Charter Schools and Segregation

I was recently asked what I envisioned the future of education to be under Governor Christie. Let me say that Governor Christie is not the only politician in our country that has this plan for pushing through the current trend of education reform policies.  One of the statements I made included the fact that I see a future of charter schools across the nation.  One reason I feel that this should not be allowed is that charter schools are able to be more discriminatory in the types of students that they admit for enrollment.  These schools are capable of denying the admissions of different sectors of our student populations, such as our English Language Learners and classified special Education students.  Because of the fact that these students will need to be housed somewhere, this allows for the development of schools that will not necessarily be best suited to help a student realize their full potential.  The question remains, what is the effect of this on our society.  We already have a nation of unfair wealth distribution where 1% of the population controls over 50% of the financial resources.  If we start to allow for this charter school movement in our country we are just going to feed into that type of society where you have this separation of classes and that is not in keeping with the original beliefs of our country.  Our nation was founded upon the idea that all men are created equal and yet we are allowing politicians and corporation to come in and pick and choose who they want to consider equal.  We can not allow this to happen to our children before they are even given a chance to reach adulthood, to realize and develop upon their full potential.  We would be basically telling some of our children that they are not good enough for something, that they will not be able to reach certain goals.  This is, in no way, fair to do to our future generations, to rob them of the hope and the chance to become the person that may be locked somewhere inside of them.  Just because they do not perform well on a standardized test.