Charter Schools

Some people might wonder why I made a fuss about the legalization of marijuana when we are also voting on charter schools. Let me explain my views regarding charter schools.

Listen to the critics of charter schools. They insist that we must stick with our highly destructive traditional schooling model because charter schools might be worse. They act as though we must maintain what we have throughout the rest of human existence because it is unfair to children to try unproven ideas on them. Of course, you can’t progress if you are unwilling to ever try anything different. I have to say that the opposition is providing the best argument to vote in favor of charter schools.

Unfortunately, charter schools would be crippled. They would be subjected to the same standards built for traditional schools. To maintain charters, schools would have to be modeled after the same approach. There might be a little more flexibility for them, but they would still rely on the same mentally destructive foundation that is causing so much trouble today.

Combine this with our traditional-by-default approach, and charter schools are at a serious disadvantage. Most charter school students will likely attend those schools only because the traditional schools were already proven harmful to them. With the same foundation, these students would likely encounter the same problems in a charter school. As a result, typical charter school students will probably perform worse than the students in more traditional schools.

Even if a charter school could find room to add a second acceptable learning style to this state (or country), that would still be insufficient for individual needs. No student today properly fits our single rigid schooling environment because there is so much variability in learning styles. If we had two socially acceptable approaches, we would still have no students who properly fit.

Charter schools won’t fix anything. The overall impact that they would have would be insignificant. Regardless of whether or not we vote for charter schools, we will not see any meaningful change. I have no reason to take a hard stance one way or the other because there really isn’t much of a difference between these two viewpoints.