That may be true for Success Academy but there are some truly awful charters out there. The problem is that what it means to be a charter school varies so much from state to state and even from district to district.
Teaching is hard, getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment.
Charterschools are good because they allow for differentiation in education. We don't want anyone to be educated exactly the same way. Thats not a good thing.
That charterschools allow for people to take advantage of them is another discussion and can be solved in many different ways.
Instead of just critiquing the fact that they can be misused perhaps it would be more constructive to discuss how to make sure snake oil salesmen doesn't take advantage of the system.
Just like we do with other businesses in general.
When I was in public schools, there was a lot of differentiation in education, and students definitely weren't taught all the same, including different levels (eg, AP vs. non AP history), different tracks (eg, extra courses for those interested in practical arts, or interested in programming, for a career), and special support for students with more specific needs, including in my case speech therapy.
Nor do I get the sense that my school system was special in that regard.
"getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment"
When was it ever easy to run properly?
Success Academy was started because the public school system failed to educate kids in Harlem. The philosophy have since then been copied at other schools with success my son is in Williamsburg.
This isn't only about the curriculum but about the very approach to teaching the kids AND the parents involvement in their kids education.
The difference between today and back then I feel is best illustrated by this http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg
Success Academy fights this with tooth and nail but in return require quite a lot from their teachers.
It's not a perfect system but I prefer it compared to the public school he first went to exactly because its focus on getting parents back on the side of the teacher and their goal and method for getting the kids to love learning.
galby: "there are some truly awful charters out there"
exelius: "To be fair, not all charter schools are for-profit, and there are good charter schools and bad ones. But the entire system stinks; it cuts funding to struggling districts, leaving them in a perpetual budget crisis."
Neither say charter schools are categorically bad. Exelius's point is that the funding system to support charter schools is what stinks.
Your illustration has no historical basis. You are viewing history through rose-colored glasses.
I'll demonstrate with a classic, the 1955 book "Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do about It". This placed the blame on teachers and the school pedagogy for poor childhood literacy rates, not the students. Parents reacted to that by pushing for policy changes. That book reverberated for decades. At https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qtZQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ORME... you can see:
> Since then, other arguments [besides teachers 'simply using the wrong techniques'] have cropped up. Those who sympathize with teachers blame overly-defensive administrations and boards of education. Still others say parents are responsible for having abdicated social duties to the schools, transforming them from educational institutions into huge day care centers.
Sound like a familiar discussion?
Here's an example of a letter to the editor from 1976, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=VdYeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=nVYE... , where a teacher places the blame on school boards for not letting the teachers apply real discipline to the "hoodlums" who get to pass because of "social promotions." This teacher doesn't think the students are getting any discipline from their parents over poor grades.
This Ann Landers humor piece from 1984 reflects the idea that the students are doing poorly because the parents don't care; both parent and child veg in front of the TV: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zbUfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=htcE...
My comment here is surely no strong proof, only suggestive that you may need to research the history which brought us movies like "Blackboard Jungle".
Galby and I agree, again I would urge you to actually read the exchange rather than cherry picking what you think they basically said.
With regards to the past. No one is glorifying anything. But if you want to launch an attack on charter schools and claiming that budgets and teacher salaries are the reason why public schools are doing bad and that charter schools are stealing things then you aren't being true to the discussion. The reason why charter schools work when they work is that they are putting a lot of the effort onto the parents. That bad schools existed before is no secret but it's now almost the rule more than the exception in the public school system.
All I can see is that a Charter School like SA changed things for the better in very socially challenged areas while still functioning by the budgetary constraints as a normal public school and that by it's lottery actually is a much more fair way than ex. the zoned principles in NY.
1) As far as I know, only one school principal has broken the $500k+ barrier, and that is a charter school principal from a failed school in Florida. I do not believe this specific detail was that convincing.
On the topic of graft, this is hard to pin down but it's not insignificant. See http://neatoday.org/2015/06/04/can-charter-schools-be-rescue... for one commentary:
> Some charter advocates may dismiss reports of malfeasance as the shenanigans of a few bad actors, but the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) exposed the massive scale of the sector’s shoddy practices in a series of startling reports. In April, CPD revealed at least $200 million in 15 states had been squandered or misused through various activities – everything from the use of taxpayer funds to support other businesses to outright embezzlement. That total is probably higher, but, according to the report, it’s difficult to pinpont “because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”
If the books are private, it's hard to really tell if there's graft, no? At least with public schools it's easier to see where the money goes.
