Charter Schools

(Topics: Children ⇒ Education | Back to Home)

Something wild is happening in education. Strap in, because there may be no greater demonstration of the strangeness of modern politics.

Back in the 1970s, there was an English teacher named Ray Budde, I get the sense he was a typical New England lefty [1], Budde felt that what was going wrong in education was all the central authority and bureaucracy and general over-business-ification that had been going on. What we need*, one can imagine Ray Budde, a former Navy man, saying, is to have us teachers run the damn show.

The solution was a new law. In addition to the usual agreement between school corporations the legislature, new schools would be allowed to provide public education with few oversights and restrictions.** These academics, with their PhD's in education (like Ray Budde) would decide not only what students would learn, but how they would be taught. It was, in essence, and entirely different charter between states and schools.

A charter school is a tuition-free school of choice that is publicly funded but independently run.[2]

[1] Budde died in 2005, so I'm eulogizing with love here.

[2] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-are-charter-schools/2018/08