“The message here, no matter how it is framed, is that 20 years after the start of the charter school movement, even with all the private energy and public policy cheerleading it has engendered, students in charter schools roughly perform the same as students in the rest of public education—not the leaps and bounds that were promised,” AFT president Randi Weingarten says.
“While any gain in achievement is welcomed, we should use the CREDO findings as an opportunity to pause and ask ourselves why we keep pitting charter schools against neighborhood public schools—a strategy that has created little more than a disruptive churn.
“Both charters and neighborhood schools have their place, but rather than closing neighborhood schools and replacing them with charter schools, we should return to the original mission of charter schools—as laboratories for innovation and creative ideas that can be scaled up so they can benefit all children, not just some.”
