When Tallahassee talks about school choice they are
really talking about privatization and I think I can prove it.
When defending her school choice bill Rep.
Janet Adkins, R-Fernandina Beach said, "Parents do know what is best for
their child. Not government. Not
bureaucrats." This is the same representative which has insisted we
keep with the high stakes testing agenda despite the protest of most of the
states parents. Apparently Representative
Adkins only thinks parents know best if they are opting their children out of
public schools.
I wonder if she thinks the parents of
the thousands and thousands of children who were enrolled in one of the 270 Florida
charter schools that failed knew best too.
Margrett Raymond
the founding director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, the definitive study on charter
schools which says Florida’s underperform when compared to public schools, disagrees
with Adkins, she recently said:
This is one of the big insights for me.
I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a
choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of
my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s [education] the only
industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not
helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the
state. I think there are other supports that are needed. Frankly parents have
not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy
environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and
transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter
school movement. I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of
charter schools, but I also think we have to have some oversight of the
overseers.
We do have problems in education but by
far the biggest is the leadership out of Tallahassee which has been abysmal.
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