They go back to the failing public schools, the ones riddled by fraud and staffed by people too incompetent to work in the private schools.
Regards,
Shodan
If the ROTC program receives $50,000 a year, the school district must account for $50,000 worth of ROTC expenses for the year.
However, the charter school funding formula ignores that. The ROTC funding for the year is divided evenly among all students in the district, and when a student goes to a charter school, their portion of the funding travels with them. The school district must make up the missing funds from its general fund.
One of the ways that some charter schools save money is by hiring teachers from Teach for America. There is nothing inherently wrong with this per sec, but they are often young and inexperienced teachers who sometimes use a charter school as a stepping stone to better options. This creates an incredible amount of turnover, which is harmful to developing a teaching culture which supports students. Teaching like most professions require years of experience to get good at. In fact, I feel experience is particularly important when working with at-risk students. However, in many charter schools, the students most at-risk are being provided the most inexperienced teachers; teachers who leave after two years.
(Note this can occur in public schools as well, as new teachers are sometimes placed in ‘undesirable’ schools…however, there is usually a well-established teaching culture which provides support to the inexperienced teachers. Moreover, it’s not designed as a cost-cutting measure.)
As far as bad charter schools closing, I think we need to think about how long the process from opening to closing can occur. One of biggest issues with some charter schools is transparency, how are parents to know how a charter school is doing without some form of standardized measurement? Further how often do charter schools release their financials or are they even required to? The answer is, of course, it depends on what type of charter they are and in what state they are located.
For example, if I don’t have to release my financials until year 3 of operation, I can loot resources, provide a poor education to students and then close my doors. So yes, a ‘bad’ school has closed, but I have personally enriched myself. Further, it is not uncommon for a failed charter school, to simply re-open under another name.
Finally, people often state that they feel a school should operate the same way any business would. If you perform well you profit, if you don’t, you fail. However, consider this: most business’ have the ability to pick and choose their supplies. So if I am making pies and the peach guy brings me bad peaches, I can reject them or go to another vendor. I can relocate to a more favorable location for tax purposes or new clients.
A public school doesn’t have that option, their ‘supplies’ are children, their location is a neighborhood and relocation is rare. A public school (usually) doesn’t have the ability to turn away a child with ADHD, a disability or from a broken home.The school must accommodate them. The school doesn’t have the ability to pick up and move to a different neighborhood. The school has to work with what they have and sometimes sadly, they simply can’t rise above it. Yes, there are cases of incompetence, apathy, and waste, but overall public schools do a decent job on average.
The biggest and unfair advantage private and some charter schools have is the ability to skim the cream, that is to take the best off the top and leave the rest. They can decide that Timmy’s ADHD is too much of a distraction and not enroll him, they can (depending on the state) not take disabled students and they can locate their schools on the right side of the track, reducing students from troubled backgrounds. All of these options may allow a charter school to create a superior learning environment and make a profit, because they don’t have to account for many of the negative aspects which a public school MUST accept.
It also allows charter schools to take the cream, as you said, and then take credit for their success.
This means that if you take a bunch of kids that are in the top 10% academically, and send them to a charter school, the charter school could pass them at barely above average, and call that a success, even though they have failed these kids in every way imaginable.
Of course, while they are doing that, the lower 90% can stay in the public schools that are less funded because so much of the money is diverted to these selective schools.
But that educated adult worker in the future is not the person who’s paying to educate the child in the present. As k9bfriender and I both already pointed out, the future benefits to the student him/herself are also external in this transaction.
As Dangerosa and I both already pointed out, there are major fundamental reasons why universal basic education is not an area where it’s likely that “a for profit school can do it better”.
There is strong resistance to paying the high costs of good education, largely because of the negative-externality issue discussed above. That puts a for-profit school’s profit motive in conflict with its ethical obligation to provide good education. To maximize profits for themselves they have an incentive to cut corners wherever they can on what they provide to the students.
I got roped into going to a for-profit college about 10 years back. Was getting dicked around a bit at the community college I was intending to enroll at (they get a bit funny about “non-traditional” students), when I found myself practically stumbling into being enrolled at the for-profit. Seemed like a good idea, even though it was more money (a lot more money), but that was just becuase they spent more on their sales pitches than on their teachers.
Terrible mistake, but they had such shiny pamphlets. All I have to show for it is student debt I am still paying off. The teachers were crap, the facility was crap, and partway through the program, it lost its accreditation, so it no longer was a direction for job prospects or even transfer credits.
This messed up my plans, but as an adult, it was an inconvenience, not a destroyer of my life. If I had received that sort of instruction in k-12 school, rather than going to a bit above average public school, it would have destroyed my life, as I would go into adulthood with pretty much no ability to understand or analyze the world around me.
At least in public schools, there is accountability. These charter and private schools, we won’t know the outcomes of their effects until the kids are adults and their educations are complete.
How long does it take to close a bad public school?
