Here’s an interesting statistic from a depressing account of the state of New York schools:
The data also cast new doubt on the ability of charter schools to outperform their traditional school peers. Statewide, only 10 percent of students at charters graduated in 2009 at college-ready standards, though 49 percent received diplomas. The state has not yet calculated results for every district and school.
Given that the college-ready rate in city districts is between 5 and 23 percent, charter schools are at best on par with urban districts, and probably worse. So much for the fantasy that parents can self-organize a better school than the admittedly terrible one in their neighborhood.
(via)
Phyllis
I think charter schools have their place. Some of the better ones are the ones that have a specific focus, such as arts magnets or STEM magnets. But they run into the same issues other public schools run into and refuse to deal with; parochialism, nepotism, unclear or downright incompetent leadership. And they are just as prone as regular public schools to lose sight of the reason they exist–what’s in the best interest of the children.
Wag
In my experience, charter schools are a mixed bag. My daughters went to charter in Colorado and got fantastic preparation in English and Social Studies and terrible prep in Math and Science. I suspect that the child’s experience is often a crapshoot, much of which is determined by the ability of the teachers, a variable that parents running schools are poorly prepared to assess.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Charter schools can never fail. They can only be failed. Also, vouchers.
MattMinus
This doesn’t mean they can’t still be used as a union busting wedge, does it?
TR
I hate to rain on the public school triumphalism, but that article ignores the fact that many charter schools are placed in some of the most economically disadvantaged sections of the country, where students start out with a number of distinct disadvantages. It’s ludicrous to compare a charter school in Bed-Stuy with a public school in Westchester.
And yet, if you look at New Jersey instead of New York, you can see that some of the charter schools in Newark actually outperform all public schools — even the whitest, richest, most suburban ones — in terms of the proficiency levels.
Consider North Star in Newark:
Charter schools vary widely in quality, but we’ve got to abandon the knee-jerk reaction that they’re all some sort of right-wing plot to cripple the public schools that’s just a “fantasy” for deluded parents. Some of them work, and work incredibly well.
mistermix
@TR: Why don’t you RTFA? It says that public schools aren’t triumphant, they’re just probably a little bit better, on average, than charter schools. If there are a few good charter schools, as you claim (and there must be a very few, since you used a New Jersey example, when the stats quoted are from New York) then the bad charter schools must be really, really bad. Let’s close them, and do it quickly.
M-Pop
I’ve gone back and forth on charter schools for a long time – I like that they offer less traditional curricula but don’t like that they take money away from public schools (I’m actually not sure about that last one).
My son’s best friend goes to a charter school in our city and his parents are really thrilled with it. More than a few of the charter schools in our area test at the top of our district (our friends’ is one of them).
In districts where they’re not working as well, maybe the charter schools could be folded into nearby neighborhood schools?
TR
And seriously, I can’t believe you read this…
…and concluded that charter schools were worse than public schools, when the results for the public schools haven’t even been calculated yet.
I get the instinctive hostility to charter schools, but maybe we should wait until we actually have the data for public schools before you’re proclaiming charter schools to be worse than they are.
And why don’t I RTFA? Because I know people who work in charter schools, and they bust their asses for 60-70 hours a week to make sure that poor kids get a decent education even though they weren’t born in the rich suburbs, and all I see from my fellow liberals is a bunch of crossed arms and sneers.
Yeah, I hate union busting too. But I like the idea of children getting a decent education more.
MattMinus
@TR:
“The staff at North Star knows that quality education demands longer hours of preparation and reflection to ensure high levels of student achievement.”
Are the teachers compensated for these longer hours?
TR
Here’s a compare and contrast from a charter school in Rochester and the other public schools there.
What a fantasy! Sure those numbers for the charter school are all better than the ones for Rochester public schools in general, but it must be fuzzy math or something.
mistermix
@TR: You must have been educated in a charter school, because reading isn’t your strong suit. The story clearly states the results of the major urban public schools in New York (23% for NYC, around 17% for most, 5% in Rochester). That paragraph is telling you that the individual results for charter schools have yet to be released, but the overall stats are worse that almost every urban school in New York State, except for Rochester. In other words, the statewide charter school data is in, and charter schools aren’t doing well, overall.
TR
@MattMinus:
I doubt it — most charter schools have to work within the same financial limits as the public schools, but get greater leeway on curriculum, rules, etc.