Charter school supporters should push for more transparency, as this veil of corporate secrecy makes a great target.
2) "Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped."
There's no question that this is true for many districts. For example, in Pennsylvania, the local public school system must reimburse charter schools based on their own per capita costs per student. Students on the autism spectrum are more expensive to teach, as are students who are emotionally disturbed. At Chester Uplands those students make up 8.4% and 13.6% of the student population, respectively. At one local charter school, those are 2.1% and 2.8% respectively, while at two other charter schools, those are 0%.
As a result, the school district sends more money to the local charter schools than it gets from the state, and may soon be bankrupt.
See http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/08/pa-charter-vampir... for a summary.
In Ohio, according to this report http://innovationohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Unfair-... , "Because of the $774 million deducted from traditional public schools in FY 2012 to fund charters, children in traditional public schools received, on average, $235 (or 6.5%) less state aid than the state itself said they needed."
I therefore think this is valid critique by exelius about how charters are funded, independent of the quality of the education provided.
3) "Educational standards are different"
Isn't that also true? https://www.the74million.org/article/whitmire-5-ways-to-stop... comments, in defense of good charter schools, that opponents to charter schools have some valid arguments. One is:
> Identify the low bar, and enforce it.
> This is another lesson from California, which leads the nation in actively trying to boost charter quality. There is no agreement on what makes a great charter; depending on the student population being served, that will vary greatly. But there should be an agreement on the low end of the bar. So set that bar, and enforce it.
> That low bar has to be precise about what constitutes academic achievement.
If charters have a lower bar than public schools, then there's inventive to teach to that lower bar, which lowers cost for a charter school, and leads to profit for the charter owner rather than savings for the taxpayer.
I believe this a valid critique, though I do not know the evidence.
3b) "Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc."
There are any number of sources which say that the charter schools cherry pick students. There are any number of those which say the opposite. You can dismiss it the claim, but all evidence is that it's part of a valid critique of the charter system, and intimately tied with the funding question.
You commented: "and that charter schools are stealing things"
By stealing, do you mean violating the law? I liked this text from https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/in-chicago-98-mill... :
> When the story broke last week that Juan Rangel’s United Neighborhood Organization funneled $98 million dollars in state grants to friends and relatives of higher ups in the organization, Patrick O’Connor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s aldermanic floor leader said, “Nothing being reported means they’ve done anything illegal or improper. It might sound crude, but it’s kind of like picking your nose in public. It looks bad. It’s not classy. But it’s not illegal.”
Or do you mean the metaphorical sense, like "stealing a child's future"?
It's really that simple.
Charter schools are publicly funded and privately run. If the public doesen't feel like the schools are living up to their promise they can simply stop the funding.
That some schools have been taking advantage of that situation says absolutely nothing about the charter school as an educational system or whether it's the fact that it's a charter school that makes it take money from the public schools. The primary thing for me is that you can fire bad teachers.
If anything it's the oversight with charter schools thats the problem not the funding. That can be solved.
You are cherrypicking your examples to try and defend what is fundamentally a wrong premise for why public school system is failing.
Thats your right to do so but it doesn't make the claims right and nothing you have provided here shows that.
> they can simply stop the funding.
How? The school board doesn't have the authority. In many cases the state has removed local democratic control over the process. The only solution is to replace a significant portion of the state legislature, and that is no simple task.
> fundamentally a wrong premise for why public school system is failing
My premise is there's too much state and federal dabbling in what was a working system, and not enough spent on long-term social support systems. As I haven't mentioned it, I'm much more certain that you are projecting views onto me.
After, what, 15 years of testing, charter, education reforms, there's precious little success to come out of a lot of new spending. We saw that most recently in the NEAP scores, at http://edexcellence.net/articles/heartbreak-on-naep .
Out-of-school experiences, like poverty, have a more significant impact than teacher quality. The reform movement calls that an "excuse" for bad teaching. So where is the evidence that this new world of teaching is any more successful ... sorry, less of a failure ... than what we had before?
And before you say that charters have nothing to do with testing, in principle you're right. Except for all those schools with low test scores that were labeled "failing" and were shut down or converted into a privately run charter school. That difference in standards is one of Exelius's valid criticisms.