Regards,
Shodan
One of selling points of charter/private schools is that they are subject to the free-market and that if they are bad they will lose money and close. I was suggesting that due to a lack of accountability of how resources financial and educational are being allocated, the owners can still generate income by putting their student’s needs behind generating a profit and enrich themselves…even if ultimately the school closes.
Your question isn’t within the context of the section you quoted.
ISTM that the real reason people support or oppose public/private education is because some gut-level, innate revulsion against the connotations of “public” or “private.” Some people just innately rebel against private schools, private libraries, private transportation, privatization - and some innately rebel against public schools, public this, public that.
It’s just a gut-level “public good, private bad” or “public bad, private good” instinct.
The board usually has the power to replace a principal at any time. The entire teaching staff can be and sometimes is replaced over the course of a year or two. There are very very few places where the authorities in charge of the public school system aren’t accountable at the ballot box, and can be changed out on whatever cycle elections are held in that jurisdiction.
(These remedies, of course, require parents and other residents who are motivated to do something about the schools. If nobody cares, nothing will happen ever.)
My kids elementary school almost closed due to NCLB. The school does great - for the kids whose socio-economic class means they’ll do great. But they had a bunch of ESL, low income, special needs and minority kids who struggled - and they barely got the gap narrowed enough to not close (and the law changed because…well, there isn’t anywhere else to put the kids).
They turned over most of the teachers - about 30% a year. They turned over the principal every year. Those things didn’t really help - the issue isn’t the teachers or the principal, its the makeup of the student body. What it did do is provide an inconsistent environment for the kids - one where the rules changed with every administration and the first month of school was spent figuring out how the school was going to function this year - by the teachers, administration, parents and students. Its really fun to waste a month of our limited education calendar every year because the new principal has to mark his territory.
The other issue was that with that much turnover in staff, kids would drop through the cracks. My son’s entire class missed out of gifted and talented testing - they didn’t figure out they’d missed that grade for TWO YEARS when a new high potential teacher started at the school and realized she didn’t spend any time with kids from that grade. Kids who were identified late in the year as needing services that wouldn’t start until next year - good luck - without the teacher that taught them last year or the administration around, they’d just get lost.
And they can’t close the school - there is a population of residents it needs to serve. There isn’t a glut of school buildings. Heck, in our district, we have 38 kids in an elementary school classroom - close a school and those kids will need to be crammed into classrooms at other schools.
There aren’t a heck of a lot of teachers waiting to work at low income troubled schools. It isn’t like the unemployment rate for qualified teachers is high. One of the reasons private and - in some states - charter schools can open is that they don’t require teachers to be licensed. So close the school - and do what with the kids? Move them to an already overcrowded school? Hire new teachers less qualified than the ones you just fired?
THIS. One of the daydreams about charter schools is that you “can fire bad teachers”. I gotta tell you, it’s not paperwork and contracts that stop us from firing bad teachers–it’s that we can’t find anyone better to replace them. It’s not impossible to document someone out, but why rock the boat?
I’m in a great but urban school. Nationally ranked STEM magnet. We still have to hire brand-new math teachers because we can’t even find experienced ones to interview. And this is literally a dream job. STEM teachers are the worst, but it’s true across the board.
That’s obviously not true. Public schools also benefit their employees directly, and there are all sorts of political effects that benefit various other stakeholders.
That’s not to say that public schools are bad. Or that we shouldn’t be cautious about profit-driven schools enriching their owners and providing a crappy education. But there are plenty of examples of a profit-driven business providing better service or products than non-profit ones. There’s no particular reason that
This has to be mostly because the math teacher jobs don’t pay enough, right?
I mean, I’m good at math. I tutored math all through high school and college (and writing, and software and test prep). That certainly doesn’t make me a math teacher, but I have some aptitude for the impartation of knowledge. And I enjoy it. Teaching is intellectually and emotionally rewarding. But I’ve basically accepted that I’m not going to be a math teacher because it doesn’t pay enough.
There are lots of high-paying jobs available to people who understand math well enough to teach it. Seems like it’s mostly the truly dedicated who do so.
Its more than just that it doesn’t pay enough.
Teaching is emotionally rewarding, but its also emotionally draining. Introverts in particular find it a draining profession - and a lot of STEM teachers are introverts. In addition to long days with students, where you often seem to spend as much time on discipline as teaching, you have to deal with parents (“Why did Sarah only get a B+?”) and the administration (all teachers must maintain a web page and be active on social media - but you can’t put anything on social media that would reflect badly - i.e. all your friends might post pictures of themselves out at a bachelorette party, but if it shows up on your feed with you identified, there will be trouble.)
The days are long - you have an hour of prep, but that isn’t enough to grade math papers for five hours of courses, 30 kids per course. Even if you have the kids self grade homework, you still have 150 quizzes and tests to grade on a regular basis - and if you have the kids self grade their homework, there is a big chance that you’ll miss a kid who is falling behind.
