[QUOTE](CNN) More students are attending class at charter schools across the U.S. than ever before, and the number is expected to continue growing in the coming years.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently released a report saying that more than 2 million children are enrolled in public charter schools this year. The nonprofit resource for charter schools said that more than 500 charter schools opened their doors across the country in the 2011-12 school year.
In speech after speech, President Obama has said the charter schools play an important role in his education policy. His administration hopes to double the number of charters that were existence when he took office.
“We’ll encourage states to take a better approach when it comes to charter schools and other innovative public schools,” Obama said in a recent speech on education reform.
Coney Island Prep opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. But it took founder Jacob Mnookin two years to get to that point. He first had to get through the application process.
“When I submitted it, it was about 1,800 pages,” the graduate of Princeton University’s public policy school said.
Mnookin said a tremendous amount of information is required for the application. “Everything from daily schedules and annual calendars to five-year budget projections and personnel policies, curriculum, assessments, etc. So it’s a very detailed and lengthy document.”
He also had to put together a board of trustees that would oversee the school, find a location for the school and hire a staff. Most charter schools go through a similar process, but the details can differ greatly from state to state and city to city.
While Coney Island Prep is housed in a traditional school building, the similarities between the middle school and other public schools end at the door.
“We have a commitment to excellence that families sign, scholars sign and staff sign. And it just lays forth kind of the basic expectations that we have,” said Mnookin.
Students at Coney Island Prep wear uniforms and follow a strict code of conduct. Their school day and school year are both much longer than those of a traditional public school. Teachers are also required to devote more time to students than their counterparts at traditional public schools.
Some critics claim that charter schools attract better students and more involved parents, giving the institutions a better chance of succeeding. Mnookin says that’s not the case.
“Last year, we had over 350 applications for the 90 seats available. It’s a random lottery. We know nothing about the students when they apply.”
Students enter most charter schools across the country through a lottery system. Charters often wind up with a higher percentage of students with special needs, and they have to accept everyone.
Charter schools have much more leeway to try out new things than staff members at traditional public schools do. With that freedom often comes more accountability, not only to city and state officials but to the school’s board of directors.
In a short period of time, students’ reading and math scores have risen at Coney Island Prep. The New York City Department of Education placed Coney Island Prep's performance in the top 1% of middle schools in the city. After being in existence for just two years, it was rated the third best charter school in New York based on reading and math test scores. In every area, the city’s Education Department said, students at Coney Island Prep outperformed a majority of their peers at both charter and traditional public schools.
It is success stories like Coney Island Prep’s that the Obama administration hopes to mimic with the creation of more charter schools across the country.
“What the charters are is the mechanism for trying things outside of the larger system free of some of the red tape that is in these systems for good reasons,” said Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. “When we’re most successful, we learn from those examples, and then we’re able to learn how they can be adapted and taken up to scale inside our large school systems.”
There have been some very successful charter schools across the country. But Shelton says they haven’t done a good job of replicating those successes in traditional public schools.
“That’s one of the things that we’re trying to focus on in this administration … not only creating these innovative places that are breakthrough examples of performance, but also how do you create the kind of relationships and partnerships that allow for these effective practices to transfer into the core of the traditional education system?”
Charter schools aren’t responsible to municipal education boards. Generally, they operate independently. But in New Orleans, they’ve essentially become the local school system. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina almost all of the city’s schools were placed in a recovery district. Today, almost 90% of them are charter schools.
“It’s chaos. It’s utter chaos,” said Karran Harper Royal, a parent of several public school students in New Orleans and a founding member of the advocacy group Parents Across America. “Operating here in New Orleans, there about 51 different nonprofit entities that are charter organizations.”
Harper Royal said that as a result, there is no such thing as just going to your neighborhood school anymore.
“You would have to go and apply to every school you think you might want your child to attend, because when they decided that they would have this many charter schools, they stripped away your right to a neighborhood school. So it’s not a choice.”
Many education experts believe the extreme direction that charter schools have been taken in New Orleans should not be mimicked in other locations. Paul Peterson, director of Harvard University’s program on education policy and governance, says students seem to benefit most when cities have a mix of charter and traditional public schools.
