Charter schools need more support

I was right about how quickly the nitwit bureaucrats in the Nashville school system would capitulate:

A small cadre of students, parents, educators and business people faced down the monolithic public education status quo in Nashville last week.

At the last minute, Metro Schools Director Dr. Pedro Garcia saw the light and allowed about 40 students at Nashville’s two charter schools — KIPP Academy Nashville and Smithson Craighead Academy — to stay enrolled this school year.

Hear, hear!

In addition, the newly minted Metro Board of Education needs to reign in an administrative staff with an apparent bias against the charter school movement.

The default position of the MNPS staff and Garcia should have been to find every way possible to keep these children at the schools where they were already learning and were rooted. Instead, MNPS administrators sought to move children after the school year had already begun, sacrificing the best interest of these students in the name of enforcing the public education status quo.

Charter schools are the wave of the future in urban school systems where traditional approaches to public education are failing our children. MNPS staff needs to get on board with the movement, assuming a supportive stance.

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Charter schools need more support

 

September 25, 2006, The Nashville City Paper

http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=38&screen=news&news_id=52310