Ignoring Shavar and instead planting seeds for charter operators

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Leave a comment

So I have never been one to shy away from a conversation with non-like minded individuals at an event. As a result, I attended a recent charter school operator conference in New York City. While, I might have played up the conversation here on a blog as a debate with the DFER’s Shavar Jefferies (See Charters and Big Boy Pants!? This ought to be interesting… #ICSS17). Instead, I actually planned to ignore everything he would say in the conversation and focus my comments on planting intellectual seeds for the charter operators to think about. Based on the smirk in the cover photo, he was probably ignoring me too.

What was most surprising about the general conversation was something that I highlighted as problematic in my remarks as a Civil Right conference that I attended at the University of Minnesota Walter Mondale Law School November 9-10. Here is a tweet that sums up the two points.

Charter school advocates have argued that (1) they're more segregated because they choose to be self-segregated and (2) there's no proof that integration is good for kids – @ProfessorJVH #SummitforCivilRights pic.twitter.com/esDHbqeBjl

— Breaching the Fourth Wall (@BreachtheFourth) November 9, 2017

Listen to the #ICSS17 conversation in the YouTube video above and see if you can find where these were intimated. I also enjoyed having lunch with Deb Meier, Nicholas Meier, and John Merrow (who has a new book Addicted to Reform: A 12‑Step Program to Rescue Public Education) Merrow gave me a copy and I plan to check it out this week.