Two pieces on bad proposed charter school restrictions.
Biden would hurt needy children with new restrictions on charter schools (Official Washington Examiner editorial, April 6): Just as waves of parents across the country are rightly demanding more choice and control over K-12 education, the Biden administration is making yet another move to stomp out school options that unions don’t control.
In doing so, Joe Biden is crushing children’s dreams.
New rules proposed stealthily by the Department of Education, with a far shorter-than-usual window for public comment, would make it harder to open new charter schools. It could also force the closure of many existing ones. The administration says the rules are designed to encourage greater accountability and “equity,” but they probably would deter rather than encourage both goals.
Charter schools are publicly funded but operated independently of the public school bureaucracy, usually with tremendous flexibility in educational approaches. While some charter schools fail, of course, decades of research show that charter schools, on average, produce markedly higher levels of student achievement than do regular public schools….
Mary Landrieu eloquently argues for charter schools (April 6):
When Democratic former Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana spoke passionately to the Washington Examiner late last week in favor of charter schools , she said plenty else, not yet reported, of importance about both charters and bipartisanship.
Landrieu, an old-fashioned liberal but far from a hard leftist, was arguing against the Biden administration’s proposed new rules putting major new restrictions on charter schools. ( Charter schools are publicly funded but operated independently from ordinary school bureaucracies.) She amplified a chorus of criticism of the proposals from across the political spectrum (except the extreme Left).
In so doing, Landrieu also implicitly pleaded for the type of cooperation across party lines that once was common in Washington on some issues, even as political parties fought hard on other fronts….
