{"id":7382,"date":"2012-09-01T10:33:18","date_gmt":"2012-09-01T15:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=7382"},"modified":"2012-09-01T10:35:53","modified_gmt":"2012-09-01T15:35:53","slug":"7382","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=7382","title":{"rendered":"Charter Schools on NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was glad to hear <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2012\/09\/01\/160401996\/whats-a-charter-school-if-not-a-game-changer\">this story<\/a> about Charter Schools today on NPR.<\/p>\n<p>It reminded me of one of my early heroes in public education Al Shanker who I once despised. Al started the Charter School movement much to his union&#8217;s chagrin. The Edison Charter Schools, now Northstar Academy are one result and the local teacher&#8217;s union fought tooth and nail to kill it in the cradle. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>it was a top union leader who first endorsed and promoted the concept of charter schools in the spring of 1988. Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, gave a supportive speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re meeting here today because it&#8217;s time to take a major step forward in trying to improve the schools of our nation,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>It was Shanker&#8217;s response to relentless political attacks, namely by the Reagan administration, that blamed unions for the dismal quality of public schools described in the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk.<\/p>\n<p>But the school-reform movement born of that report, Shanker argued, was so feeble, it was bypassing 80 percent of the nation&#8217;s public school students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My search engine points to two blog post mentions of Shanker one of them is <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1720\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was glad to hear this story about Charter Schools today on NPR. It reminded me of one of my early heroes in public&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7382"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7388,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7382\/revisions\/7388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}