Making the Right Enemies

Further evidence that charter schools work better than traditional public schools: They are making the right enemies. “Local school boards view charter schools as a threat,” U. S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., said at a conference at the Center for American Progress (CAP) this morning. “Local school boards will do everything they can to charter schools that can’t work so that they can say that they don’t work.”

After Hurricane Katrina decimated much of her native New Orleans half a dozen years ago, NOLA reopened its public schools as charter enterprises.  The city of brotherly love escaped such a natural disaster but has come to increasingly rely on charter schools to help reform its own troubled educational system.

From 1990 to 2000, “We’ve had two decades of failed turnaround efforts in Philadelphia,” Diane Castelbuono, associate superintendant for strategic programs in the school district of that Pennsylvania metropolis said at the CAP event. “At the same time, the number of charter schools in Philadelphia skyrocketed.”

Currently, “One in five kids attends a charter school” in Philadelphia, Castelbuono told the crowd at CAP. President Obama lauded one of these—the Shoemaker Middle School which has been taken over by Mastery Charter Schools.

The Shoemaker School is featured in a CAP video which notes that, under new management test scores, including the SAT, are up.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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