I worked for 2 years as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Atlanta Public Schools. I'll preface this by saying I don't know if I believe charter schools are bad or good, but here are some arguments against them:
- Charter schools take money away from neighborhood public schools. Most schools are funded per-capita, so fewer students means less money. But many costs are fixed/discrete (e.g. school nurse costs N thousand dollars).
- Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
- Corporatization is evil. Charter schools often run more like a business than a socialized institution. Some even pay kids for good grades. Often, the success of a charter school depends on marketing, and successful marketing depends on performing well on metrics. Charter schools are then incentivized to "teach to the test" and potentially force out students who don't perform well. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
That's a pretty good summary of the common anti-charter arguments. A few counter-arguments to the above:
- Charter schools expand choice for low-income families. If your public school sucks and your family is doing well, you can always move elsewhere or go to private school. If you're from a poor family, charter schools are your only escape valve
- Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates.
- The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit. The people running and funding a charter school are just as motivated by good intentions, as those in public schools. They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go.
- Metrics can be gamed, but a complete lack of metrics can also be exploited by underperforming/incompetent/disengaged organizations. Tracking a reasonably good metric is better than tracking no metric at all - something seen in how most successful organizations operate.
>The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit.
According to this article [1], schools can technically be registered as a non-profit, but contract out day to day operations to a for-profit management company owned by the same people who run the non-profit.
This setup allows the school to take in tax free donations, but it means that from a profit motive standpoint it's identical to a for-profit school.
I have no idea how common this is, but it does mean that it's not quite as simple as saying that the vast majority are non-profit.
"Charter schools expand choice for low-income families."
Only if charter schools are not permitted to pick and choose who attends.
"Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates."
This kinda boils down to "fuck you, I've got mine." It's why no one likes libertarians.
"The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit."
Citation needed. And a citation that they're actually non-profit, and not a non-profit in the same way the NFL is a non-profit.
"They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go."
Yeah, but many times those "experiments" have to do with just breaking unions.
In the area where I live, there is a lot of anticipation for a Charter school to open because the county school board is so terrible. There are 6 regional seats for a single county wide school district and 3 of the seats vote against ANY improvements or expense increases. In a tie vote, nothing happens. It's been an issue for years at this point.
There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.
>There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.
What's the impediment to voting out those people? Do they represent areas that are mostly retirement communities or something?
> Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
Thats an interesting way of saying that charter schools get better results.
Given the set of high-ability students, it does seem that charter schools have better results.
There's an attitude that everybody should do poorly together, and that's better than anybody succeeding. Like a bucket of crabs, each clawing at the others trying to get out and pulling them back in that keeps the poor, doing poorly. And well-meaning ivory-tower types fuel the culture with idealistic 'fairness' arguments.
Charter schools like elite colleges gain 90% of their reputation from rejecting average or below students. There is variation among school quality adjusting for incoming students, however that exists for both normal and charter schools with many charter schools preforming worse than expected and many public schools preforming far above expectations.
However, if you want to support the value of some institution or approach it's really easy to ignore this fact and create biased research.
Citation? Its not about reputation (irrelevant) but accomplishment. And in the OP case, we're talking about one school helping one demographic. I wish this new school all the best luck in helping these kids.
Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools.https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vo...
And are charter schools about reading and math? Cherry picking results is easy to show whatever you like.
Charter schools are about - whatever each is constituted to be about. Like you can't go to a hardware store and grab a random tool and rate it on how well it drills holes. You shouldn't rate charter schools on your favorite metric. Some are about upper-class folk raising their kids with better music and art appreciation. Others are about escaping backward school boards. Sometimes they are in areas so backward, that the charter school still underperforms the national average. But if its an improvement for that area, its an improvement.
The "sacrifices" involved in any decision here are actual children too.
For example for me specialization couldn't come too early. Specializing even at age 12 would have been fine. Everything else could have fallen by the wayside, I only was interested in and good at exactly one thing and only at University did I finally meet anybody who actually challenged me, only there did I find specialisations within the specialisation that were all attractive. In some ways the last 3-4 years of school were just waiting.
For plenty of other kids they got all the way to an undergraduate degree in some general subject area they didn't care about, still with no clear idea what they were about, no real direction, forcing them to specialize earlier would have hurt them severely by cutting off options.
Without fairly intensive Chemistry (and preferably some Biology) by age sixteen, you are not going to become a good medical doctor. Without putting many hours a week into mathematics (not just enough to grasp a vaguely analytical subject like engineering, serious fundamental mathematics) by age eighteen you are never going to become a serious mathematician. And sucks to be you if, aged twenty-five, you at last find out you are a natural with a basketball, or at soccer, or dozens of other sports which require peak physical performance that's unattainable in middle age.
All our options here suck, somewhere a kid will be betrayed by whatever happens, if they're able to specialise, some of them will pick wrong and regret it. No fault to them, just bad luck. If they can't specialise the mandatory general achievement will prevent some of the most talented in specific fields from ever achieving what was possible.
I have no recommendation here, just commiserations.
There are plenty of short term advantages to specialization. But, diminishing returns generally apply and the standard public school curriculum is a relatively low bar. So, IMO we should generally stick with them, but after that the sky's the limit.
That said, you have a good point that some fields really do require a lot of early work. I just think they should be added as supplement not simply replacing the foundations of a good education.
Yes, due to an unfair advantage. As per the text you quoted:
> charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
so if I'm an engaged and interested parent, and I want my child to succeed, looks like charter schools are the correct answer about where to send my kids.
But the question of "where should I send _my_ kids" should be considered separately from "how should education in this country as a whole be structured."
You have to distinguish between the macro and micro. Another example is college. If my nephew asked me whether he should go to college, I'd say, definitely do that, if you can afford it. But on a macro level, college in the US has kind of become scam and we have to do something about it.
Not necessarily. Charter schools do much better if you measure just output, but are frequently quite average once you control for their advantageous population.
It depends how much you weigh “Does the charter school actually teach my child better than a public school”(statistically, no, and they might even teach worse!) and also “do I care about exposing my child to people they’re different from”(ie. Avoiding them being stuck in a bubble) and also “am I unable to find another environment for intellectual pursuits”(clubs, extracurriculars, etc. when I was young there were definitely after-school schooling available for smart kids, and at school you can stay late for science teachers to teach you more science).
An individual parent’s incentives do tend to point in this direction, if their metric for success as a parent doesn’t include being exposed to children whose family’s aren’t as successful.
But when taken to an extreme, this leads to exclusive areas and excluded people.
The real question is whether they get results that are as much better as they should be, since they are selecting students up front. I suspect that picking your inputs at a very young age is more about marketing and capturing money than it is about true ability to perform.
Either that, or it is simply a follow on of the fact that parents with money, free time, and high levels of education tend to have students that do well in school. The school may make no difference at all if the kids learn a lot at home.
Kids going to School A from School B means that School A doesn't need to pay anything for that student. Plus public charter schools typically run less overhead and are more efficient per student.[0]
Lol, school nurse. Those disappeared in the 80s. Now it is normal for a single first aid attendant to cover multiple schools. Nurses cost way too much.
- Charter schools take money away from neighborhood public schools. Most schools are funded per-capita, so fewer students means less money. But many costs are fixed/discrete (e.g. school nurse costs N thousand dollars).
- Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
- Corporatization is evil. Charter schools often run more like a business than a socialized institution. Some even pay kids for good grades. Often, the success of a charter school depends on marketing, and successful marketing depends on performing well on metrics. Charter schools are then incentivized to "teach to the test" and potentially force out students who don't perform well. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."