Commentary

Guess Who’s Right About Charter Schools?

Guess Who’s Right About Charter Schools?

James P. Freeman

Lost earlier this month amid gripping stories of plunging temperatures and plundering wire taps was the news that Boston charter schools received a record number of applications. This welcome development should prompt Governor Charlie Baker, who rightly and robustly supports charter schools, to renew efforts to reconsider expansion of these schools.

As reported in The Boston Globe, 16 charter schools in Boston "collectively received 35,000 applications for about 2,100 available seats," according to the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association. Those same schools received 13,000 applications in the previous period. It is believed that a new online application system contributed to this year's spike, making it easier for applicants to apply to multiple schools.

Lies They Told You About Common Core
Commentary

Lies They Told You About Common Core

Sandra Stotsky

Amazingly, the Common Core project was sold to state boards and school administrators as "state-led." (See, for example, here.) Even so, it was never designed to be accountable to the states that presumably promoted it despite the well-known fact that the federal government pays for only about 8 to 10 percent of the costs of public education on average across states.

How sets of English language arts and mathematics standards (and, later, matching science standards) created by non-experts selected (so far as we know) by Achieve Inc. (a D.C.-based organization developed in the 1990s to assess state standards) and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation got adopted legally by (generally speaking) mathematically and scientifically ignorant state boards of education is a complex story. This story is carefully told in Joy Pullmann's newly published and very readable book The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids (Encounter Books, 2017).

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