That said, charter school teachers certainly get the added perk of getting grief like this for all their trouble.
mistermix
@TR: I think you’re a bit fuzzy on the term “average” or “mean”. If the *average* (i.e., mean) is 10%, and some schools far outperform that number, then there must be some really bad ones, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@TR: … and I know people who bust their asses 60-70 hours a week in public schools to make sure that poor kids get a decent education even though they weren’t born in the rich suburbs.
TR
@mistermix:
As I said above, the quality of charter schools varies widely. There are some great ones, and there are some bad ones.
But you shit on all of them without acknowledging the differences, proclaiming the “charter fantasy is over” because you saw an article in the New York Times (which is never, ever wrong).
Some charters suck and should be closed. Others are outperforming the public schools and should be expanded.
But that would require more than a sneer, right?
MattMinus
@TR:
I’m sure I’m missing something, but this strategy would seem to apply to anything. Imagine a factory with the following mission statement:
“The staff at Soylent Green knows that quality factory production demands longer hours of preparation and unpaid line work to ensure high levels of productivity”.
I’d expect them to outperform the competition by at least the margin of unpaid labor.
I’m not convinced that there isn’t a solution that progressive in terms if labor and education policy.
TR
@Omnes Omnibus:
Me too. And yet they lack the support from their school administration and colleagues that they deserve.
Sorry, but when it comes to the issues of public schools, it seems like this is the one blind spot most liberals have where we fall into that stupid “my tribe good, your tribe bad” shit that conservatives always pull. It’s more nuanced than that, and we need to get beyond our knee-jerk reaction to the issue.
There are innovations taking place in the good charter schools, and lessons that can be applied to the whole spectrum of public schools for the betterment of all our kids. Pulling the plug on the whole experiment now — or simply declaring that it’s a fantasy that’s over — is childish and premature.
mistermix
@TR: Pardon me for being pissed that a poorly-regulated solution has resulted in a bunch of kids getting an even shittier education than they would have gotten in their neighborhood school. You can focus on the few success stories, but clearly the program overall is a failure, and that’s how success is judged in the real world.
I can point you to a half dozen public schools in the Rochester area that graduate 90%+ of their kids college-ready. Would you accept that as an argument that public education is generally excellent? If not, why do you expect me to be enthusiastic about your cherry-picked examples when the overall data doesn’t support your case?
Sly
There are two big problems with charter schools and one big potential problem that varies by state.
The first is, as the Times article suggests, the charter system is more often than not ineffective at addressing the problems it purports to solve, and often creates problems where they didn’t exist before. Studies on the “competition principle” have yielded generally unfavorable results for the pro-charter movement. It’s not that they performed worse, its that the difference in outcomes has always been statistically insignificant. And a survey of about 250 traditional school principles in California showed that they found the presence of charter schools in their districts had little to no impact on their finances, teacher retention, student retention, and their ability to procure resources. If one of the purposes of creating charter schools is to encourage traditional schools to shape up, it isn’t working.
Underlying this issue is the fact that the pro-charter movement doesn’t see the kind of problems that arise when you decentralize schools. It’s only a recipe for success, because bureaucracy is always the enemy. But a big problem in New Orleans now that they switched to a majority charter system (and one that didn’t exist before) is coordination between schools in addressing the needs of special ed students and complying with Federal IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) mandates. So, of course, instead of working to comply with regulations the charter schools have instead tried to find ways to “finesse” them. New Orleans didn’t have this problem before, since it had a centralized bureaucracy that could force compliance on its constituent schools and provide mechanisms through which its schools could address these problems together.
The second big problem is segregation. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard found that charter programs exacerbated segregated classroom environments, with black students in charter programs being about twice as likely to find themselves in intensely segregated schools compared to black students in traditional schools. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but the circumstances surrounding charter enactments at a state-by-state level suggests that some degree of “white flight” is involved in many charter school creations. You don’t see nearly as much drive to create charter schools in places where existing levels of segregation are already high, for example. But you do where segregation is low.
The big potential problem is the lack of open enrollment. When, like a lot of private schools, charter schools are allowed by law to select out students with special needs. This is probably the chief reason why private schools outperform public schools when it comes to standardized testing, because a public school is required by law to take any and all students from their district.
