Kay Madati: Building Charter Schools While Questioning The Movement: Kay Madati has doubts about the charter school movement. And he helps run a charter school.'I'm not sure in aggregate that charter schools are even raising the bar,' he says.
Madati, 39, who oversees entertainment marketing strategy for Facebook, doubles as the chairman of the Atlanta Heights Charter School, in Atlanta, which he founded.
The school just finished its first year only to have a state Supreme Court decision scrap its constitutionality under state law.
Because of issues around how the school was chartered, the court ruled that the school couldn't operate in Georgia until it was re-certified.
Big players in the education reform movement, from Michelle Rhee to Bill Gates to members of the Obama administration, have embraced charter schools with brio. That passion has fed the highly polarized debate around how well charter schools educate students in comparison to traditional public schools.
Madati, who says skepticism is what brought him to the cause of school reform in the first place, avoids taking sides in that argument -- to the extent that he can.
'This is not the be-all and end-all solution,' he said. 'In any one area when a charter school opens up, it only serves one segment of the population. What do you say about other segments of the area? The other 98 percent?'