And you don’t grade math for just a right answer - that’s fairly useless - you want to understand how they got the answer they got. Is the wrong answer a result of a stupid mistake like a sign switch, or is it because they don’t have a clue how to solve the problem?
So, yeah, private industry pays better, particularly when you have a math aptitude. But even if it paid the same, teaching would be a more demanding job - and most people want the most reward for the least effort. Teaching is a calling, not a job.
Several of my kids STEM teachers teach because its their calling. But a few teach because their calling is coaching Swimming, or Gymnastics, or Track - they don’t tend to be awesome teachers.
:dubious: Really? Who opposes the existence of private schools, private libraries, or private transportation? Not even the most ardent defender of public goods and services, AFAIK, says that private goods and services shouldn’t exist at all. People who think along those lines are, literally, Communists, who tend to be quite rare in serious political discourse in the US.
What non-Communist advocates of public goods and services are against is not the existence of private alternatives, but rather destroying public goods and services for the benefit of their private-sector competition.
In other words, privatization is the problem, not the mere existence of private enterprise, which we generally have no quarrel with.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
and some innately rebel against public schools, public this, public that.
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Now these are the people who tend to be radical absolutists about the public/private dichotomy. It’s not just that they want a flourishing private sector in these areas: it’s that they want the public sector not to exist, period.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
It’s just a gut-level “public good, private bad” or “public bad, private good” instinct.
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Wrong. It’s more like a “public good, private also good as long as it isn’t cannibalizing public” instinct versus a “public bad, private good” instinct.
Sure, but the point is that profit-driven businesses are naturally ill-adapted to situations with lots of those positive externalities that we’ve been talking about.
Profit-driven businesses are great at providing, say, TVs, or pizzas, or haircuts, because in those lines of business the benefits of what they’re selling are mostly captured directly by the person(s) they’re selling them to. So those purchasers are willing to pay enough to cover the costs plus profit for the sellers.
Education doesn’t work like that. Nobody looks in the fridge or in the mirror and thinks “gee, what I really want is a well-educated workforce and citizenry ten years down the line!” Those benefits are mostly externalized to people who aren’t directly paying for them.
So, from the point of view of the people who are directly paying for them, it appears that they’re too expensive, and there’s strong resistance to paying enough to cover their costs. That is not a situation conducive to businesses being able to make good profits in an ethical manner.
Mm-hmmm. And why is it that math teacher jobs generally don’t pay enough to attract large numbers of good teachers who have “lots of high-paying jobs” available in other fields?
Because the people who are actually paying for universal basic education would consider it too expensive. Because of those pesky positive externalities that lead taxpayers to undervalue the worth of good universal basic education.
[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
But I’ve basically accepted that I’m not going to be a math teacher because it doesn’t pay enough.
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:dubious: So how are you figuring that a for-profit business would be able to afford an ample supply of good math teachers plus a healthy profit margin, when non-profit ones can’t afford an ample supply of good math teachers even without any profit margin? By standing within a pentacle and uttering the magic words “private enterprise” seven times?
I’ve known afew folks who thought that private schools should be banned. Although I don’t think that’s a common sentiment. And threads about healthcare often have folks stating that physicians shouldn’t be allowed to do private business with willing customers if they do any public-plan work.
They don’t pay the math teachers more because in most districts I’ve lived they’re not allowed to unless they pay everyone more. There’s one pay scale, usually based on education and experience. Not on more granular supply and demand, and certainly not on efficacy.
Exactly. I swear, people are fixated on the bad teachers they had in school and have this fantasy of getting all of them fired. But there really aren’t good replacements for what we have now–not as the job is currently constructed and not at the wages we are willing to pay.
There are a lot of places where you can offer stipends for hard to fill areas–bilingual, STEM, SpEd. But the problem isn’t limited to STEM. We struggle to fill all positions with people we are really happy with. I’ve helped fill lots of teaching positions, and I’ve never, for any of them, had to chose between two candidates I’d be happy with. Best case scenario is one: usual is “I guess good enough”.
Charter/voucher/choice people sometimes blame certification for this problem–they argue that unions are artificially keeping supply of teachers low. But alt-cert program abound, making certification pretty simple to get, and the problem persists. Plus, it’s a known fact that much of the teacher shortage is the product of people–certified people–leaving the profession after a few years.
Now, maybe there’s an argument that you can replace good teachers with perfect curriculum. I’m dubious, but that’s the kind of idea that charter schools are uniquely well situated to test. I’m in favor of letting people experiment. But that requires transparency about the method and the results. And that’s not what actual charter schools seem to be about.
On a related note, a website just crunched a bunch of numbers, including salary, cost-of-living, etc., for 380 metropolitan areas in the US, and ranked them from best to worst to be a teacher.
Wanna guess which area was ranked #380? MINE! WOOHOO!