Weingarten Continues to Lie about Albert Shanker and Charter Schools

Rhonda (aka Randi) Weingarten has a piece in Huffington Post that seeks to offer charter lovers some context for understanding Hillary's recent remarks about charter schools.

A central element in Weingarten's ongoing dissembling about charters is to try to explain away her own support for segregated corporate charter schools by pointing to Albert Shanker's one-time support for charters:

Charter schools are publicly funded schools with flexibility in program design and operations. The late AFT President Albert Shanker was one of the first proponents, believing public school teachers could incubate innovative ideas, sharing successes and learning from setbacks. That was our goal in creating University Prep, a charter school in the South Bronx that the United Federation of Teachers co-founded with Green Dot Public Schools when I was UFT president.

What Weingarten leaves out about Albert Shanker is that his support for charters, which began in 1988, had died by 1993.  Even Weingarten's chief enabler, Diane Ravitch, has acknowledged that Shanker came to realize that charters had, in fact, been hijacked by corporations that wanted to use charter laws to create vast new business revenue streams from public money.

Below are a few clips from Shanker's "Where We Stand" paid column, which ran for years in the New York Times:

From July 3, 1994 

 

 

From March 19, 1995

 

 From Nov. 7, 1993