Charter movement hijacked by conservatives

Chicago education activist/blogger Mike Klonsky has an interesting post about the biography of teachers' union leader Al Shanker ("tough liberal"), who started out championing charters as a progressive alternative, and watched with dismay as they become the pet project of conservatives "who had tremendous contempt for public education" and the tool of privatizers. I'm reposting it with Mike's permission.

July 20th

Early charter school advocate

I'm reading Tough Liberal, Richard Kahlenberg's biography of Al Shanker, who led the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the world's largest union local, as well as the national AFT and was thought by many to be the most influential figure in public eduction, right up until his death in 1997.

Progressives like me had a love/hate relationship with Shanker. Those of us who were around in the late 60's, despised his attacks on the black freedom movement, which fought for community control of the schools in Harlem and Oceanhill-Brownsville in 1968. We also couldn't fathom his support for the Vietnam War.

On the other hand, Shanker was a defender of public schools in the face of the assault by privatizers, as well as a far-sighted and bold school reformer. He was jailed for leading teacher strikes and never hesitated to stand up for teachers's rights and respect. He realized before most, that unions had to play an active and leading role in reform, while, at the same time, defending teachers' rights, living standards, and working conditions.

In a speech to the National Press Club in 1988, he proposed the idea of teacher-led "charter schools" where rules could be bent if the great majority of teachers in a small school approved. He called on districts to "create joint school board-union panels that would review preliminary proposals and help find seed money for the teachers to develop final proposals." His ideas forshadowed today's Pilot Schools and Green Dot charters.

At the time, his idea received negative responses from today's right-wing charter advocates, like William Kristol and Chester Finn. Finn, who at the time, was Bush's assistant secretary of education, attacked the charter school proposal, saying it suggested that we don't already know what works in education.

In the coming years however, writes Kahlenberg:

Shanker "watched with alarm as the concept he put forward began to move away from a public-school reform effort to look more like a private-school voucher plan..Shanker came to believe that the charter school movement was largely hijacked by conservatives who made many charter schools vulnerable to the same groups that made voucher schools so dangerous: for-profit corporations, racial separatists, the religious right, and anti-union activists...Shanker watched with dismay as 'those who had tremendous contempt for public education' jumped on to the charter school bandwagon."

— Caroline