“Supporters of a breakaway charter school in the high-achieving Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District have dropped the effort, at least for now,” the Los Angeles Times reports. The charter was supposedly proposed “as an alternative to the standardized-testing culture of district schools.”
Something about this story doesn’t quite sound right. First of all, charter schools are subject to testing too. It’s also baffling that the parents felt the only way they could make a statement about testing was to start their own charter. Testing is seldom the problem. The mischief is in the test prep and endlessly sweating children to perform. It strains my credulity to think that the principal of a “high-achieving” school wouldn’t feel accountable to parental pressure to back off if that was the problem. Push comes to shove, the parents could make an even more effective statement with a testing boycott.
