You have been batting zero in representing how charter schools and other public institutions work. Rather than address such factual deficiencies, you simply pivot to unrelated points. For someone who claimed to bow out of the conversation yesterday, you seem to be hanging in there.
How can we miss you if you don’t leave already?
That is definitely needed to fix things. I hope that we can get back to a place where governments, from local all the way up to the Federal level give education the priority it deserves - much, much higher than it currently sits. Then maybe the charter school system in the states where it has been well implemented, can be a model for the original intent - as a R&D system for education.
However, as many have pointed out, Michigan’s charter schools are a racist, profit-mongering disaster. They are that way by design. The Michigan charter school program needs to be nuked from orbit, the sooner the better, so that the public schools can recover that funding. Michigan public schools used to be some of the best in the country and were a model for others. They can be that way again with the right leadership and funding. But that recovery is incompatible with the way charter schools are structured in the state.
A timely and helpful explainer from EdWeek: What are charter schools?
Note the emphasis that accountability and autonomy guidelines for charter schools varies by state, which is part of the reason Michigan’s are so notoriously bad. I feel like many contributors to this discussion have fallen into a false dichotomy that either charter schools are all good or all bad.
We’re very proud of it. We were just named a Star Level Honor Roll School which requires a combination of high performance, high poverty rate, and narrowed achievement gaps.
The founders started as an open classroom and used progressive teaching methods such as expeditionary learning, non-violent communication, and project-based learning. In no way were the traditional schools moving towards these techniques and they failed many students who were unable to succeed with lecture based learning. By moving to a charter they were able to be free to use these alternative learning methods all while still being held to the same standards for academics and diversity as any other school in the district.
So, I do understand that we may be unique but it’s frightening when I hear rhetoric that labels all as bad. Our model has been highly successful for a lot of kids. This is certainly not what is happening in Michigan. I’m all for accountability and shutting down broken schools. Like @DukeTrout said, they should be nuked from orbit. I fully agree.
I don’t recall John Oliver telling me that charters were evil.
I do recall watching, with great interest, a segment on Last Week Tonight which reported (as memory serves) that
I also remember the segment addressing the question of profitability separately from academic performance.
I also remember the segment noting that the degree of public oversight varied widely from state to state and even district to district
And I remember several really heinous examples where shady administrators of charter schools seemed definitely to be milking their tax-sourced revenues for maximum personal profit and not really giving a damn about whether the kids got an education.
But I don’t remember John Oliver telling me that all charter schools are evil.
Whoa wait wat? I mean, there’s a certain amount of overhead to any enterprise, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t myriad ways of taking a harder look.
I’ve never been able to find anything casually googling but I’d love to see a school budget from a school in 1970 and compare it to now. My suspicion has always been that administrative costs will have ballooned out of proportion to any reasonable need, squeezing out teachers. When I went to school we had like one school nurse for a whole district and basically just one principle per school, and jr. and high school had vice as well. There was one counselor in the high school. When I hear about all the support staff in schools now I think no wonder teachers aren’t getting what they need. Just give all the money to the teachers and stop pretending all this support staff is essential. Parents raise your kids, teachers teach them, it shouldn’t be like the d-day invasion logistically.
Are you factoring in school size? I went to a big school back then and it had 8 counselors because of their case load. The local school is bigger than mine was and it has…8 counselors. Their case load has gone up and their pay hasn’t, adjusted for CoL.
Also, I think @Lexicat is primarily referring to the physical school. You can hypothetically pare back administrators to a minimum of one per function if a big school gets its population reduced by competition from charters, but you can’t back off the support and maintenance costs of running the physical school. Charters raid the budget but don’t help maintain the school.
Not fixed over time, fixed for a given school year. Losing three students to a charter school, a public school still has to pay the same for principal, admin, counselors, etc.
In summary:
What factual deficiencies have I failed to address? I seem to be one of few here referencing my claim with peer-reviewed studies.
What unrelated points? I came here to address Cory’s factually inaccurate description of charter schools having been “invented in the wake of Brown versus the Board of Education” for racist motives. No one has been able to back that absurd claim up.
Here’s a couple of documents that suggest the “invention” of charter schools is quite different:
@waetherman, I don’t represent any charter schools. My son attends a traditional public school and I work for a non-profit organization that works with a majority of traditional public school districts.
Correction: You are one of several people (including @Mangochin) who are citing peer-reviewed studies. Sometimes you have to follow through an article to get to the original sources.
Mod Note: This isn’t Quora or Wikipedia. Folks are entitled to their opinions without requiring citations. Readers can make their own judgements on the merits of said opinions based on the evidence presented.
Additionally, please keep within our community guidelines. That includes refraining from assuming bad faith just because another member disagrees with you or discounts your sources. (You are welcome to flag such posts for review, noting the reason, if you believe such activity to really be trolling, however).
Thank you,
You keep repeatedly referring them as “public schools”. They are not.
You completely misunderstand what Magnet Schools are. They are not actually related to charter schools
You made categorical statements about them being publicly accountable. They are not
You claimed I never addressed your factual deficiencies. I did, several hours ago
here’s a good piece about the mentality at which you rage here.
tl;dr we don’t say things like
“that patient is doing poorly, we shouldn’t reward them with more blood and oxygen”
so we shouldn’t say things like
“students at that school are doing poorly, we shouldn’t reward them with more books.”
Indeed.
That article (especially the parable at the start, about Pat and Chris) reminds me of this
Please do not paint opposition to charter schools as stark absolutism. Very few, if any, of us believe all instances of <thing> are universally bad.
There are myriad examples of things that, although they may be used beneficially by some, are so dangerous, or ripe for abuse, that we ban them categorically as a society. For instance, there are modifications to my car that I could make and use safely, maybe even to the benefit of others, but allowing such modifications would on the balance be dangerous to society, so they are banned. A more extreme example - personal possession of nuclear weapons. Maybe I live in a town that is under siege and can be trusted to only use my personal nukes as deterrents to keep my town safe, but allowing such private ownership on the whole would be very very bad.
So, yes, you can come up with examples of charter schools that are a great benefit in their particular case, and that is entirely irrelevant because allowing them is incredibly destructive to society as a whole. We are better than this and can come up with a cure that helps many and harms none, rather than a cure that helps many and harms many many more.
Excellent. I agree. I suggest you re-read this very thread.
Exactly why I insisted throughout the whole thread that the bad schools should be cast out. I would like more oversight knowing that the examples being cited will be shut down or, hopefully, never receive their charter.
What I do want to say is that it’s rare that I’m in (a nuanced) opposition to the majority of the fine people in this forum and I appreciate the opportunity to share my own experiences.
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