Reply to NYT article on Walton-funded spread of charter schools in DC

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Reply to "NYT article on Walton-funded spread of charter schools in DC"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I wish they published more from him about the "long term harms".  Do public schools completely crumble? Or can they somehow be built up to "compete" with charters?

This is a great article, has me thinking about both sides of this coin. [/quote]

It's a newspaper article, so it is relatively short, and by it's nature can not contain a lot of historical context.  But man, does it leave out a lot of DC-specific context.  Like how enrollment in DCPS was 140,000 in 1966 and 80,000 in 1995, 2 years before a single charter school was opened.  What did charters have to do with that decline?  Obviously nothing.  There are huge forces that made those changes, riots, white flight, black flight, massive buildups of the suburbs nationally, smaller family sizes, later marriage and childbirth, etc, etc, etc.

I think you can make a good case that the Walton Foundation has a pretty strong agenda related to schools, and it is playing out in a lot of different ways.  But the entire picture of schools, just in DC, is really complicated, and is even more complicated when you layer in all the different charter laws nationally.  Just like there is no one type of "public school" (compare Ballou High to Wilson, or Janney to Garfield Elementary in Ward 8. All DCPS), there is no one type of charter school, not just in DC, and certainly not nationally.

And it's even complicated at the foundation level.  The Gates Foundation is another one that has given a ton to charter schools and education reform.  They also give billions to fight tuberculosis, malaria and polio in the poorest parts of the world  Bastards![/quote]

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