convince me that charter schools are a good thing

Great Debates
1

I grew up with an elementary school teacher. She worked in EMR for decades, until the paperwork became too much, going to 2[sup]nd[/sup] grade for the last decade or so. Because of that, I tend to have pretty fixed notions on education.

Private schools do a better job than public schools. This is because they have selectivity in their student body. If private schools had to cover the full expanse that the public school system does, I tend to doubt that they would demonstrate better results (howsoever one can meaningfully measure that).

Charter schools offer the community local control over education, so that they can cast off the “evil” that is common core. I understand that the education department looks like a sluggish behemoth that institutes absurd bureaucratic rules, but is local control going to end up a net positive? I have my doubts about both sides of this issue and feel that some sort of synthesis may be sensible, but I am not seeing how charter schools constitute the answer.

Then, of course, there is the money thing. Charter schools offer an opportunity to kneecap the NEA/AFT, so that we can pay teachers minimum wage (they can make it up in tips) and toss out tenure so that bad teachers can be culled more easily. But again, I have my doubts about the fiscal advantage. As far as I can tell, charter school operators cut expenses to the bone, in favor of profitability for themselves. It is not easy for me to see how this is good for education. Then again, perhaps the goal is to create a permanent underclass, who will never be a threat to the already-well-heeled (as paranoid as that sounds).

Please tell me why I should not regard charter schools as a nightmare. Because I still have to deal with the results of whatever the education system is, as I encounter them in my daily life. How will charter schools not make those results less appealing to me/us?

2

“Charter school” doesn’t have a particular meaning. They are usually just locally run, experimental schools with a stated mission that may or may not be very different from other types of schools. The general idea is to make publicly funded schools more like private schools.

My parents (and grandparents) were teachers too and I don’t have a problem with them as a concept. However, the concept can easily go astray if they are misrun or used for unstated purposes like defacto segregation. That doesn’t mean that the whole idea is bad. It works well in some cases especially when the local public schools are so bad that it is difficult not to improve on them and there are a group of parents, teachers and students that can create something better themselves.

I am thankful that I live in an area where the public schools are better than the vast majority of the private schools in the country but I didn’t grow up that way and I know that lots of students could benefit from a different model than the standard public schools. If someone can come up with a better model, I see no reason to stop them.

3

I am missing what was wrong with public schools in the 50’s - 90’s?

I grew up in those systems and they were good. Their biggest failing was the inequities between white suburban schools and mostly minority inner-city schools which still exist today (that is a problem worth solving).

But there was nothing particularly wrong with the curriculum or teaching methods. Sure some things were boring and dull and perhaps some new insights can result in better methods but on the whole a couple generations got a good education. I can see some tweaks here and there but otherwise why futz with it?

So why has it become so impossibly convoluted now? (really asking)

4

There really isn’t anything wrong with it. That is one of the big misconceptions about the U.S. educational system. It isn’t as if most public schools are bad; it is that the bad ones are really bad and hurt the average. That should be self-evident because we have many of the best colleges and universities in the world and no shortage of students to fill them (quite the opposite these days) yet some people insist the whole model is hopeless and broken. It isn’t.

My daughters’ public schools in Massachusetts are on par with top performing countries like Singapore and Finland. Meanwhile, there are horrible schools (public and private) in places like rural Mississippi due to demographics, cultural differences and resources. The problem isn’t with the general model. It is about consistency.

Still, if a town in Mississippi has parents, teachers and students that want to start a charter school that does better than an under-performing local school, I don’t see a downside to that as long as it doesn’t lead to discrimination or corruption. They may even find a model that works better in communities like their own.

5

There’s nothing wrong with public schools just the students who go there and the teachers who work there. I recall a student pulling a piece of lumber from his baggy pants and beating another. I once had to use a desk as a weapon against another student who wouldn’t stop harassing me. I picked up the desk with one hand and told this dude to shut his mouth or it was going upside his head. And I went to one of the better public schools in my city. Needless to say, this may have influenced my future political beliefs. Check out World Star Hip Hop videos to see what I saw on a daily basis.

6

One of the “better public schools” in your area is relative.

Did you get a good education?

