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.
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