[B]“When some new school sets up that’s a competitor with the local public school, that public school tries to meet the competition. So the more competition there is, the better they become,” Peterson said.[/B]
Some opponents of charter schools contend that they take resources away from regular schools. Peterson says that’s not the case. “Generally speaking, charter schools operate with less money per pupil. They only have about 80% of what the traditional public school has.”
Charter schools tend to attract younger teachers with little to no experience in a classroom. Peterson says that has actually worked to the schools’ benefit. “They are very upset about the traditional public school. They feel it is bureaucratized and regulated and over-controlled, and they feel very hamstrung.”
Many of Peterson’s students go on to work in charter schools. “They really are the drivers of the charter school supply side: young entrepreneurs coming out there with their ideas, and they get very excited about the possibility.”
Coney Island Prep founder Mnookin was one of those entrepreneurs. He firmly believes that successes at charter schools can be replicated on a large scale. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for administrators and staff to try some new things, and hopefully, if something works, we can roll that out to the greater public school system at large.”
Raw data across the country show that a large percentage of charter schools are among the success stories. But a significant number of charters are also among low-performing schools.
The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University studied charter school performance in 16 states. Researchers concluded that 17% of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools. But 37% of charter schools performed at rates below their public school counterparts. The remaining 46% showed no significant difference.
The Rand Corp., a nonprofit research foundation, looked at charter schools in eight states and found that, on average, charter schools as a whole aren't producing results that differ substantially from traditional public school systems. [B]However, the study showed that students at charter high schools are between 7% and 15% more likely to graduate than their traditional public school counterparts.[/B]
Everyone interviewed for this story said education officials have to do a better job of closing down charter schools that aren’t making the grade and implement on a wider scale the practices that are producing positive results.[/QUOTE]
Source: [url]http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/15/charter-schools-wave-of-the-future/?hpt=hp_bn2[/url]
A.k.a. the wave of corporate control of education.
That can't be too good...
My school is attempting to become a charter school, it sounds pretty awesome and I hope it goes through, people against it are pretty illinformed imo
Charter school's are not corporately owned, and they can't make nearly as much of a profit (if any) as a private school. They are mostly special-interest schools that people found when they believe that schools are not focusing enough on specific subjects.
Hey whatever works. Education needs to be improved if you want to turn the state of the country around.
Won't charter schools almost always have somewhat better scores overall as they somewhat pick and choose whom they want to enroll and likewise only slightly better of parents will even consider something like sending their child to a school like this?
[QUOTE=ewitwins;33750971]Charter school's are not corporately owned, and they can't make nearly as much of a profit (if any) as a private school. They are mostly special-interest schools that people found when they believe that schools are not focusing enough on specific subjects.[/QUOTE]
The US desperately needs science and math professionals, I sense these will be the specific subjects
[editline]16th December 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=wraithcat;33751024]Won't charter schools almost always have somewhat better scores overall as they somewhat pick and choose whom they want to enroll and likewise only slightly better of parents will even consider something like sending their child to a school like this?[/QUOTE]
The article says that improvement compared to public schools range from none or slightly above to 40% improvement in grades. As for picking and choosing, I think that would be to the individual schools, not them over all.
My school is an independent charter, and from what I gather it's worked out great. None of our teachers have been laid off or anything like that, and we're the second or third best academically in California. The administration even has enough money to buy two new buildings to expand the school.
I went to a charter school in south east washington DC with all the ghetto kids, it was a nice building.
Just get rid of school districts and let kids apply for the schools they want to go to, make it so if you are in the "zone" your application gets reviewed first, outside the zone your gets reviewed 2nd. This would help so much.
[editline]16th December 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Madman_Andre;33750826]A.k.a. the wave of corporate control of education.
That can't be too good...[/QUOTE]
Because it isn't like the job market has anything to do with what courses you take in college... :rolleyes:
I used to go to a charter school called "The Cooperative". The principal had an affair with one of the teachers and they both eloped to Japan shortly after.
[QUOTE=Madman_Andre;33750826]A.k.a. the wave of corporate control of education.
