For seventeen years, the five-million strong National PTA urged state governments to give only local school boards the authority to grant or deny charter-school applications. That changed this month, when the group’s board struck that restriction from its platform and extended its support to “all authorizing bodies.” The National PTA says it wants to be more relevant in charter-school policy, and its old position conflicted with the plain fact that local PTAs are increasingly working with charters authorized by universities, states, or independent bodies. This is a big leap for a group that education analyst Thomas Toch once accused of being “out of step with many parents’ demands for change in public education today” and that has lobbied alongside teacher unions for decades. Of course this change in the national stance isn’t binding on state chapters that have taken contrary positions. Georgia and Washington PTAs, for instance, have opposed recent efforts to create state-level commissions that would have the power to authorize charters: They still want to keep oversight (i.e., power) over all charters “local.” (In the case of Washington State, there are no charters of any sort, thanks in part to past PTA opposition.) But let’s at least acknowledge this welcome crack in the national glacier.
RELATED ARTICLE:“National PTA Revises Policy on Charter Schools,” by Sean Cavanaugh, Education Week, August 27, 2012
A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.
