The Failure of "Reform" - Charter Schools

by: Jersey Jazzman

Mon Oct 31, 2011 at 11:58:00 AM EDT

So yet another study was released this month about charter schools. What does it conclude?

The overall tenor of our results is that charter schools are in some cases outperforming traditional public schools in terms of students' reading and math achievement, and in other cases performing similarly or worse.

No one should be surprised at this: there is a large body of evidence that charter schools are simply not the panacea for education that corporate reformers would have us believe. They don't teach the same population of students, and the successful ones don't cost any less (in many cases, they cost more) than public schools. There may be a place for charters as laboratories for educational theories, but the fraction of successful charters will never be replicable on a large scale.

Jersey Jazzman :: The Failure of "Reform" - Charter Schools

And yet, here in New Jersey, the corporate reformers want to force outstanding school districts to fund new charter schools - many with no track records of success - over the objections of their duly elected school boards and their communities.

The district will lose 90% of the per-student funding for each student who enrolls in a charter; however, they will still have to educate all of the children who stay in the district, including the special needs children who are the most expensive and cannot be educated by charters.

No school district should have to give its funds away to a charter school.

Schools are local civic institutions. They should be managed by locally elected representatives who are directly accountable to the voters; not by unelected and unaccountable corporations that can simply pull up stakes and move on if a charter school fails.

The market-based cheerleaders for charters refuse to acknowledge these costs. They act as if schools are businesses, competing for clients.

They are not, and the mixed (at best) record of charters shows a market approach is not appropriate for education. Markets have winners and losers: no child, however, should ever lose out on a good education.

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The Failure of "Reform" - Charter Schools | 2 comments

Charter Schools Should Have Focus (0.00 / 0)

If a community thinks that having a particular academic focus would be good for the town, then charter schools make sense. Architecture, physics, theater, languages, whatever are all good academic focuses that a community might want to fund.

But there is no reason to have charter schools because you want to improve the basic three Rs in your community. That's just stupid, because you already have schools tasked with that. If the only way to improve the scores is to separate kids out then you have a problem whether you create a charter school or not.

by: huntsu @ Mon Oct 31, 2011 at 16:12:47 PM UTC

local control doesn't work either (0.00 / 0)

We have way too many school districts in the state with locally elected school boards, consisting mostly of people with no background in pedagogy whatsoever. We have way too much costly administrative redundancy in the form of business managers, superintendents, and support staffs.

We need to replace our 600+ school districts with 21 (possibly less if we combine some of the more sparsely populated counties) county school districts and we need to change the charter school funding formula so that it is funded equally between contributions and grants and state income tax dollars. By consolidating local school districts into county school districts, charter schools can also serve a broader population and receive funding from a larger pool of public dollars.

I also wouldn't mind seeing the federal government get into the business of approving charters and directly funding charter schools. This could be a way of employing both recently laid off teachers as well as unemployed professionals with advanced degrees in a field of study that could be applied to public school classrooms.

This could also be a way of getting Republican votes for a jobs package as they may not be willing to vote for money to go to states to be spent on schools, but they might be open to voting for money to go directly to charter schools. Teachers unions could be appeased if a bill was structured in such a way that for every federal dollar spent on charter schools another federal dollar would go to the states to be given to traditional public schools.

by: Bertin Lefkovic @ Tue Nov 01, 2011 at 00:11:34 AM UTC

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