The game of “Let’s Pretend” is in full swing.
From the N&O Under the Dome blog:
Prodded by Gov. Bev Perdue, the legislature is racing toward allowing as many as 135 addtional [sic] charter schools in the state, as long as they’re controlled by school boards.
Under a bill the House Education Committee approved this afternoon, local school boards would be allowed to covert continually low-performing schools into charter schools, as long as the State Board of Education okayed it.
A defining characteristic of a charter school is that a community board, not a school board, has oversight of the school. In fact, a charter is only necessary because of oversight by a community board.
This is not the first time Perdue and friends pretended to raise the cap without actually raising the cap. In North Carolina’s Race to the Top application, the state used the phrase “charter-like schools without charters” to describe Learn and Earn/Early College schools and the like. The application proudly noted that there is no cap on “charter-like schools without charters.” No kidding. In response to this ridiculous phrase, I noted that a defining characteristic of a charter school is a charter.
I have an idea. Let’s just raise the cap on charter schools, instead of pretending that schools with none of the defining characteristics of charter schools are, in fact, charter schools.
