As I suggested in my Scaling up, part 1, essay, part of the problem here is in seeing charters as a pedagogy (or, in Meier’s view, ideology) rather than a market mechanism, one that is largely indifferent to pedagogy or ideology, and, for that matter, capacity. Choice has a way of solving those problems all by itself. The market, as Milton Friedman famously said, is not a cow to be milked.  The idea is not to shoe-horn schooling into governance systems but for governments to get out of the way so good schooling can happen…. The success of so many different models of schooling over the last couple of decades—including the ones [New York Times reporter James]  Traub wrote about in 1999—suggest that it is less pedagogy than governance methodology that is the key. And the what may just be government getting out of the way. We need less system, not more.

Fordham Institute’s Peter Meyer on why school choice is a critical part of moving American public education from its Model T Ford design.

As Joseph Viteritti, one of the country’s top experts in the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and school choice, has observed, the Pierce decision helped establish “the constitutionally protected right of parents to have their children educated in schools that reflected their own values, as well as the commensurate right of religious and private schools to coexist as viable alternatives to public schools.”

Unfortunately, all parents do not have an equal opportunity to exercise this constitutional right. Parents with sufficient resources may satisfy their state’s mandatory school attendance law by sending their children to secular or sectarian private schools, but parents with insufficient resources cannot. As Steve Sugarman recently wrote on this blog, just as the choices guaranteed by the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision require public funding to be fully realized, so do the choices guaranteed by the Pierce decision.

Over the last decade, school choice opponents have used state and federal constitutional provisions as the basis of legal attacks on various school choice programs, but these same provisions provide the basis for expanding and strengthening school choice. For example, if the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses require that government remain neutral when parents choose their child’s school, then shouldn’t the government provide equal financial support for the parents’ choice — regardless if the chosen school is secular or sectarian? Isn’t government putting its collective thumb on the scale when it financially supports parents to attend secular schools but not sectarian schools? And shouldn’t the Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee low-income parents the same access to sectarian schools as wealthy parents?

Redefine Ed‘s Doug Tuthill on how a 1924 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (along with the Constitution) can be used to expand school choice — a subject of past Dropout Nationcommentaries.

Most teachers agree that we could deliver dramatically better results were it not for a “lack of student motivation.” Unfortunately, too many of us think about motivation the way we think about sunny weather — it’s nice when it happens, but there’s nothing you can do if it doesn’t… But actually, there’s a lot we can do. We’ve known for years that the manner in which adults interact with students has a tremendous impact on how students behave, how they value education and how committed they are to producing quality work.

Derby, Conn., Superintendent Steven Tracy, in the Hartford Courant, on why the work of adults is school is what fosters students to succeed.