If you can't be bothered start by watching the Documentary "The Lottery" and then come back and tell me that a schools methods can't make a difference.
If you are still not convinced I can certainly live with that.
You consistently respond by pointing to a single charter school. No one has ever claimed that there aren't some excellent charter schools. But why should I believe that Success Academy Charter Schools is characteristic of charter schools as a whole?
Of course a school's method's can make a difference on the students. There's a entire genre of movies on the topic. I mentioned "Blackboard Jungle". Another example is the turn-around at George Washington Preparatory High School, which was portrayed in the movie 'Hard Lessons'. There's "Dead Poets Society" based in part on the teaching impact of Samuel Pickering, and "Lean on Me" is based on principal Joe Clark and Eastside High School. As a New Yorker, you should well know of NYC's history with alternative schools, which includes public alternative high schools like 'The High School of Performing Arts', which was the basis for the movie 'Fame'.
But the choice of pedagogy has very little to do with the the complaints about 1) extra opportunity for graft in charter schools, 2) a general funding preference for charter schools over public schools, and 3) charter schools which are held to lower minimum standards than public schools.
1,198 charter schools in California only 6 of them are LTDs.
And yes I talk about a single charter school exactly because I don't want claim what I have no data to back up with, which is what the OP did.
> Whitmire: 5 Ways to Stop Bad Charters from Derailing Education Reform
> 2. Charter advocates need to name names.
> That’s a sensitive one. Already, charters are under attack from teachers unions and many superintendents. Why pile on by naming the low-performers among you? That probably explains why so few state charter organizers single out charters for closure. But there’s an important exception: California, home to the most robust charter system in the nation.
> “About five years ago we realized we had a quality problem,” said Elizabeth Robitaille, who oversees performance issues at the California Charter Schools Association. By controlling for socioeconomic factors, the group could see that its schools tended to fall on opposite ends of a scatter graph — a disproportionate number of both high- and low-performers.
The critique is that most districts don't hold charters to the same standards as public schools.
You point out the only state where that isn't true.
And it was put into place to address exactly that critique.
So you can't defend charter schools as a whole from that critique by pointing to the one state which took that critique to heart.
For example, this 1995 article describes how a school for the blind was closing because of the mainstreaming of blind students. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=_DRQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=pVUD... . Here's a recent example of a teacher using the term 'mainstreaming', http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/10/pa-shutting-down-... , and doing so only in the context of special ed.
Either your school district was using its own definition, or you misunderstood the context.
"Well-rounded education" was a bigger buzzword in the 1940s and 1950s. See https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=well-rounded+e... . It's part of the American education system that students are required to take course in a diverse set of subjects. It doesn't require that everyone take the same classes.
That clarification aside, and assuming I'm completely wrong, how does a charter system, which presumably has the same general graduation requirements, change things?
Anything more about your circumstances requires understanding more about your district. Eg, was everyone in the same level of math, so that no one (or everyone) took calculus by the time they graduated? Were there only 25 students in the class? Did everyone take the same foreign language course?
Wow! My school has changed. There's a "Drafting / Illustrative Design Technology" track, a "Fashion Design" track, which includes "Fashion Marketing Management", an "Arts, A/V Technology & Communications" cluster, and more http://www.coralgablescavaliers.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uRE... .
You are assuming it's about the curriculum it's not. It's about the environment, the parent participation etc.
Therefore I can't see why you think I assume it's only about the curriculum.
Nor do I see how unions are relevant. Your 1960's classroom, in the cartoon that resonates so strongly with you, was almost certainly run by a union teacher, in a time when unions were much more powerful than now.
You can't decide to choose one part of history and not the other.
Do you have any evidence that that's actually true? My examples demonstrate that it was far from universally true in the 1960s.
If was was true, when did it change? There are plenty of complaints in the 1970s complaining about how the parents are at fault. In fact, I can find complaints from the 1940s about how the young people these days have things given to them on a platter and never have to face any challenges.
If it isn't claiming an actual historical propensity, why does it use "1960"?
And if you think the highly unionized school teacher of the 1960s was effective, then why do you think unions are the problem now?
Success Accademy functions by lottery so it has kids from all over new york. Public schools are zoned which means that the best schools are those where the parents have the best incomes.
So even on a "fairness" scale I believe at least Success Academy pass the test.