New York requires that all taxpayer-funded schools, whether traditional or charter, have open enrollment. So this isn’t a big problem here. And most states require open enrollment. But there are a few that don’t, and this basically leads toward a two-tiered system of education wherein special needs students are essentially left to rot while the charter schools in that state (and their advocates in the movement) can trumpet the higher aggregate test scores as a success.
So, to a large extent, charter schools are basically snake oil. They don’t really fix the problems they want to fix, they create new problems that didn’t exist before, and if they lack open enrollment they can skew the results.
ant
@TR:
I don’t think this is true at all. After that deal where that women got in all that trouble in Ohio a few weeks ago for lieing about where her kids lived to get them into a better school, I got to thinking about what might be the best way to address the problem, policy-wise.
Any solutions I came up with were long-term cultural stuff. Stuff that’s virtually impossible to change politically, or more money. More money would help I think, but without the culture stuff, I think there is a limit to what it can do.
Fact is, smart and educated parents try really hard to have their kids grow up smart and educated, and poor uneducated parents are a lot less likely to know how to make that happen.
And I don’t see Republicans doing anything either to help, other than punch down.
debbie
Too many charter schools in Ohio have turned out to be scams for the idea to have much credibility. Also, there’s a case near Akron of a mother gaming the system to get her kids into a better school. Kasich is maneuvering to make her a poster child for the charter school movement. What no one mentions is that the school she wanted her kids to be in is a district where the residents pay extra taxes in order to have a better school. I’d bet most of those taxpayers are of the white bread elite Kasich counts as his base. I doubt they’ll be happy paying for the unwashed masses to come into their school.
Sly
@TR:
Teachers in traditional public schools also bust their asses for 60-70 hours a week.
No one is really focusing on aggregate teacher quality in this discussion, and why should they? Most charter systems draw from the same pool of teacher candidates as traditional schools, because they have to follow the same state requirements in hiring.
PeakVT
While the dedication those who do is admirable, teachers should be not be working 60-70 hour weeks. That, to me, is either a sign of a broken system or, in charter schools, a model that isn’t replicable. What’s the point of establishing a model that isn’t replicable?
NonyNony
@TR:
May I give you a hearty “Fuck You”. I know teachers who work for public inner city schools and they work 60-80 hours a week to try to get their students a quality education. And they have to spend a good amount of their time making sure that their lesson plans and whatnot are up to state standards – something the charter schools here in the state don’t seem to have to comply with.
Dork
Honest question — just what the hell is a charter school? Who pays for it? Is it accredited by the state? Can they make their own rules, like no gheys and spics and mooslems and school unis for everyone?
rikryah
I’ve always considered charter schools a scam.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
I think there’s a skimming effect for charters taking families more interested in education, and in districts where there’s a form of school choice (like NYC) for the publics, the charters would fare worse.
In SF, the two charter elementary schools perform worse test-wise than the publics, as SF has a combination school choice/lottery system for the publics.
bjacques
What’s snake oil is the idea that charter schools are inherently superior to public schools, and therefore the former must replace the latter. Based on that idea, tax money is diverted from a public institution into private (and/or ecclesiastical) hands.
Starving public institutions of funds helps make their “failure” a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is exactly what the Tories in the UK are doing with their “free” school program (and their Bog Society plans for other public services).
I’ve got nothing against charter schools, but they shouldn’t be funded at the expense of public education. This is exactly what some of the louder advocates of charter schools want. That and of course to crack one of the few independent and strong unions remaining. If charter schools can be profitable, they can fund themselves. If not, replace “fund” with a similar-sounding word.
Ohio Mom
It’s a long comment and I know some of us skip the longer ones, but what sly @19 said.
Yes, there are a handful of good charters, doing interesting things out there. They serve the overall charter movements by being decoys.
Over and over, research has shown that charters do no better than public schools and that’s AFTER they refuse or “counsel out” the kids with issues — the ones that are hard to teach and expensive to serve. There’s
Very few charters are founded by parents. Many, if not most, are founded by organizations that money off of the charters. The sto
If you are truly interested in this subject, I recommend http://www.schoolsmatter.info/ and Diane Ravitch,
Most charters are not founded by parents.
chopper
@TR:
OTOH, it appears that someone took a shit in your wheaties this morning, which might explain that too.