That can't be too good...[/QUOTE]
While profiteering in education could easily become a problem, I wouldn't worry too much about charter schools. They tend to be an alternative to the horrendous public schools you find in the majority of the US, because the students there are far more motivated.
If you have ever heard of the KIPP program you will see what I mean. There are thousands of students on the Chicago public school system who want to become engineers, chemists, doctors, etc, but even though they have the brains they are screwed because they are educated equally with the likes of gang members and drug dealers.
It is our responsibility as human beings to provide those kids a way to learn.
Public schools suck.
I'm in a public online school and while it is incredibly easy, honestly it's not the greatest.
Heck, my math teacher hasn't graded any of my assignments since the third week in the semester and I'm taking my final today.
Ok so I went to a public charter school. Let me give you guys the low-down on how my high school worked.
This charter school is called the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. The whole idea is that it focuses on math, engineering, and science courses. That's not to say it doesn't have the other subjects, but it allows students to take more of the former category. Now, this school is still a public school. I didn't have to pay a dime for my education. However as a result of it being a public school, my school wasn't allowed to have an admission process. So what happened was, they drew names out of a hat until they hit the class size cap of 250 kids. After that, they'd draw names for a waiting list (in the case that kids decided to go to their original high school instead).
So the question is, did it work? Yes. By the time I graduated high school, I had taken 15 AP classes, and Calculus II and Calculus III joint enrolled at Georgia Tech (one of the premiere public engineering schools in the US). I'm at the University of Georgia right now coming in with almost 2 full college years worth of credit. I'm going to finish my first major [I]completely[/I] by the end of my first semester sophomore year. I had a damn fine education. It's the kind of education that kids should have access to.
While I did well, not everyone did. We were the inaugural class, and we started with 249 students. By the end of the 4 years we graduated with 111. We had a retention rate of less than 50%. So it's certainly not for everyone, and that's where my school is going to fail. It's already falling apart. Since it's a public school, it can't do an admission process. It has to be through a random lottery. So each subsequent year more and more "stupid" kids come in. Our inaugural class was the "smartest" because only really intelligent kids applied. We took a risk going to a new school. It paid off, and so now more and more people just want their kids to go to this school. As noble as that sounds, they force their kids to go to a school that offers AP classes as the lowest level of class. Some kids just can't handle it and fail right out. So the school starts retaining less and less kids, and due to budget cuts and serious opposition from the public they have increased the class size to 400. Now, they have more and more kids getting in that can't handle it, and my school is being forced to dumb down the curriculum. They are losing exactly what they started-off as. Instead, all my school is becoming is a smaller high school.
I sat in with the current freshman class last week. These kids belong back in middle school. I'm not trying to be hateful and condescending because I consider myself intelligent, but these kids seriously do not belong at a school like this. It's unfortunate to have to say this, but the school I proudly graduated from is only going to have one or two more years of great classes (the current seniors and current juniors aren't bad, and obviously those that haven't dropped out by now can handle the course).
That's my experience with public charter schools.
When I was in high school there were no charter schools around but our school did have a program called STEM, which stood for Science, Engineering, Technology and Math. Basically what they did was have an entire section of classes set for the program that were advanced. The problem was that STEM classes were not AP, so the kids who took all AP classes laughed because while they got college credit STEM students got harder classes but no college credit.
[QUOTE=TGKhaotik;33751693]Public schools suck.[/QUOTE]
Not always. A lot do, but there's a good amount that are very decent.
It's in the rich neighborhoods.
And no, that's not a joke. The town neighboring mine is known as "where the rich people live" and their school system this year managed get BOTH the middle and high school students EACH an iPad to "help" with their school work. They pour an immense amount of money into the school system and the students turn out pretty decent (though the girls there are notorious for being slutty [not that that's bad ;) ])
Public schools wouldn't be so bad if they had proper fucking priorities. I mean, at my school, they spent millions of dollars on 2 new additions to the school, but apparently we don't have enough money to fucking run the ac most of the time, nor do we have enough calculators/books to go around.
They also got 10,000 dollars when some people came to our school and looked around, and then promptly spent 8,500 on it for a shitty play of the Wizard of Oz.
