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Dubious claims, boorish behavior, multimillion-dollar advertising battles, political and racial division, claims of dirty tricks, even billionaires.
It’s not only the stuff of the American presidential election, but of the pitched battle for and against the spread of charter schools on ballots across the United States.
On the same day they cast their votes for president—November 8—residents of one U.S. state will decide whether or not to remove a cap on the number of such schools, which are given public funding but operate free of the usual restrictions placed on conventional public schools. In other states, candidates for seats at every level, from school board to mayor to governor, are also scrapping over charter schools, often with the involvement of, and large sums of money from, determined pro- and anti-charter forces.
Just as in the presidential race, claims by both sides include vast generalizations, sometimes relying on questionable facts, propelled by millions of dollars in advertising.
This speaks to the high stakes for public schools, which fear a further loss of funding, and for teachers’ unions, observers say—and for for-profit education providers, which covet the contracts under which they may be brought in to operate some charter schools. It’s another vestige of the widening ideological divide in the United States. And it threatens one of the original ideas of the charter movement, which was to serve as laboratories for educational innovations public schools could then adopt.
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Charters battle enters presidential race
The intensity of this battle has spilled into the contentious presidential campaign. Teachers’ unions were among the first to endorse Democrat Hillary Clinton, even before she was chosen as her party’s nominee, but teachers at the National Education Association summer convention booed her for saying that, when schools get good results—whether public or charter—“let’s figure out what’s working and share it.”
Clinton went on to say: “We’ve got no time for all of these education wars.”
But war there is, with an increasing racial tone. Supporters of expanding charter schools contend that they are a particular help to nonwhite students stuck in poor-performing public schools, but teachers say they strip those public schools of funding, shifting money from them to pay for students who decide to go to charters.
The civil-rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has endorsed a moratorium on privately managed charters. Jeanne Allen, head of the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, shot back that the NAACP was “intimidated by unions” and “misinformed about how opportunities for poor children, in particular, and minorities” are more available at charter than at public schools.