Bad Education 2018
To the Editor: Re “,” by Conor P. Williams (Sunday Review, June 3): As a Paul Wellstone-Hubert Humphrey liberal and as a student of the master community organizer Saul Alinsky, I helped write the charter public school law in Minnesota after learning the value of helping create left-right coalitions to win approval for important ideas. Many of us who advocate district and charter public school choice disagree with most of what Secretary DeVos promotes, including vouchers. Outstanding charters help many youngsters succeed. In some places, districts have improved their own programs in response to chartering. District and chartered public schools have also learned from each other’s best ideas in Minnesota, and elsewhere. Students gained from these collaborations.
Isn’t one of the longtime lessons of America that broad coalitions can help produce progress, though coalition members disagree on many things? JOE NATHAN, ST. PAUL The writer is director of the Center for School Change. To the Editor: While it’s true that the support of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President Trump does little to help the cause of charter schools among progressives who are uncomfortable with the privatization of public schools, the issue we take with school choice goes well beyond a branding problem.
Bad Education 2019
The single school profiled in the article, the Hiawatha Academies’ elementary school in the Morris Park neighborhood of Minneapolis, may be doing great work with its children. But there are plenty of public schools across the country that are also doing great work with their students — students they serve without an application or process for selective enrollment. Therein lies one problem with charter schools: They are schools for some, not all. 
Equity for students is exactly what those of us opposed to charter schools wish to talk about, not presidential politics.
Bad Education. Comedy, Drama. The unfolding of the single largest public school embezzlement scandal in history. Director: Cory Finley. Writer: Mike Makowsky. Updated: 16 November 2018 More Info: See more production information about this title on IMDbPro. Add Image Add an image. Do you have any images for this title? Ray Romano is set to star with Hugh Jackman and Allison Janey in the Bad Education movie. 2018 Domestic Box Office Postmortem: What Went Right & Wrong For The Majors In A Record $11.9B+ Year.
SARAH YOST, LOUISVILLE, KY. The writer is a public school teacher. To the Editor: Teachers have a charter school problem. Individual charter public schools that experiment educationally were never a problem. But the charter school “movement” is objectively a corporate effort determined to privatize K-12 education in the United States, in part by defunding traditional public schools and public school children to support charters. They also destroy teacher unions and other unionized workers in public schools (as corporations and their political henchmen have done for generations to most workers in the private sector).
They segregate education, so that even in charter schools with mostly disadvantaged children, most will never average anywhere close to to the levels of advantaged children. And they defund comprehensive education (including art, music, civics, shop) in the name of improving math and English skills, as if they are mutually exclusive. As a teacher (retired), I have always supported well-thought-out educational experimentation. But I would never be a teacher in an educational enterprise that does all of the above. To call teachers who work in such conditions progressive is a misnomer. Whatever success students in charters achieve, it is dwarfed by the damage charters do to students in traditional public schools, to unionization, to integration and to comprehensive education. JOHN NORMAN, PLAINVIEW, N.Y.