13 ms·

This is a good thing for the country; the education provided by these schools is often on par with sources like Kahn Academy and Coursera -- at a much higher pr

by exelius 11y ago

This is a good thing for the country; the education provided by these schools is often on par with sources like Kahn Academy and Coursera -- at a much higher price. It seemed like many for-profit colleges are simply a way for "schools" to collect federally guaranteed loans that the students then have to pay back. The student assumes all of the risk. The other side of this industry are charter schools. These are for-profit K-12 schools, often paid for by state / local governments. The problems with them are: 1) Graft is common, with charter school administrators sometimes taking home ludicrous salaries ($500k+ for schools with ~1,000 students) 2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools. 3) Educational standards are different -- in most states, faith-based charter schools are totally ok. As long as they teach some bare-minimum requirements, they can teach as much religion as they want. Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc. To be fair, not all charter schools are for-profit, and there are good charter schools and bad ones. But the entire system stinks; it cuts funding to struggling districts, leaving them in a perpetual budget crisis. It often does little to improve the education of students, while placing more of the burden on parents to go shopping for a school.

nmrm2 11y ago
3 is crucially important -- and the religion thing is really unimportant compared to the larger problem. Charter schools, in many states, occupy the absurd position of being able to claim that they out-perform local schools while selecting or quasi-selecting their student population and still not actually participating -- at all -- in the standardized testing that justified their existence in the first place.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Again this is simply wrong. Success Academy one of the best performing schools have a lottery so there is no way to get your kids into that school otherwise. Also public schools in NY are zoned so you have to live the right place to get your kid into the right school.
  - specialist 11y ago
    I'm glad that Success Academy is serving your children so well. Please understand they are not the norm. I attended the best public schools in the county. Consistently listed in the top 10 nationally. My former public high school is effectively a private school. Just a few miles away are some of the worst performing schools in my state. Elsewhere, most schools are somewhere in the middle. Similarly, some charters are above average, many are terrible, most are somewhere in between. Overall, charter schools performance is no different than public schools.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      No one is claiming their overall performance is better and I deliberately didn't talk about charter schools in general. I reacted to the characterization from exelius about how charter schools somehow was worse. All I want is for my kid to learn first of all reading, writing and math. I don't even care about whether one school outperform another but there seem to be various studies showing different things. My guess is that charter schools work a little better because of the Hawthorne Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect And studies show different things. According to this it's better in general. But to me thats less important you can probably find studies that shows other things too. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-25/stanford-university-study-says-charter-schools-improved http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-25/stanford-u...
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    The lottery still has a selection bias, just less of one than outright cherry picking the best students. That being said, I'm not sure either of these are a problem. The real problem (one of them at least) is that a school's performance is measured by the student's scores on standardized testing.
mason240 11y ago
All three of those are true with public schools systems.
- wfo 11y ago
  No. Public schools don't get to pre-select their students and then claim to ourperform other schools because they just picked the best ones. Public schools are not faith-based. Public schools do not have enormous administrative salaries
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Neither does charter schools like Success Academy. Instead it's a lottery. Public shools in NY are zoned so if you want your kid to go to that good school in Tribecca you most probably have to move there.
  - mason240 11y ago
    1) Graft is common, with charter school administrators sometimes taking home ludicrous salaries ($500k+ for schools with ~1,000 students) True for public schools. 2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools. Open enrollment causes the same issues. 3) Educational standards are different -- Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc. True for public schools.
- a-priori 11y ago
  In the United States maybe. Elsewhere, public school systems seem to be able to deliver a high quality education at a reasonable cost to the public. In Ontario, Canada, the public spent $23.6B on education in the 2013-2014 fiscal year. That's total cost, including salaries and building maintenance and supplies and everything else that goes into running an education system. That works out to $11.7k per student per year based on 2,015,411 students in the 2013-2014 school year. That's similar to what you'd pay in private school tuition, and that's with all the bureaucracy and unions and teacher's salaries (teachers here top out at around $100k salary) and all the other things people complain about as reasons public schooling is a waste of money. It's not; it's about the same cost as private schooling. But with public funding, a good education is available to everyone, and the public has more direct oversight of the curricula and of standards. As a result, Canada scores well in international school rankings, similar to the best European countries -- which are also, almost universally, funded publically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA_2012#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA_2012#Results).
ThomPete 11y ago
As someone with a kid in a charter school (Success Academy) I have to disagree with the very premise for how you discuss them. Some charter schools is a response to the problem of amongst other issues, a way too strong teachers union and it's inability to develop contemporary learning environments for children. In California teachers union have in their agreement that they can't get replaced by new technology. The high salaries is a tradeoff from the high pressure they put on the teachers and the very fact that they can get fired. My son start 7.30 in the morning and ends 4.30 in the afternoon you can guess how much the teachers work. They are 32 children in each class. Success Academy started in Harlem and was responsible for taking the kids out of their social fragile environments and starting to give them good habits and start showing that that others expected things from them and believed in them to deliver. Success Academy is one of the best performing schools in NY state. Compared to the usual public school system, charter schools when done right is an amazing alternative to the public system. Now I don't believe charter schools are the only way to do things, but I do believe that teachers unions are way to strong and until they start to change I will do what I can to keep my kids out of them. Success Academy is privately run but publicly funded and the school have to fight for every dime they get while still staying out of the control of the teachers unions influence through the DOE. So it's a much more complex discussion than the one you paint here. If anything when charterschools are done right they are a much better model for how the public school system should work IMO.
