Michael Strong: Give charter schools a chance
I’ve been talking some lately with Flow CEO Michael Strong, who (together with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey) is doing some excellent work with explaining free market principles to folks with liberal-ish ideals.
Today I noticed an article he published recently at Cato Unbound, wherein he makes some excellent points about charter schools in the United States - and why they haven’t (really) been given a fair trial yet, when it comes to helping American students overcome their rotten performance scores.
I liked this point:
After the fall of communism, even the most recalcitrant academics acknowledged that Hayek had been correct that governments cannot manage an economy successfully. And yet nearly twenty years later, the notion that governments can manage an education system remains a respectable notion.
And here’s some interesting background about Michael himself:
After a career in both public and private education, in May of 2002 I moved to Angel Fire, New Mexico, to serve as the founding principal of Moreno Valley High School (MVHS), a charter high school.
In a rural area not known for the quality of its education (a UNM-Taos professor told me point-blank that “northern New Mexico students are not capable of passing AP courses), we created an AP program that in the second year of the school ranked us among the top 200 public high schools in the nation and, in the third year, the thirty-sixth best public high school in the nation on the Washington Post Challenge Index.
Although the ranking is based on the number of students who took AP tests divided by the number of graduating seniors, our students also achieved a score of 3 or higher at more than twice the rate of the national average. Because of our performance, and our innovative approach to getting there, AP New Mexico co-hosted training by our faculty for AP teachers statewide.
Teachers moved from other states in order to teach at MVHS and parents moved from other states so that their children could attend MVHS.[5]
Thus when I read an academic like Miron contrasting the rhetoric of charter schools with the reality, I know that the “rhetoric” of charter schools can be achieved. I know exactly how to do it and could do it again, over and over again, across the country. And I know exactly why it has not been achieved on a broader basis - which has a lot to do with why I am no longer in K-12 education.
See his full article for much more.
I’m looking forward to meeting Michael in person on June 15th in Austin at John Mackey’s presentation on Conscious Capitalism.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.