TR
@chopper:
It was the guy who wrote this post and then claimed that because I misread the NYT piece I must’ve gone to a charter school because all those kids are stupid DURR-HURR. The same guy a couple weeks ago who insisted all Catholics were retards because they drank communion wine DURR-HURR-HURR.
Yeah, I think I’m done with this blog for a while.
Uloborus
TR, I’m afraid your argument really does not hold up for a number of reasons. It’s based on your assertion that there are exceptional charter schools, and you name one. No one here is denying that. However, the argument being made on this side is that the reputation of the charter school system is clearly undeserved, because *as a system* they are not outperforming public schools. In fact, the evidence suggests that *as a system* they’re underperforming public schools. Because of that there’s an argument that no one here has pushed strongly (but has been suggested) that charter schools are a bad thing *as a system*. The existence of exceptional outliers doesn’t change that.
EDIT – And this reputation is important, because it’s one of the major weapons conservatives use in their attempts to dismantle public education.
Nicole
@PeakVT:
Thank you for pointing this out. Assembly line workers went on strike in the 1930’s over 60 hour workweeks. Nowadays it’s being used as an example of devotion to one’s job, when it really just means a person is being overworked.
Punchy
This. Absolutely this.
Xantar
I’m going to dramatically announce my departure from this blog, too! Someone pay attention to me!
mistermix
@TR: Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.
mistermix
@Xantar: Sorry, you need to preface your dramatic announcement with a bunch of comments that show that you haven’t read the links in the original post. Bonus points if you piss on anyone who points out the difference between anecdote and data. You haven’t done that, so no attention for you.
Suffern ACE
@bjacques: The snake oil is the promotion of the idea that charter schools will achieve private school results. Also, since private schools don’t have a union, the union must be the problem. And that there is this huge pool of people out there who would show up to be good teachers in place of the “bad ones” that we can draw on to ensure every student has access to Michelle Pfeifer.
But back to the original stats. When I see a number that only 10% of charter school students are college or career ready, and that number is less than 1/2 of the public schools in the same large district, I’m wondering if these schools are actually being chartered to do something different from public schools. Also, I’m beginning to wonder if Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg actually know anything about education policy at all…
Ohio Mom
Oh dear, my computer froze up in the middle of my comment @ 29 (I have to learn how to link back!), so I couldn’t finish and the end is a grammatical train wreck.
I was going to recommend anything on the subject of charters by Diane Ravitch. She’s a conservative education historian who was an early advocate for charters but has since changed her mind.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/
I also didnt’ get to finish my other thought, which is that many, if not most charters, are not founded by parents, or even teachers who think they have a better idea. They are started by people and businesses as money-making concerns. The Schools Matter website (Not schoolmatters!) does an admirable job of documenting these atrocities.
El Cid
@Sly:
Hey, c’mon now — you have to give some credit to the increased levels of segregation in public schools aimed at by the latest pro-segregation public schooling political movement. A movement to bolster the residential segregation effects on location of schools and their pupils’ families.
They may not be at their goals yet, but they’re working on the end to remaining awkward attempts at lowering re-segregation rates.
I don’t remember how far away my schools were from my house, but I don’t think 17 miles would seem to me or my parents as an extreme. Except when my neighbor kids felt like riding their bikes to school on our safer rural roads.
Though there can be many factors affecting peoples’ opinions on these school and governing authorities’ diversity efforts, I don’t think the miles traveled is the most significant.
Ohio Mom
One last point about charters (I admit, charters are a pet peeve): they are billed as being a form of public school because they receive public funding but they have none of the accountability of public schools.
Public school systems are actually a form of local government, as described in the state constitution. They are governed by a democratically elected body (the school board), which has jusridiction over a defined geographic area (the school district), and they are funded through taxes. They must follow open meetings laws and open records laws (specifics about individual students being the exception).
If you are not happy with your school board’s actions, you can speak at a meeting, request the pertinent records to research what it is you want to change, organize your neighbors against what they are doing, work to get someone else elected to the board, even run for school board yourself.
None of this is true of charters, which are private entities. You might call this whole end run around democracy at the local level — hm, what do do call it when private concerns are melded with goverment? It’s at the tip of my tongue…
Jay C
@TR:
Dude. This a (open, public) blog: yeah, we’d all love intelligent, reasoned discussion (most of the time) – but that’s the problem with “the public”: just anybody can get in: don’t be so thin-skinned – and pay attention to the serious rejoinders: like this one:
In short: the “sneers” you perceive are probably a reaction (rude, certainly, but understandable) to test results that cast doubt on the widely-publicized notion – mainly by well-organized starboard-leaning organizations – that charter schools in general are a be-all, end-all panacea for the problems of public education. Which they, in general, have not proven to be.