- galby 11y ago
  That may be true for Success Academy but there are some truly awful charters out there. The problem is that what it means to be a charter school varies so much from state to state and even from district to district.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    There are even more truly awful publicly funded schools out there too. Harlem have their share. That doesn't mean there aren't good public schools too. But that's not a way to discuss this IMO. Teaching is hard, getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment. Charterschools are good because they allow for differentiation in education. We don't want anyone to be educated exactly the same way. Thats not a good thing. That charterschools allow for people to take advantage of them is another discussion and can be solved in many different ways. Instead of just critiquing the fact that they can be misused perhaps it would be more constructive to discuss how to make sure snake oil salesmen doesn't take advantage of the system. Just like we do with other businesses in general.
Shivetya 11y ago
Oh please, get off this idea we don't put enough money into education. We put too much, so much so that they ended up hiring people other than teachers and the carry forward costs are too high. You want to fix education in the US, the money must follow the student. Until the school systems themselves are forced to improve by having students want to attend they won't. The recent issue with testing which they said was putting too much pressure on students and teachers is also a misdirect. The old school method before testing was required was just to pass the student. As in, Johnny got a D where in no way he knew anything but he is now in eight grade. We have no teacher shortage, we have less student per teacher than anytime before. The amounts spent per student are many times higher than in the seventies yet what about the value of that education. It isn't a money issue. With regards to for profit college educations, well the same with all new high costs course at my local state university - they are created to soak up the money because the fed loans it.
- wfo 11y ago
  Of course it's a money issue. We pay teachers garbage for working harder than anyone else, who wants to do that job? If you got the A-types who go into finance or law or medicine into teaching you'd see a very different scenario play out. Right now it's essentially all-volunteer. People call it "a labor of love" but a double-time job paid at part-time wages is what they mean. Teachers don't make money or have respect. I'd challenge you to do an excellent job in that scenario.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    It's a parent issue first of all and can be solved without more money. http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg
    - specialist 11y ago
      Parental involvement is the number one factor for student achievement. Followed by socio-economic stuff, like food, household income, zip code. Make a ranked list of factors and teacher competency isn't even in the top ten. Which makes all this school reform chatter drive me nuts.
mratzloff 11y ago
You combined two very important points in #3. For instance, how often do charter schools enroll special education students?
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Are Charter Schools Required to Provide Services to Students with Disabilities? Yes. The responsibility to make a free appropriate public education (FAPE) available to all students with disabilities applies to ALL public schools under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).9 Charter schools are public schools; therefore, they bear the same responsibility. Who is actually responsible for ensuring that special education services are available to students with disabilities in a charter school? The answer depends on how the charter school is legally identified in the state. If a charter school is considered to be an independent Local Education Agency (LEA) under its state’s law, that charter school bears the exact same legal requirements for providing special education services as any other LEA (or district). If a charter school is considered part of an existing LEA, the LEA (or district) retains most or all of the responsibility for special education in the charter school. The charter school is considered a school within that LEA and is responsible for following LEA policy. http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/charters/ http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/charters/
  - mratzloff 11y ago
    Dig deeper and you will find that while this is the law, it is not necessarily reality. Hence why I structured the question the way I did rather than focusing on the legal requirement. A new government report shows that charter schools are not enrolling as high a portion of special-education students as traditional public schools, despite federal laws mandating that publicly financed schools run by private entities take almost every disabled student seeking to enroll. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303379204577477003893836734 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023033792045774770...
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      There are many things that aren't reality when you dig deeper. Public schools are no different. Again. Trying to make charter schools the bad schools in defence of the public shools is simply absurd.
partisan 11y ago
One thing that gets lost in the comparison between charter schools and public schools is that charter schools get to cherry pick their students. The students not accepted into charter schools are sent to public schools. Public schools then have a higher concentration of underperforming students and therefore perform worse when compared to charter schools. If you are given the best students and money is thrown at you, you are being handed success. The rest of the schools are being handed failure. When all schools are charter schools then we will see many of them fail and be replaced by more charter schools and the problem will just be perpetuated in a different form. I wish it were true that charter schools were all about giving students a better education. It is unfortunately not. It is part political and part financial. The political aspect comes from showing success through change (see my first paragraph to understand how that success is gained). The financial aspect goes to the higher salaries paid to administrators. The school districts are happy to pay higher salaries now to rid themselves of unions and more importantly, pensions since charter schools are not unionized. Teachers at those schools work long hours for slightly higher pay. The approach is churn and burn. They hire younger teachers who are just passing through the system on their way to their true careers after they burn out and become disillusioned about the system. Some people will make off pretty well during this growth stage, but the long term outlook is poor.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Charter schools like Success Academy function by lottery so no cherry picking at all. And keep in mind it was started in Harlem not exactly the best base for the kids with the best resources. The reason why charter schools like Success Academy are popular is because it's strong focus and philosophy.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    Every single student in that lottery had to be entered by a parent concerned about their education. That already presents a selection bias that will deliver better testing results than the entire student population.
    - 11y ago

