Contributors
jonathan woahn
david blake
[Teacher] unions are out of touch & are courting irrelevance.
A great WSJ article on the rising success of charters and the downfall of the unions:
All the reforms unions oppose—charter schools, testing, accountability, No Child Left Behind, performance pay—have been around for a while now and the disasters the unions predicted have not come to pass," said Richard Colvin, who runs the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media in New York. "The unions are out of touch and are courting irrelevance.
Teachers and administrators who once relied on a steady stream of critical stories about charter schools (which they see as competitors) now witness a flow of laudatory articles. Fly-by-night charter operators still get their comeuppance in the press, but these days reporters are just as likely to profile the high-performing charters saving thousands of inner-city children from near-certain academic death . . . and then to ask why regular public schools can't do the same.
Through the growing list of high-profile success stories, like KIPP [charter schools], the public is starting to understand that reform is actually possible," says Joe Williams, a former journalist who is now executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. "That's a big deal," argues Mr. Williams, "because the hopelessness that marred previous reform eras took a lot of people's eyes off the prize.
