What You'll Learn:
Since the 1990s, the charter school movement has taken off across the United States. These charters are essentially public schools with fewer bureaucratic hoops to jump through, and their impact is often positive, especially in underprivileged minority communities. Despite their net success (or perhaps because of it, as Sowell points out), charter schools represent a threat to many comfortably ensconced traditional public school systems. Economist and Stanford research fellow Thomas Sowell has gathered the relevant data and urges the American people to understand this movement and the systematic subversion it is encountering.
Key Insights:
- Intellectuals and politicians overlook examples of black success in education when blacks succeed in ways elites did not envision.
- Apples-to-oranges comparisons of public schools and charter schools amplify confusion for the American public.
- The best-designed studies of charter schools versus traditional public schools reveal that charter schools perform better—and sometimes much better.
- The million-dollar question of why an education movement helping low-income minority students gets so maligned is more of a billion-dollar question.
- School districts and teachers unions are eager to thwart charter school expansion, but the real losers are schoolchildren.
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