The charter schools around here seem to be far more innovative in getting kids involved and interested in there education from what I hear from the students that attend them.
I went to a Public School with a near perfect graduation rate. In fact, standards for students were so high that the nearby community college was usually the punchline of jokes about poor or stupid people.
My school district suffers from terrible, terrible funds mismanagement and the worst administration seen this side of the federal government, but we still manage to exceed state standards significantly. Then again, we're a rural area, so most people have an incentive to do well or good enough in school to leave a place almost uniformly hated by the students.
This is because the Republicans are forcing it by making public schools poor and switching funding to charters. Like my damn governor Rick Scott.
My mother's a public school special education teacher, and in my area, they are opening up more and more charter schools. They selectively pick the best and brightest from the public schools and port them over. Those stuck in regular public schools get an increasingly worse and worse education, and overall scores go down. Teachers in charter schools are generally inexperienced and at best disposable; there is no solid job security for a class of workers that is already desperately overworked and underpaid. Moving teachers into the private sector means that they're subjected to more corporate shill and less respect from their bosses, and loose all benefits of being a state employee.
Charter schools have come under fire for their education procedures as well. In my state, there's a story of a dyslexic boy that committed suicide because the school refused to pay the extra money to teach him appropriately, and when he washed out of the tests and was not being acknowledged for his natural problems due to the [i]potential financial burden it would cost the school[/i], he decided to took his own life.
This leads into special education. Many charter schools refuse to pick up special education programs due to the associated costs. Helping mentally handicapped people to integrate into society and become productive does not help test scores and costs more per head. This is why charter schools are wrong, they put a tangible monetary value on the education of our youth.
That's what I have to say on that.
Where i live, charter schools are just "holding areas" of the young failures of our society.
AKA only delinquents go to charter schools in my town. The district has a very high test score average on standardized tests, and low tolerance for crime/trouble, and would love to get ride of anyone they can who don't meet certain needs.
I am completely fine with the idea of the failures and fuck offs going to the charter school down the road.
I mean it's hard to expect much of these kids to achieve anything, while we let them water down the school when all they do is cause problems?
The fact charter schools are a "wave of the future" scares me, because where i am they're only shit and only for the shit.
Literally, they're like prisons where the parents send their troubled kid because the public school system suggested it too them or expelled them.
[QUOTE=Mr. Bleak;33751732]I'm in a public online school and while it is incredibly easy, honestly it's not the greatest.
Heck, my math teacher hasn't graded any of my assignments since the third week in the semester and I'm taking my final today.[/QUOTE]
Private schools are just as easy/hard as public ones. It's pretty much the same, except they have the right to kick you out at any time and can teach you wonders of Christ. I went to one for a while, shit's the same.
I'm not American and there's not really an analogous institution in Australia (our private schools get more government funding than the public schools and go around building apartment blocks) so could someone please tell me:
what on earth is a charter school?
My friend had a very religious family and after he failed to meet their "expectations" in elementary school they sent him to this shitty charter school called like cyber village or something that was a christian school that sold itself as a place that developed computer skills in kids. When he came back to high school had had no friends and had trouble fitting in.
Fuck charter schools
Just furthering the gap between rich and poor. Pretty soon going to public school will doom you to poverty just as surely as being born on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks.
My school is a charter school.
We still have to take general education classes, but we also have to pass a senior exhibition and write a reflection for every single class we took in order to graduate.
There's also 1500 more students than the school is equipped to handle, simply because it gets money for each student and it's broke. This causes a huge line of traffic every single morning, since there's one entrance and one exit. People can spend over 20 minutes in that clusterfuck, and the school will blame the student for being late.
There's also a lot of annoying rules and dress codes, which are mostly in place so the school can say how great their students are. The school treats everyone like children, yet always expects us to act like adults, which, by senior year, gets really fucking annoying.
I go to a charter, and it's awesome. The school is small enough that they can afford REALLY NICE classrooms, and the whole school is technology based. Every single room has a smart board, and all students are issued a laptop at the beginning of the year. Because of the way the school is built, it is very open- bullying is literally nonexistent. Charter schools are the way of the future.
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