Missed opportunities for better education Posted on July 2nd
Thank you for publishing “What do we tell the kids?” (Voice of the People, June 25), written by Rufus Williams, president of the Chicago Board of Education, and Arne Duncan, CEO of Chicago Public Schools. It is clear that the families they serve and the educational professionals they employ are weary of the constant battle to ensure solid public investment in their monumental work. They deserve our support to keep pushing the needle for innovation in public education that focuses on longer term success for all public school students.
We agree it’s time to put aside the personal agendas and the politics. In recent remarks made in Illinois and around the country, Barack Obama has reminded us that in order to compete and succeed in the 21st Century, we can never be satisfied with what is; we must keep working toward what could be and what should be.
The Illinois Network of Charter Schools has been an advocate of lasting education reform, urging our elected officials to expand charter school options. Demand is strong, growing and unmet: There are 13,000 students on charter school waiting lists in Illinois. According to a recent poll by Lake Research, 80 percent of parents in Peoria, Springfield and Rockford want a charter school option in their community.
Some of our charter schools have designed programs that support their students through college graduation, which makes it easy to understand why more than 600 parents, teachers and community leaders traveled to Springfield to urge our state to step up to the plate and fully support public education reform.
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