How Good Are Charter Schools For the Public School System?

theodp writes "'You go to these charters,' gushed Bill Gates in 2010, 'and you sit and talk to these kids about how engaged they are with adults and how much they read and what they think about and how they do projects together.' Four years later, Gates is tapping his Foundation to bring charter schools to Washington State, doling out grants that included $4.25 million for HP CEO Meg Whitman's Summit Public Schools. So what's not to like? Plenty, according to Salon's The Truth About Charter Schools, in which Jeff Bryant delves into the dark side of the charter movement, including allegations of abuse, corruption, lousy instruction, and worse results. Also troubling Bryant is that the children of the charter world's biggest cheerleaders seem never to attend these schools ('A family like mine should not use up the inner-city capacity of these great schools,' was Bill Gates' excuse). Bryant also cites Rethinking Schools' Stan Karp, who argues that Charter Schools Are Undermining the Future of Public Education, functioning more like deregulated 'enterprise zones' than models of reform, providing subsidized spaces for a few at the expense of the many. 'Our country has already had more than enough experience with separate and unequal school systems,' Karp writes. 'The counterfeit claim that charter privatization is part of a new 'civil rights movement', addressing the deep and historic inequality that surrounds our schools, is belied by the real impact of rapid charter growth in cities across the country. At the level of state and federal education policy, charters are providing a reform cover for eroding the public school system and an investment opportunity for those who see education as a business rather than a fundamental institution of democratic civic life. It's time to put the brakes on charter expansion and refocus public policy on providing excellent public schools for all.'"

Comments

Re:And children of public school cheerleaders

[cayenne8]

Also never seem to attend public schools. Usually these cheerleaders are wealthy, and wealthy families tend to use private schools.

And exactly what is wrong with people that can afford to help their children get a better education doing so? Should not every parent try to provide the best life skills and education for their offspring that they are able to provide?

Are you advocating that people who have these means...sacrifice the lives of their children, send them for a poor education merely to prove a social "point"?

Can't we at least learn something?

[meustrus]

The more I learn about charter schools, the more it seems that they obviously are not supposed to be a permanent solution. The institution itself is seems explicitly designed to produce a scattershot of ideas and methods, some of which might fail spectacularly, and some of which might succeed spectacularly. While it is troubling that we as a society are learning which ideas work at the expense of our children, that doesn't mean we should just throw away what we've learned. I'm not talking about whether or not to keep charter schools around. I'm talking about taking some of the more successful methods and implementing them in our public schools. It concerns me that every time I hear about how awful charter schools are supposed to be, the speaker acts as though the best solution would be to nuke them and pretend the whole experiment never happened.

Re: Level the playing field

[Lord Kano]

I've seen it from close up.

Ghetto black people and white trash are surprisingly similar. We've seen a migration from the inner cities to low income suburbia of people with that mindset.

The biggest difference is that the white trash celebrate when someone makes it out of the cycle of poverty.

Comedians make jokes about it and I've seen it with my own eyes. Guys get more love and admiration when they get out of prison than they do for finishing college.

People throw parties when their friends and relatives get out of prison and don't care when their friends and relatives further their educations.

The day I graduated with my M.S., I went out to celebrate with a beer. I wore my cap and robe to the bar. I got a bunch of strange looks, like seeing someone who graduated from college was unimaginable. One man, apparently a thug, came up to me and asked what degree I had just gotten. I told him that I just got a Master of Science in Information Security and Assurance. He grabbed me, embraced me, told me he was proud and that we needed more educated men in our community.

It's still an uphill battle but it's not yet a lost cause.

LK

Re:Test scores

[ranton]

You would figure most people on Slashdot would have a good enough understanding of math and statistics to know that just because testing scores may not be perfect, there are plenty of practices that can make them very useful.

We can do pre-tests and post-tests so teachers aren't penalized for having students that were already poor performers. A teacher could be rated as outstanding even if his students are testing under the standards as long as their improvement was above expectations. The government has access to enough information to adjust test scores based on socio-economic factors. If 75% of a teacher's students are on food stamps, and the data shows students on food stamps generally underperform, then the performance metrics can take that into account.

The statistics world already has wonderful tools like standard deviations to determine if results are either expected deviations or are actually meaningful. And while the simple ones taught in STAT 101 aren't good enough for most uses, there are far better techniques that governments could pay very qualified statistics Phds to perform on teacher metrics.

And even though these metrics will still not be perfect, does that stop the private world from trying to rate employee performance? Sometimes a person is put on a doomed project and it is too hard to determine if they did a great job while everyone around them failed. But when people actually care about performance they understand that sometimes life can be unfair and that should not be an excuse for a shoddy product.

And our schools are certainly a shoddy product as they stand today.