by Annie Abrams
Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Sunday, November 25, 2007
There are powerful forces afoot causing fundamental change in the American institution of education. These forces, led by a growing phalanx of philanthropists, business leaders, public organizations and citizens, make change in the system a certainty.
The resistance to change is predictable. The interests in education are vested and powerful. These interests were established as education grew to meet the needs of a young democracy fueled by capitalism. Our democracy is no longer young and the world is a changed place. Education must meet the challenge of preparing students to compete on global standards and to face the realities of a volatile and changing world that we no longer dominate.
In Arkansas and many places around the nation, charter schools have become the lightning rod for change in the system. The charter school provides the venue for competition to enter the education marketplace without sacrifice to the accepted responsibility of our government to guarantee a free and appropriate public education to the youth of our nation. The argument can be made that charter schools in fact hold the promise of increasing that opportunity. They become useful extensions of the public education system when they are constructed to achieve solutions in education.
The current debate on charter schools represents the point where Arkansas joins the movement toward real change in the system of public education. It is not merely coincidental that this debate follows the recent commemoration of the Little Rock Central High School crisis. The review process for charter school applicants provided an exquisite setting to open the debate on the future of public education in Arkansas . Perhaps fate gives our state the opportunity to fashion a future unlike our past.
This will not be easy. Education in America began as a private system, available to people of means. The father of public education in America , Horace Mann, was born of modest means. Through individual perseverance and sacrifice, he was able to acquire a good education and endeavored to make the opportunity available to persons as a responsibility of government.
The public school system today provides universal access. Access however, is only a part of the puzzle. Quality, resources and content delineate the system's ability to fulfill the goal of an educated citizenry envisioned by Mann.
Charter schools bring new resources and energies to the education process. The opportunity to increase the inflow of ideas and support for the public school system is made possible by getting citizens involved at the grass-roots level. The planning process could be structured and supported in ways that would increase community participation in the planning and implementation of a school.
The classic debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington is instructive in two proposals for charters presented to the state Board of Education recently. E-STEM schools would prepare students for 21st century jobs with an emphasis on science, mathematics and technology. The proposed Learning for Life Academy would be designed to help students catch up in the existing system. The proposals addressed the two extremes in American public education. On the one hand we are falling behind in our effort to produce students who can compete on global standards, and on the other we are failing to prepare students to meet minimal workplace standards.
Clearly, we cannot embrace policies that limit student ability. Neither can we embrace policies that leave children behind. We return to the goal of education to provide students with a free and appropriate public education. The term is virtually synonymous with IDEA-the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. Education must be "appropriate to disposition, native ability and human propensity" to the exclusion of standing. Public charter schools enhance the ability of the system to deliver a product consistent with these qualities.
Public charter schools do not compete with public education, they are an evolving part of the public education system. A change is going to come. Let us meet the change with courage, confidence, and the will to create a future unlike our past.
*------Annie Abrams lives in Little Rock .
