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School Choice Week

Posted January 25, 2012 2:14 PM by Dylan Miyake

Yesterday, The Atlantic posted an article on "How School Choice Became an Explosive Issue." Like almost everything else in American K12 education now, school choice has been politicized -- to the detriment of children and educators across the country.

Take, for example, the issue of charter schools. Charter management organizations like KIPP and Uncommon have proven that they can indeed scale the achievements of charter schools by instituting higher standards across their networks. Yet detractors of charter schools on the left accuse them of creating educational apartheid.

And then there's the issue of public schools and teachers's unions. Listen to the rhetoric from the right and it sounds like teacher's unions are committed to only protecting their civil service jobs, and that teachers don't care about students or achievement. Which is obviously untrue and overstates the case.

Of course, the answer is somewhere in the middle. What we need in the United States is a market for education that includes a strong, accountable, and equitable public education system and and equally robust private system. And we need to get past the rhetoric and the grandstanding to learn from all the experiments going on in the United States. Our children deserve better.