On the one hand, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of letting individual publically-funded schools experiment with how to educate kids, and this more likely to happen under a charter school model where the schools are actually run by a diverse set of organizations.
On the other hand, the only side pointing to any evidence is the anti- side, which points to a Stanford study that most charter schools fail to do better than equivalent public schools, and a plurality actually do worse. And I also worry about charter schools functioning as a mechanism to further segregate schools on socio-economic lines (though the fact that the law would force schools to use a lottery system to pick their students mitigates that somewhat.)
This is the only thing that’s keeping me from mailing my ballot back. Anyone want to try to make a convincing argument either way?
This is just a stepping stone to profitizing our public schools and break the backs of public teachers’ unions. Don’t be fooled by the alleged bi-partisan crap.
Charter schools siphon students and funding away from public schools and are often very poorly regulated and supervised. We had one shut down here in Ohio not that long ago when it turned out that they were operating out of a horse stable. Literally.
The main effect that charter schools have is in de-funding the public schools. Each child that goes to a charter school represents a certain amount of money that now will not go to the public school - the public school still has to pay the same number of teachers, the same amount of support staff, buy nearly the same number of books, pay for the electricity to be on the same number of hours, etc., but has less money to do it with. And then are expected to maintain or raise standards due to the new “market pressure” from the competing school that is sucking away its resources.
Charter Schools are just like regular schools. There are bad ones and there are good ones. They hire bad teachers and they hire good teachers. The A lot of it boils down to what kinds of requirements and oversight your state (and the school districts therein) are going to impose on those new charter schools.
On further reading I think I’d vote against this because the bill allows for conversion charters (which would allow a charter school to take over an existing public school) and I’m not on board with that.
In Massachusetts, charter school teachers don’t have to be licensed. That may not be the case where you live, but if it is I feel like that’s all one really needs to know to decide.
Is that part really true? It seems to me that everything you just listed is a variable cost. Reduce the number of students in the system, and you pay fewer teachers, keep less staff, keep fewer buildings, etc. It should scale down linearly with the reduction in student count due to the charters.
Textbooks are really the only thing that scale that way, and even then I think you have to buy them in large sets, so you can’t just say, “OK, we have 25 kids instead of 30 in 3rd grade this year, so reduce our order by 5.” (I’m not 100% sure about that, however.)
But for everything else, if you have, say, 25 kids instead of 30, you still have to pay the same number of teachers. Each kid doesn’t have an individual teacher, so you can’t just send five teachers home if five kids leave the system. At some point, yes, you will have lost enough kids that maybe you can do some staff reductions, but up to that point, you’re just paying the same number of staff with less money. And you would really have to lose a LOT of kids before you can start closing entire buildings.
I think we’re thinking about this at very different scales. You’re not going to just lose 5 kids from the public system, you’re going to lose entire classrooms of them. Because there’s a whole new school that wasn’t there before, with a whole school full of kids.
Charter schools are one of those things that seems like a really intuitive idea, but actually lead to some pretty counterintuitive consequences.
We are all familiar with the Beltway Bandits, and these organizations have cozy ties with government officials and make enormous fortunes executing government contracts without any of the pesky over site or ethical considerations that the actual government has to deal with.
Well there is a while pile of them waiting in the wings, eager to jump on the opportunity to rake in all that money they can make being education contractors. They see our elementary, middle and high schools as one big wasted business opportunity, and they are using whatever leverage they have to make it happen. Remember, their goal is not to make money from parents, which requires some degree of performance. They would rather just make the money by contributing money to politicians who can be convinced to dismantle a bit of the government to be outsourced for private profit. a la post-Soviety Russia. This actually insulates them from quality related market forces. Rather, like for-profit universities (which often provide a low-quality education financed by federal loan dollars), they find that money on advertising and lobbying earns a better profit than money spent educating. .
Cutting out teaching is one of the best ways to save money. It might surprise you to learn that rather than sending high school kids to summer school or to repeat a course they have failed, as they did in my day, many public high schools contract to online “credit recovery” services, who provide a set of online lessons and electronic tests that many schools accept as a full year’s worth of work. Millions of dollars have been spent on developing fully-electronic essay grading software, and developing standardized tests that test for the essay structures that electronic grading is able to teach. These models are often untested, unregulated, run by uncertified instructors, and have no way to be dismantled if they are not improving student performance.
The WA initiative mandates that Charter Schools be run by not-for-profit, not religiously affiliated organizations. Part of the counter-argument is that the not-for-profit could get the charter, but outsource the running of the school to a for-profit, which could have the effects you outline. But it seems that restricting the charters to non-profits at least mitigates the risk here. Thoughts?
Being not for profit doesn’t prevent exorbitant management fees or high salaries paid to administrators who are running the school.
Studies have shown that over time charter schools do no better and often worse after the first year or two of operation. Sorry, I am on my iPad so I will leave the research for cites for others.
Time and again, if you want to improve education spend more money on public education. There is a direct correlation between reducing class size and improving academic performance. Improved facilities in rural and inner cities combined with parental engagement at all levels will do more than charter schools ever will.
