A Language/culture based charter school is a Charter school whose curriculum is based on the language and culture of a specific ethnic nation or group of nations, although the schools are open to students of all ethnic backgrounds.
A review by the Washington advocacy group, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, found that among the more than 4,600 charters nationwide, 113 have mission statements specifying such ethnic cultural themes. These include the Amber Charter School in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School in Rochester, New York, both of which feature instruction in Spanish and in Hispanic cultures, the Ben Gamla Charter School, the country’s first Hebrew language charter school, which opened in Hollywood, Florida, in 2007, the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School, where by grade six all subjects except English language arts will be taught in Chinese, and the Hellenic Classical Charter School in Brooklyn, New York.
A language/culture based charter school is similar in many respects to a religious charter school. Lawrence D. Weinberg, in his book Religious Charter Schools: Legalities and Practicalities, argues that a charter school can be religious in many ways and that charter schools may accommodate religious beliefs, but not endorse religious beliefs. Religious charter schools would include Catholic schools that converted to charters as happened in Washington, D.C. and some Hebrew or Arabic language schools.
Famous quotes containing the words language, culture, based, charter and/or school:
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)
“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“[How] the young . . . can grow from the primitive to the civilized, from emotional anarchy to the disciplined freedom of maturity without losing the joy of spontaneity and the peace of self-honesty is a problem of education that no school and no culture have ever solved.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)