7

Charter schools have no standards or requirements that they must adhere to. Be afraid of our future uneducated population.

8

“Charter school” can mean almost anything. It can mean a school run by a for-profit company, or it can mean a school that is part of the public school system and run by the local public school board. It can be very selective, or accept students by lottery. It can engage in union-busting, or be run by a union. It can follow a very traditional curriculum or experiment with new and unproven ideas. It can be whatever the chartering institution wants it to be.

Because “charter school” has no real meaning, the students who emerge from charter schools may be very well prepared or have no meaningful skills at all or be anywhere in between.

9

There are so many different forms charter schools can take, including public charter schools, that regarding all of them as a nightmare would be irrational. Like everything else, some are good and actually do serve impoverished children, while others are nothing more than profit machines that are hoping to do just well enough to stay in business and maximize profits.

10

Normal public schools only benefit the students. For profit charter schools can still benefit students as a side effect while generating profits for their owners. In some cases jurisdictions have tried to prevent that by requiring charter schools to be non profit, but they’ve found easy ways around that by simply passing through much of their funds to for-profit school management companies.

If you can still benefit the students while also generating big profits for owners, it sounds like an easy win-win for everyone!

11

Generally this, but I’m also highly skeptical of politicians who treat charter schools as The Answer. As if siphoning off some public dollars for charter school vouchers will solve decades of inequality in public schools. It won’t. It’s a convenient fig leaf that makes it appear as though they have a plan to “fix our schools” without threats of higher taxes or forced socio-economic mixing that might upset their voters.

12

I actually really like the idea of charter schools as a way to allow people to experiment with different models of education, and I feel like we’ve learned some important things through charter schools–there’s a lot of bullshit in the way, but some of the underlying ideas in “data-driven instruction” are really very sound and offer a new way to reflect/develop practice.

But the opportunities for corruption and graft are so overwhelming, so difficult to circumvent, that I don’t know if the light is worth the candle. I know a charter school where most of the kids are citizens of upper-middle class Chinese residents. They live in a dorm. I assume the company that runs the dorm is connected to the non-profit that runs the charter school. So the state is subsidizing what’s basically a private school education for the children of wealthy Chinese citizens who want their kids to graduate from an American high school (lots of private schools have students like this). Other charter schools offer just a horrific education and target populations where no one grew up in the American education system and so they don’t know to complain.

13

I have very mixed feelings.

Around here, charter schools get a per student fund exactly based on what the public schools are spending on average per student. These funds come out of the local district’s budget.

However, charter schools don’t have to offer ROTC, or free/reduced lunch, or transportation or EC services. Funds from the federal government for ROTC, for example, must be spent exactly on ROTC programs; same with free/reduced lunch. So what ends up happening is that the public school district has to dip into its general funds in order to pay charter schools their per-student allotment of ROTC/lunch funds, and then the charter schools can spend that money on other programs.

One charter school is a twenty-minute drive away. Sure, parents organize carpools, but you want to guess how many poor students are at that school? Not very many. You want to guess how many of those poor kids are nonwhite? Almost zero: the poor families tend to have social connections to the rich families, and while there are social connections that cross race or class lines, very few cross both. As a result, the school is nearly all white, unlike the local public schools.

Because those schools don’t offer full EC services, even though their enrollment is open, families whose kids struggle academically or behaviorally aren’t likely to send their kids there.

Because those schools don’t offer free/reduced lunch, families that struggle financially aren’t likely to send their kids there.

This is charter schools done wrong: in my neck of the woods, they’re a back-door solution to the problem of integrated public schools, allowing white families to send their children to an all-white school without having to pay for the privilege of resegregation.

Now, I don’t think that charter schools necessarily work this way in all cases (even locally, there’s one school that bucks the trend). But it happens often enough that I cast an extremely jaundiced eye on the movement. At best, it’s a movement that really needs to engage in introspection and clean up the logistics of how it proceeds. DeVos is 100% the wrong person to do this.

