Instead of Teacher Appreciation Week, President Obama asks us to celebrate Charter School Week [View all]

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May 7 to 11 is generally recognized as Teacher Appreciation Week, with May 8 specifically being Teacher Appreciation Day. Google it if you don't believe me. Shoot, even Michelle Rhee's anti-teacher organization StudentsFirst is recognizing that, albeit only to get people's contact information in a list-building exercise. So what does President Obama do? He declares it National Charter Schools Week. Not even National Charter School Teachers Week. No, we're supposed to take this week to celebrate the charter schools that exclude disabled kids and homeless kids and kids with limited proficiency in English, the charter that was a Christian school until it became a charter to keep students whose families couldn't afford the tuition, the charter taken over by Scientology.

This isn't to say there aren't some great charter schools out there. But there are a lot more great teachers out there—in traditional public schools, in charter schools, in private schools—and the fact that the president is trying to replace the week to appreciate them with a week honoring an educational form that has, according to the most in-depth research available, performed less well than traditional public schools far more often than it has performed better, with the differences in performance being, on the whole, pretty small, except that one of these systems has meant big profits and big paydays for some charter management companies and their executives, is an unfortunate reminder of how disappointing, how flat-out bad this president's education policies have been.

President Obama's proclamation of National Charter School Week repeatedly invokes the idea of innovation. But if a decade of "innovation" along one very specific line has produced no meaningful improvement, why are we simply supposed to celebrate that specific kind of innovation? Why aren't we innovating by, say, giving traditional public schools the autonomy and freedom to experiment that charter schools have been given? Freddie deBoer's take on "choice," the other common argument in favor of charter schools, seems to apply here as well:

more . . . http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/08/1089731/-Instead-of-Teacher-Appreciation-Week-President-Obama-asks-us-to-celebrate-Charter-School-Week