No one is claiming that there are NO “better” charter schools, or “worse” public ones: NOR, for that matter, the converse. But the major difference is, as many others here have already pointed out, the selectivity. Which, apparently, isn’t even enough to make a statistically significant difference.
Alwhite
But we can make it all better if we fire teachers & principals and take money away from failing schools! That and bust the teachers union – that’ll fix everything.
As I noted here last week, the wingnuts ask what are schools doing with ALL the additional money we are giving them. School spending has gone up 180% since 1970! Blithely ignore that inflation has gone up nearly 560% in that same time period.
A lot of the problems with schools are not problems inside the school but in the homes & neighborhoods. These problems are often compounded by the schools inability to refuse admittance to really troublemakers and an over-litigious society.
Sly
@PeakVT:
Teachers working 60+ hours a week isn’t a function of how the system operates, its a function of the labor market and key misunderstandings about what, exactly, teaching entails.
The public doesn’t really know what goes into teaching. They just see the classroom hours and maybe the time spent grading. But the vast majority of teaching occurs not only outside the classroom, but outside the school itself. Lesson development, professional development, informal assessments of each student, etc. Plus the bureaucratic demands of most other jobs. In survey after survey, “not enough preparation time” is always ranked first or second on a list of concerns that teachers have.
Not recognizing these costs allows districts to underpay teachers they have and not see the necessity of hiring new ones.
martha
@Omnes Omnibus: That would be my sister, a second grade public school teacher in a poor district in northern CA, for one. For almost 20 years now.
aimai
@TR:
I’m sorry, what are those lessons? That kids need small classes, lots of teacher attention, longer hours, more comfortable spaces, cleanliness, safety, good nutrition, nurses on staff? Wow. Its like we didn’t know any of that without charter schools to tell us.
aimai
Charter schools remind me of this Philip Pullman observation on the deceptive brutality of attempts to make the public sector more “market like.” Essentially states/societies have two choices: spend what you need to get a good outcome for everyone (which would pour money into poor areas and keep it low in rich areas) or force poor people to compete like rats in a barrel for scarce resources and claim that it produces “innovation” and “commitment” and is a sensible way to divide up resources. The poor lose under this system–they just think that maybe some of them have a chance to get ahead by stepping on and abandoning the rest of the public.
chopper
@TR:
oh noes! pissy dude iz leaving!
JMC in the ATL
This is a pretty interesting thread for me. I’ve known three people that went through charters, and all three went to arts magnets. They were all the types of teenagers who were completely detached from regular classroom work, but thrived in an arts environment.
I’ll have to do some thing on this. I would hate to see those types of environments destroyed, when they help kids that just wither away in traditional settings.
aimai
@JMC in the ATL:
A magnet school doesn’t have to be a charter school–my cousin runs a small magnet public highschool in New York City.
I feel like this discussion is a bit blindmen and elephant. Each person is describing the kind of education they have seen–or that they imagine exists out there–without necessarily acknowledging the limitations of their viewpoint. Public schools are paid for by the public out of property taxes and sometimes business taxes, helped out by federal government money. There are standards for how that money can be used, and the money is limited by the parsimony of the taxpayers and their relationship with the notion of the “public” and “education.”
Charters aren’t an answer to this problem–they are a workaround. Where the public/government/taxpayers aren’t willing to pay enough for the education of some of the children some families–generally those with the highest expectations and the most political skills–either move districts (use money) or try to force the district to create a semi private school which will mysteriously charge public school rates. As far as I can see these charter schools take money from the public schools and those children and families but are failing to educate those kids to the same or higher standards. There are outliers, of course. Some charter schools may, in fact, offer more art, or better science. But that’s not why they were founded and the ones I know of generally strip out those “extras” in attempting to attract parents who don’t value those things. That’s the whole “inner city kids would benefit from just the Three R’s” version of why charter schools are good.