14

Here is a real life example. My niece was in middle school a few years back. She had the misfortune of having a boy start to like her who was liked by a very popular girl in the next grade. This girl threatened by beat her up. She reports the girl to the principal but then the girls friends tell her friends that they are going to beat her up for snitching. She doesn’t know who all of the other girls friends are and so is afraid of all older girls. She no longer wants to go to school. Her parents options are: force her to go to school, let her sit at home while the paperwork goes around and see if she can go to another public school, or pay for a private school. If they choose the private school they are still paying taxes for the public school the tormentors go to. If they can not afford to pay for the new school I suppose they could have taught her to fight.
Under a charter school system. If a child feels unsafe at a school, or the parent feels like the education is not up to par they can enroll at a new school with no financial penalties. Studies have shown that charter schools and school choice mean lower costs, slightly higher test scores, and higher parent satisfaction.
I am old enough to remember when people were concerned that religious fanatics would keep evolution out of schools and now the education establishment wants to.

15

Is that true, though? If charter schools are run on a lottery and they take as many kids as they can at the beginning (which a lottery pretty much implies), they can’t take kids mid-year. There’s certainly no reason to think the process would be quick and easy: schools are not retail stores.

16

I have direct experience working in a charter school. As has been said above, the term Charter School doesn’t have a single definition. Some will be good, some will be bad. There is less strict oversight in some aspects so if traditionally that oversight was the cause of localized problems then a charter school has the potential to alleviate those. Vice versa as well.

In my experience, our charter high school received around 75% of the ADA funding that a district school would receive. We were a public non-profit and accepted any one. We did have the benefit of taking over an existing school campus so facilities were already in place. That also meant that we took the same population of students that previously attended. I started in year 1 of the operation and we offered all of the same services and extra curriculars that were previously offered, and added many more.

Off the top of my head, the population of seniors who met the minimum requirements for state college was about 14%. After our first year it rose above 70%. We had a minority population greater than 80% and over 70% were eligible for free and reduced lunch. This was in a poor underserved area and I remember seeing both prostitutes right outside of school and handmade signs from the neighbors that said “no hooking”. It wasn’t in the top 10% of schools nationwide for sure, but the charter that we installed was head and shoulders better than what was there before.

17

I Can’t.

They Are Not.

18

I sent my kid to private school because the local public schools suck, big time. I wish other kids had the options mine does, so I’m not 100% against charter schools. What I’m against is replacing public schools, which accept everyone, regardless of income or disability, with subsidized private schools, which often don’t. I don’t have a problem with government dollars going to religious schools, as long as non-religious or non-majority-religious schools aren’t discriminated against.

I think subsidizing charter schools out of a completely separate fund (and keep giving public schools the same amount as always) would go a long way towards solving the problem of charter schools replacing public schools rather than supplementing them. But that defeats the main draw charter schools have on Republicans, which is that they help accelerate the decline of public schools so that they can be abolished entirely.

19

One of the best schools in our area is a charter school. Its the Math and Sciences Academy in Woodbury, Minnesota. Because it specifically has a registration of students whose parents wanted a STEM centered school with high all around academic standards, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the kids graduate with pretty good test scores well prepared for four year college.

Several of the worst schools are charter schools. These are usually inner city schools, where parents have cared enough to pull their kids from crappy public schools without checking to make sure the charter school is any better - it just isn’t the public school and its somewhere commutable for kids dependent on public transportation (charter schools usually don’t have buses - so the students are dependent on having a parent who drives - or the crappy bus system).

Charter schools aren’t inherently good or bad. But they do need oversight if they are going to take public tax dollars. And that may be the worst thing about charter schools - the oversight creates additional government overhead, and that costs money. And that cost comes from the education budget. The more schools you have, the more sponsoring organizations, the more experimental models you are running, the more variation in the system - the more it costs to make sure that the students can get a good education out of it.

I want my educational tax dollars to go to smaller class sizes, adequate materials, proper challenging instructions for all ability levels (classes for special needs and G&T) - not people from the state with clipboards.

20

Done right, it can be good ting. Done poorly, it can be a disaster.

Don right I can provide more and better choices to students.

For example application to art school frequently requires a portfolio. Most mainstream public schools are not geared towards helping you create a portfolio. An art charter school would.

OTOH, some charter schools are just scams