As a fairly regular Gadfly reader, I often find myself nodding in agreement at the wisdom and insight that it delivers. But I also feel obliged to point out the occasional blind spot, as in your coverage of the Islamocentric charter school in Minnesota that Larry Weinberg and Bruce Cooper, writing in Education Week, cite as a promising example of "religious charter schools."
Yes, I'm a long-time booster of that basic concept. Indeed, I wrote favorably about it on Education Week's back page in 2003. I continue to believe that it has great promise both to furnish charter pupils with some of what parents value most in private schools while affording cash-starved parochial schools a new lease on life and new ways to underwrite the education of children for whom they can do a great deal of good.
Okay so far. The sticky issue, not to be mentioned in polite society (hence, I suppose, not by Gadfly), is that the prototype school depicted by Messrs. Weinberg and Cooper happens to be associated with the Islamic faith. I've nothing against that faith per se, nor do many Americans, even in these anxious post-9/11 days. But one of the strongest arguments of school-choice opponents is that public funding of non-public schools will lead both to the erosion of our common culture and to the development--at taxpayers' expense--of "Klan schools," "witchcraft schools," and fundamentalist madrassas.
I assume the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy is no such thing. But I can't help thinking that the cause of religious charter schools would be more successfully advanced if the prototypes carried names like Martin Luther (or Martin Luther King), John Wesley, Notre Dame, and Brandeis.
As for Tarek ibn Ziyad (said to be a "peacemaker" as well as an "activist"), one trusts that the charter school named for him is also obliged to subject its pupils to Minnesota's statewide tests, aligned (one hopes) with Minnesota's mixed bag of academic standards. Thus does standards-based reform contain the promise that choice-based education reform won't lead to total curricular balkanization.
Chester E. Finn, Jr.
President
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