As El Cid points out in the South or desegregated areas Charter schools may be used to semi privatize and resegregate classrooms that would otherwise not be majority white. In that part of the country far from being a way for inner city/minority kids to receive a good education the charter schools are merely replacing the for profit “Christian” Academies which have always been the backbone of white education in the South in the absence of a strong tradition of public education at all.
aimai
piratedan
well the culture needs to change in this country, period. We all talk about how much education matters but people rarely want to put their money towards it. At one time, public schools were the best avenue for upward mobility through the economic strata in this country and the Conservatives have done a great job at the local and national level for gutting and corrupting it. Business used to be firmly behind the education of the general public and lately, an educated workforce can be “imported” at a reduced cost or business can be relocated to where the educated workforce is versus having it “developed” at home (TYVM Chamber of Commerce).
I really would love to see us adopt the Finnish model, because they apparently understand that you have to spend money and time to change the culture across the board and treat each child as an opportunity and “develop” each child.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/early-educations-top-model-finland/article1183419/
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
I don’t understand why magnet/satellite/spectrum (whatever they’re called nowadays) classes are such a non-starter. I went to a class that I had to test into in my elementary school, along with about 35 other kids from a couple surrounding schools. It allowed kids who didn’t need as much one-on-one attention to move a little faster than usual, allowing me to get up to some basic Algebra in 6th grade.
Why not push for more of these classes?
JMC in the ATL
Oh yes, I was not clear. The precise reason that I am finding the conversation interesting is because my opinions in charters were based on my limited experience with them as magnets. I should further specify that I am talking about a fairly rural area with smallish school districts. Without a chartered magnet that drew students from across the boundaries of multiple districts, my friends would not have had that option.
cyntax
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac:
Well, that probably has a lot to do with the fact that you’re conflating terms. The article was about charter schools which are different from magnet schools. Roughly speaking magnet schools have specialized curricula while most charter schools are basic curricula. There is of course some overlap. Google and all that…
feebog
As someone who is currently embrolied in a Charter School controversy in the San Fernando Valley, I am standing firmly in the camp of the Charter School. The question we are facing is who will operate a new High School in our Community, LAUSD or Granada Hills Charter High School. GHCHS is the largest charter school in the country with over 4100 students and a waiting list of over 2500. They graduate 98% of their students, and almost all of those students go on to a two or four year college.
They have a 2010 API of 874, compared to LAUSD schools in the area that score anywhere from 100 to 180 points lower. They will be able to staff the new high school with a ratio of 25 students per class compared to LAUSDs ration of 40. And they do all this with a board of local community professionals and educators calling the shots.
I know that not all charters are sucess stories, but we sure have one here.
Triassic Sands
Obama’s educational policies are terrible. I don’t know if his concessions to the right wingers stem from a desire to appear open to the other side’s ideas, or if he really believes what he says. Longtime conservative educational scholar Diane Ravitch, after decades of championing the conservative educational agenda, has discovered just how wrong she has been. To her credit she’s written a book admitting her mistakes. Unfortunately, Obama is still carrying the torch for ideas whose major impact is or will be to undermine public education. It is really sad to see a Democratic president supporting policies that are so detrimental to our society.
aimai
@JMC in the ATL:
One of the issues that’s so frustrating, for me, is the taken for grantedness and unquestioned nature of the notion of a “school district.” Years ago, in a seminal book on the subject, Jonathan Kozol explored this issue in one school district. The school district line is an utterly artificial one having little to do with distance from schools since children on the poor side of a poor district may be living right next door, as the crow flies, from the rich kids in a wealthy suburban district. Yet they may not attend the school they could walk to and must be bussed to a school in their official district.
Rural areas are a whole ‘nother thing. Its a fact of size/funding that rural areas would either be without a school, or without a large enough school to handle private enrichment classes for some kids (just as they have a hard time funding enrichment classes for kids at the bottom end of the curve. The creation of magnet schools for both learning disabled and potentially advanced kids makes sense. Its a great idea. But I’d rather see more money put into all the schools than the creation of a semi-private preserve for the “gifted” kids because its been my experience that that sort of thing tends to turn the regular schools into dumping grounds for “everyone else” while the money and attention are siphoned off by the more aspirational parents. In other words your friends “option” comes at a cost for all the other kids. And its a terrible thing when the Public Schools and the Teachers who work in them are relegated to the status of “good enough for the poor/stupid/educationally challenged kids” so that some kids can have the “option.” They all deserve the best education they can get.
