How The Other Half Learns: Equality, excellence, and the battle over school choice Audiobook (Free)

An inside take a look at America’s most controversial charter academic institutions, as well as the moral and political queries about public education and school choice.

The promise of public education is excellence for many. But that guarantee has rarely been held for low-income children of color in the us. In How the SPOUSE Learns, teacher and education journalist Robert Pondiscio focuses on Success Academy, the network of controversial charter colleges in New York City founded by Eva Moskowitz, who has created about How The SPOUSE Learns: Equality, excellence, and the battle over school choice something unparalleled in American education: a way for large numbers of engaged and ambitious low-income groups of color to obtain an education for his or her children that equals as well as exceeds what wealthy families neglect. Her results are astonishing, her strategies unorthodox.

Decades of well-intended efforts to really improve our institutions and close the ‘accomplishment gap’ have set equity and excellence at war with one another: If you’re wealthy, using the means to pay private school tuition or move to an affluent community, you can get your child into an excellent school. But if you are poor and black or brown, you have to settle for ‘equity’ and a lecture–about fairness. About the need to show patience. And about how school choice for you personally only damages open public schools for everyone else. A large number of parents possess chosen Success Academy, and thousands more sit on waiting lists to enter. But Moskowitz herself admits Achievement Academy ‘is normally not for everybody,’ and this raises uncomfortable questions we’d rather not really ask, let alone answer: Imagine if the price of providing a first-rate education to kids least likely to receive it means acknowledging that you can’t do it for everyone? What if some complications are just too hard for schools only to solve?