Education Reformer: Today's 'Radical' Ideas Needed to Derail Perpetuation of Bad System
by Jim Brown
January 29, 2004
(AgapePress) - An author and education reform advocate believes inner-city public schools with high academic and behavioral standards need to be shut down. She is proposing that every urban school be turned into a charter school that would be required to meet tough state standards.Dr. Abigail Thernstrom is a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and co-author of the book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, 2003). She believes every urban school should be come a charter school -- and that if it falls down on the job, it should be closed.
"When is the last time any district has actually closed a public school that is not educating the kids?" she asks. "If the districts did that, some of the larger urban districts would have to close every public school in sight. But the charter schools can be closed -- in Massachusetts, we closed a charter school last year. It looked like a good school at the beginning [but] the kids weren't learning properly. We closed it up."
Thernstrom, a senior fellow at New York's Manhattan Institute and a commissioner on the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights, admits her vision of radical change for America's schools is not being embraced by many people right now. But she believes charter schools provide a setting in which good education has the potential to flourish.
"If you want a tree to grow, plant it today," she says. "We're planting ideas and we're trying to create with this book a sense of outrage. I don't want another generation of young black and Latino kids going through schools and leaving twelfth grade improperly educated for the very competitive world that they have to face."
Thernstrom says unless more schools are released from the constraints of the traditional public school system, the racial gap in academic achievement will not significantly narrow. School choice and the freedom that charter schools enjoy, she says, are vital to narrowing that gap.
The Harvard graduate co-authored No Excuses with her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom. Their 1997 work, America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible, was named one of the notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.
