Charter Schools

I was in attendance at the National Education Association Representative Assembly in Washington DC when Clinton spoke. I am representing Mullica Township education Association, along with MTEA member Jen Sheldon. There are 21 other educators representing schools in Atlantic County as well.

The only objections (momentary boos) came from Clinton's remarks about charter schools. CHarters across the US are earning well-deserved criticism from public school educators as existing schools are being denied state funding, deemed underperforming, and set-up for failure. These failing schools are appointed state monitors, or shutdown and reopened by for-profit companies.

Not all charter schools are horrible. Some are extremely high performing - which Clinton alluded to in her speech. She encouraged all education parties to sit down and reflect on what factors make the high-performing charter schools great. Increasingly, however, public school teachers are extremely jaded as more and more reports have surfaced exposing cheating, corruption and manipulated data in regards to the performance of many of the new charters.

NEA and NJEA have adopted policies in support of charters. NEA President Lily Eskelson has announced that she will convene a task force to update 15 year old national policy to revise and update policies on charters. CUrrently, the national policy statements are based around the original concepts of charter schools being established to overcome educational gaps and programming that public schools were unable to fulfill. There have been multiple New Business Items and Legislative Amendments revolving around the Charter School debates on the NEA-RA floor over these last three days. At issue is the increasing privatization of public schools - closing public schools and reopening them by granting charters to for-profit entities. Also is the increasing threat of private religious-based charters attempting to siphon public taxpayer monies to operate under the guise of a charter. Another threat is the opening of so-called charters for the purpose of homeschooling. Additional threats are private school conversions of public schools done simply to use public monies to pay for private school education.

The full context of Clinton's remarks to the National Education Association Representative Assembly (and her remarks on Charter Schools) can be found at www.nea.org.

Barbara Rheault

Related Post
http://gadfly01.blogspot.com/2016/07/clinton-supports-charter-schools.html