And there is no indication that these laws increase parental voice in their children’s education. “You get one shot and that’s it, because once that charter is formed, that charter dictates how it will operate,” John Rogers, associate professor of urban schooling at UCLA, told NBC’s Education Nation. “[Parents] have fewer rights in the context of a charter than they would at a public school.”Parents have almost no voice at a regular school. Families cannot choose their classes nor can they choose their hours. Districts do not gather any data at all on what families want and need. Families are disenfranchised by compulsory attendance laws and although schools could have developed to support their users, they have not. Massive centralization and remote standards and testing corporations have used compulsory attendance laws to completely ignore and override parental input and control. And that means kids have no one representing them and families are treated poorly.
Increasingly, the schools are public/private hybrids where districts are allowed to further fund their own schools and viciously prosecute families that they feel use their private, er, public schools (as in so-called theft of education crimes).
Charter schools are a faux choice and even more corporatization and fragmentation. There are people working for change in the charter sector but the core issue remains that families have no real choices. Students and families should be able to choose almost everything they do with a school and schools would have a natural check on endless curricular development if families were empowered and able to make choices.
School choice? It is a lie: real choice is not a reality in any meaningful way for families. Real and wide choices at every school is a key structural change that would help communities as well as kids as families. Allowing families to choose what service they need would be a fundamental restructuring of schools and could be available for every family.
As a homeschooling parent, I can say to other parents in school systems across the country: choice is indeed the way to go but parents need the choices at every single school.
Parents everywhere need to ask for far more choices. In fact, parental choices should drive the system.
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