The Obamas’ visit to a charter school: Red Hot!
Get out that trusty Reform-o-Meter because Team Obama is finally showing some heat. For his very first visit to a public school as President, Barack Obama chose a charter school-Capital City Public Charter School,* located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, just a few miles due north of the White House. (Politics K-12 has great coverage here.) Granted, he went there to sell his not-so-hot stimulus package (to second-graders, no less!). And granted, as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post writes, it was “a good day to get out of the White House.”
Still, these sorts of symbols and signals matter (though not too much; I rate it a 2 out of 10 in terms of significance), and charter schools are certainly in need of some immediate POTUS loving. That’s because the Senate version of the stimulus bill doesn’t include language guaranteeing charter schools access to the big bucks that are about to flow to other public schools. So surely the Obama folks have to know that using a charter school as a photo op and then cutting the same charter school (and its peers) out of the stimulus bill would create an outcry in the reform community and lead to parents marching on the White House. (And if they didn’t know it, now they do.) So this bodes well for charters, me thinks.
So let’s celebrate our very first “Red Hot” reading on the Reform-o-Meter for this charter visit. Don’t you agree? Cast your vote below.
* If Arne Duncan is still looking for “a great public school that’s diverse,” I hope he noticed that Cap City is eminently so. I visited the school a few years ago and was impressed to see that the student population was one-third white, one-third African-American, and one-third Hispanic.
Related posts:
- Three cheers for President Obama’s red hot speech to the NAACP
- Feeling hot, hot, hot!
- Charter school gets a special visit
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February 5th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Mike, that’s twice that you have Arne Duncan quoted as saying he is looking for a diverse “public” school. When I checked the online USA Today article, the quote was “Diversity is really important to our family and we’re looking for a great school that’s diverse”. I doesn’t say “public”.
Now everyone is reporting that his children will be attending a public school, and there is a good chance that they will for PR purposes. But to be clear, the quote didn’t include the word public, so it might be worth watching where they do in fact end-up.
I was more interested in the fact that he said they are “looking” for a diverse school. Now maybe in Washington, the ruling class has a different set of rules, but where I live, if your children attend public school, they are ASSIGNED. No choice here. I wonder if he would support all parents have the option of choosing their “public” school, or even their teacher for that matter?