"I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools."
Andrew Cuomo
Since his opponent looks like The Count from Sesame Street and has a hard time speaking without putting his foot in his mouth, it seems the prediction polls may for once be right. Our soon-to-be-guv appears to luv the Charter School movement.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages from the national scene:
Advantage: Charters increase options for families and educators. Charter Schools create new options for families and educators who are dissatisfied with the status quo. In the past, families could choose public school, private school, or homeschooling. Now, in some locales, there is also the option of a charter school. Charters provide many of the same perceived advantages as private schools, such as increased flexibility in hiring; smaller class sizes; exemption form many of the curricular orthodoxies that are de rigueur in public schools in a given City or State, while accomplishing these tasks mostly at taxpayer expense (Charter schools cannot use taxpayer money to fund their buildings and grounds). With the advent of Charter Schools, families who wish for something different from the local home zone school who are fortunate enough to have a Charter as an option, can elect to enroll their child without out-of-pocket tuition expenses.
Advantage: Charters are a lab to try out new methods of compensation and personnel evaluation. While many Charter Schools have been criticized for lacking the teachers’ contracts, salaries, and union protections endemic to public school systems, some Charters have found ways to implement handsome salary schedules and to avoid rule-based systems of performance appraisal, rank and tenure decisions, and the like, creating truly innovative personnel programs (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2009/0825/p25s01-ussc.html).
Disadvantage: Charters create questions about efficacy when comparisons are made between non-equivalent groups. Some of the “best” reasons to initiate a request for a charter is to create an “academy of excellence,” or to serve “at-risk” or disadvantaged students. Perhaps because Charters are started with so many varied purposes in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that researchers are finding mixed results as to whether students at Charter Schools actually do outperform their peers at standard public schools (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0629/Study-On-average-charter-schools-do-no-better-than-public-schools). The lead author of the report described findings both on the whole (broad-based result: no discernible difference between achievement from charter schools vs. public school) and in specific: charter schools in large urban areas and those serving a more disadvantaged student population had positive impacts on students' achievement in math (http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/newsroom/releases/2010/Charterschool_6_10.asp).
Disadvantage: Charters instigate a fear of a “brain drain” in the public schools. Charter school and voucher programs are similar in that both types of programs allocate some public funding to non-public schools. In both types of programs, some students and some teachers who might otherwise participate in public school settings will instead participate in private school settings. When the dust settles from lawsuits brought by parties interested in how the State spends Taxpayer money, a parity question remains: do Charter Schools (and, for that matter, do private, parochial, and other non-public schools) pose a “brain-drain” threat to adult and child talent within the public schools? The answer is probably yes. But in a free and fair democratic society, is it really better to eliminate the threat as posed by the Charters, Vouchers, and other institutions, our would it perhaps be better to allow the situation to be educative to the public schools? Let’s use the “flight” as data as to what is wrong in the system, and fix the problems there, rather than stomp on the alternatives. We can call it free market capitalist education.
We're all for experimentation, but the charter movement still causes us some concern. Mainly, it comes from the utter hostility espoused by so many charter-school proponents toward teachers' unions--not all of them, we're sure, but some of them--as if unions were the main problem with education today.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that concerns us is, we suppose, a variation on the "brain drain" concern. Enlighten us if we're wrong, but can charter schools "pick and choose" their students, or must they--like other public schools--take whoever shows up at their doorstep? Otherwise, we imagine that the charters can simply refuse to take the most "difficult" students (ESL, disabled, etc.).
That being said, we'd welcome the opportunity to experiment ourselves. An interesting environment. Just our initial thoughts.
Did you catch Alan Meltzer and Robert Reich speaking on NPR's "On Point" the other night? Oh, dear, talk about anti-teachers-union! After hearing them review some worldwide socioeconomic data and comparing it to "A Nation at Risk," the UFT became the bogeyman of my sleepless pre-Halloween-night! It was the insomnia of a fever-dream along the lines of, "My god what have we done with our monopoly on institutionalized education! All is lost! All is lost!"
ReplyDeleteIt all makes Charters as an idea seem beautifully Utopian, and possibly the last positive idea left on the table.
As for rules about applications and participant selection: They vary by state, and even within state, by Charter agreement. So it's equally possible to have a charter to found an academy of excellence that will avoid any learner with a vulnerability and the next charter to found a resource center to apply highly-specialized interventions just to learners with, say, nonverbal learning disorders. That's part of what makes evaluating charter effectiveness such an outcomes-assessment nightmare.
In a couple more decades, we'll look back and laugh.