Charter schools in Washington and Rockford
What does one do with a successful school program that actually helps low-income children? If one is in Washington, D.C., then of course one kills the program. Reason.tv has the outrageous details:
Meanwhile, here in Rockford, Illinois, the nascent charter school movement is making fine progress.
Tags: Charter schools, Reason.tv
School vouchers are only a stop-gap. The real solution to the problem is to get government out of the education business totally. Do we have government run farms and supermarkets so that people won’t be hungry? The old Soviet Union tried that and their system merely produced more hunger.
For a higher-education proposal that is in the same spirit as the charter school idea, readers might enjoy my recent post “From charter schools to charter colleges?”
http://collegiateway.org/news/2009-charter-schools-charter-colleges
This is not a *curricular* proposal. It is a way to initiate reform of the enormous centralized student-life bureaucracies at large universities, by replacing university-managed operations with private, non-profit residential colleges. This in fact is exactly what the original idea of a “college” in the Middle Ages was: a residential society that offered housing, as well as academic and personal support to local university students. There are a number of such private collegiate societies in existence today, often in the vicinity of large impersonal universities. Perhaps there should be a lot more.
—RJO
It will be interesting to see how the relationship between education and the state evolves as the current financial crisis unfolds further. At some point, if they are to survive at all, schools, colleges, and universities will have to cut costs dramatically, shedding the layer upon layer of state-inspired bureaucracy that has built up over the last few decades. The only way the state can prevent that from happening is to outlaw private education completely. Eventually, the pressure to change will be overwhelming, even for them.
My guess is that we will see a much stronger online presence in education, probably in higher education first. The bricks and mortar are nice, but are they necessary? Both parents and people earning their own way through college may find the lower cost and convenience of online education attractive enough to forgo “attending” in person. If K-12 conditions get any worse, parents may consider similar alternatives.