aimai
aimai
@feebog:
That a charter that can afford to have *half the class size* of a regular public school is going to do better than a public school with 40 kids in a class is really not much of a surprise to anyone, is it? Of course its a “success story.” The problem people are pointing to is that your Charter drains money away from the Public School while not accepting all the students the Public School has to accept. The money should be flowing the other direction *if its public money* and if its not then the school is a private school and no one is complaining about it since it doesn’t compete for funding with the rest of the system.
aimai
jerry 101
Charter schools aren’t “self-organized” by parents, they are organized by for-profit corporations that set up a not-for-profit entity, obtain a charter from the relevant agency, then the “not-for-profit” entity contracts with the corporation to perform the management and administration function, including hiring and firing principals, teachers, etc.
The not-for-profit entity collects donations from various interests, and gets paid a per-student tuition fee that would otherwise go to fund regular public schools, gets to benefit from the semi-exclusive nature of the charter school (you have to make an extra effort to get into a charter school, even though they don’t have admission standards per se). The for-profit corporation then collects a fee from the “not-for-profit” entity to actually run the school.
The extra effort to sign up for the charter school lottery ensures that most of the lowest performing kids never set foot in a charter. In addition, Charters have more power to kick out kids with disciplinary issues. This helps improve the image of the charter as they get a slightly better group of students than the regular public schools get. The regular public schools still take in the kids who’s parents didn’t sign them up for the Charter lottery, and the kids who get kicked out of the Charters end up back at the regular public school.
So, almost from the get go, Charters SHOULD out perform regular public schools. The fact that there is evidence that they DON’T outperform regular schools should be a massive red flag that the Charter School model is not working.
I wonder why? For profit entity extracts a fee based on the tuition rate plus donations recieved by the school. The lower it keeps the costs, the more money the corporation makes. So, they keep unions out of the school, pay inexperienced teachers sub-union wages (you gotta wonder about the quality of a teacher who works at a charter school, seeing as how they have less job security and lower pay than their public and private school peers), and find other ways to cut costs to the bone.
Its pure and simple profit taking wrapped up as “reform”. And, as time progresses, it’ll become more and more obvious that charter schools are failures.
And, for the record, outside of being a father who’s got to figure out where his kid should go to school in a few years, I have no personal connection to the charter school debate (I’m not a teacher or anything – I just don’t like charter schools).
Gina
And meanwhile, as the adults keep arguing, the kids age out of whatever system they’re stuck in. Reason 56,987 I bailed out on the whole experiment and decided to homeschool. I can emphasize higher-level math and science, get extra tutoring help as needed immediately and make sure it’s actually a quality program. I can test as needed, using nationally normed assessments such as the CAT-5 or Iowa Skills tests, as well as require my kids to do real-life projects. We get to skip time-wasting bullshit, move ahead when it’s appropriate, and slow down when needed, without an act from the local government.
The sucky part is that I’m on 24/7, but then again, as a parent, it’s kind of part of the gig. This kind of schooling isn’t for everyone, you need to be financially secure enough for one parent to not have an outside income, as well as to afford all the computers, books, classes, etc. I wish there was a public option that could match this flexibility, but I’m also realistic. There’s not even a private school that offers this kind of detail.
Luceafarul
Charter schools were designed to fail. How do you not understand this?
wengler
But Mayor Bloomberg said the problem was that the school districts aren’t run by business people.
Charter schools are magic. Once we bust the teachers’ unions, America’s least powerful public sector union will be put of business, and teachers will finally get back to doing what they are supposed to be doing. No more shots of Jack in the teachers’ lounge while taking 3-hour breaks! Instead we will hand out “merit-based” pay so that the younger, inexperienced teachers with no power can get all the problem kids while the veteran teachers can cash all those sweet bonuses.
It’s OK if the corporate schools fail though. They can just market the hell out of that shit and everyone will pretend that it’s still worth doing. Pravda had nothing on Madison Avenue!
lol
The biggest predictor of a kid’s success in school is parental involvement. And to pile on to what @jerry 101 was saying, parents who seek out charter schools are involved parents – regardless of the school or teachers, those are the kids most likely to succeed. That’s another level where charter schools are getting a better group of kids… yet still fail to do significantly better than public schools.
DPirate
I do not think you can reasonably compare school systems, unless the objective is something like the output of a meat-grinder. It is all too subject to local culture and individuality of the teacher and student.