Writing on Fordham’s Flypaper blog today, David Griffith provides a compelling response to a recent critique of charter schools. That critique, in the form of a policy paper from former Duke professor Helen Ladd, argues that charter expansion should be limited. Why? Charters, writes Ladd, “undermine good education policymaking.”
Ladd outlines four areas in which she believes this is so; Griffith tackles them one by one. For instance, Ladd claims that charter schools “disrupt” the establishment of “coherent educational systems.” One way they do this, she says, is by harming district funding.
That doesn’t follow from the facts, says Griffith. Here’s an excerpt:
Veterans of the charter school movement will recognize many of Ladd’s arguments. For example, she asserts that “given public funding follows students to charter schools on a per-pupil basis, the outflow of students to charters means that the local districts will be financially worse off.” The first clause of that sentence deserves at least three Pinocchios, given the well-documented exclusion of many charters from many local funding sources.
Read the full post here.
