In my first of this three-part series I discussed the need to do something better in our most impoverished neighborhood schools. In the second post I described what I saw in several high-performing New York City charter schools. In this post I’m going to tackle the question of whether Washington State should allow charter schools.
This question has come up before. In fact, Washington has voted down charter schools three times so far, following high-profile campaigns which basically pitted pro-charter groups against the Washington Education Association, our state’s largest teachers’ union.
The union’s opposition to charter schools, as I understand it, boils down to this: charter schools take jobs from union members, they compete unfairly with traditional public schools, and they undermine those schools by “skimming off” the more motivated students from those schools.