We could spend a week debating which side Canada really falls on, or we could just read the book written on Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone. It has a passage where Canada answers this question directly:
And where did Canada stand? He agreed with [Richard] Rothstein that the public school system needed more money, not less. But on the other basic principles of the education debate, Canada found himself with [Abigail and Stephan] Thernstrom, on the right. "I'm for vouchers, I'm for charter schools--I'm for anything that blows up the status quo," he told me. Canada felt that liberals' hearts were in the right place on poverty and education, but something--maybe it was their dependence on teachers' unions, maybe it was an overly idealistic view of how public education worked--had led them astray on this issue. "It is my fundamental belief that the folk who care about public education the most, who really want to see it work, are destroying it," he said. Anyone who looked at the urban public school system not as an abstract idea but up close, every day, the way Canada had for the past twenty years, would want to blow it up too.So, Canada wants to spend more money, institute vouchers, reduce teachers union's influence, and blow up public schools. Which side wants to endorse all of those things? In other words, Canada doesn't fit neatly into either camp. Let's keep arguing about it though.
2 comments:
True, Geoff Canada clearly thinks there's a resolution between the two sides, and that Harlem Children's Zone occupies that middle by simply doing both the no-excuses school and the wraparound neighborhood services.
I think one debate that's going on at GothamSchools, though, is not about which side of this Ed Equality Project/Broader Bolder divide HCZ argues for. Rather, it's about the degree to which the Roland Fryer study actually draws the conclusions that David Brooks said it did, that the Promise Academy has "eliminated the black-white achievement gap."
Here's where that debate is happening: http://gothamschools.org/2009/05/08/just-how-gullible-is-david-brooks/#comments.
Would love to hear your thoughts on that debate, Chad.
Canada's implicit point in my view is that it's about the outcomes. It's not about public vs. voucher. It vouchers and charters can produce the outcomes, all debates aside they must become a part of the way we educate young people. It's pretty simple. But I guess we can still fight about it.
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