Story in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper on a rally at the Roundhouse supporting Charter Schools.
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Despite excellent results from some charter schools, whose overall charter is to find better ways of doing education, there’s a strong pushback against them. Surprisingly one of the groups pushing to have a cap on NM charter schools is the League of Women Voters, who are often thought to be non partisan.
(so what’s going on there?… Just guessing that group has a lot of teachers, or former teachers in its membership)
PSA tends to think we need Charter schools to serve as the incubators of innovation they are intended to be.
As a state that needs educational improvement, ranking as we do at the bottom of many national measurements of effective education, we should continue to charter new experiments that give us a chance to discover the various ingredients needed to make our school system fit 21st century realities of student, employer, and world economy needs.
For the problem charter schools that don’t work as intended, give those experiments a chance to “improve”, and if they don’t improve adequately, allow their charter to expire.
But do allow new experiments to take place. Charter schools are the incubators of change for our very unwieldily bureaucratic education system that has demonstrated a pronounced inability to keep up with the changes going on in the rest of the nation and world.
Perhaps we need some sort of biannual statewide educational conference to analyze the best components from various charter school experiments, and then incorporate those ideas into some form of public schools on a regular basis.