by exelius 11y ago

nmrm2 11y ago

3 is crucially important -- and the religion thing is really unimportant compared to the larger problem. Charter schools, in many states, occupy the absurd position of being able to claim that they out-perform local schools while selecting or quasi-selecting their student population and still not actually participating -- at all -- in the standardized testing that justified their existence in the first place.

ThomPete 11y ago
Again this is simply wrong. Success Academy one of the best performing schools have a lottery so there is no way to get your kids into that school otherwise. Also public schools in NY are zoned so you have to live the right place to get your kid into the right school.
- specialist 11y ago
  I'm glad that Success Academy is serving your children so well. Please understand they are not the norm. I attended the best public schools in the county. Consistently listed in the top 10 nationally. My former public high school is effectively a private school. Just a few miles away are some of the worst performing schools in my state. Elsewhere, most schools are somewhere in the middle. Similarly, some charters are above average, many are terrible, most are somewhere in between. Overall, charter schools performance is no different than public schools.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    No one is claiming their overall performance is better and I deliberately didn't talk about charter schools in general. I reacted to the characterization from exelius about how charter schools somehow was worse. All I want is for my kid to learn first of all reading, writing and math. I don't even care about whether one school outperform another but there seem to be various studies showing different things. My guess is that charter schools work a little better because of the Hawthorne Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect And studies show different things. According to this it's better in general. But to me thats less important you can probably find studies that shows other things too. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-25/stanford-university-study-says-charter-schools-improved http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-25/stanford-u...
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  The lottery still has a selection bias, just less of one than outright cherry picking the best students. That being said, I'm not sure either of these are a problem. The real problem (one of them at least) is that a school's performance is measured by the student's scores on standardized testing.

mason240 11y ago

All three of those are true with public schools systems.

wfo 11y ago
No. Public schools don't get to pre-select their students and then claim to ourperform other schools because they just picked the best ones. Public schools are not faith-based. Public schools do not have enormous administrative salaries
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Neither does charter schools like Success Academy. Instead it's a lottery. Public shools in NY are zoned so if you want your kid to go to that good school in Tribecca you most probably have to move there.
- mason240 11y ago
  1) Graft is common, with charter school administrators sometimes taking home ludicrous salaries ($500k+ for schools with ~1,000 students) True for public schools. 2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools. Open enrollment causes the same issues. 3) Educational standards are different -- Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc. True for public schools.
a-priori 11y ago
In the United States maybe. Elsewhere, public school systems seem to be able to deliver a high quality education at a reasonable cost to the public. In Ontario, Canada, the public spent $23.6B on education in the 2013-2014 fiscal year. That's total cost, including salaries and building maintenance and supplies and everything else that goes into running an education system. That works out to $11.7k per student per year based on 2,015,411 students in the 2013-2014 school year. That's similar to what you'd pay in private school tuition, and that's with all the bureaucracy and unions and teacher's salaries (teachers here top out at around $100k salary) and all the other things people complain about as reasons public schooling is a waste of money. It's not; it's about the same cost as private schooling. But with public funding, a good education is available to everyone, and the public has more direct oversight of the curricula and of standards. As a result, Canada scores well in international school rankings, similar to the best European countries -- which are also, almost universally, funded publically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA_2012#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA_2012#Results).

ThomPete 11y ago

As someone with a kid in a charter school (Success Academy) I have to disagree with the very premise for how you discuss them. Some charter schools is a response to the problem of amongst other issues, a way too strong teachers union and it's inability to develop contemporary learning environments for children. In California teachers union have in their agreement that they can't get replaced by new technology. The high salaries is a tradeoff from the high pressure they put on the teachers and the very fact that they can get fired. My son start 7.30 in the morning and ends 4.30 in the afternoon you can guess how much the teachers work. They are 32 children in each class. Success Academy started in Harlem and was responsible for taking the kids out of their social fragile environments and starting to give them good habits and start showing that that others expected things from them and believed in them to deliver. Success Academy is one of the best performing schools in NY state. Compared to the usual public school system, charter schools when done right is an amazing alternative to the public system. Now I don't believe charter schools are the only way to do things, but I do believe that teachers unions are way to strong and until they start to change I will do what I can to keep my kids out of them. Success Academy is privately run but publicly funded and the school have to fight for every dime they get while still staying out of the control of the teachers unions influence through the DOE. So it's a much more complex discussion than the one you paint here. If anything when charterschools are done right they are a much better model for how the public school system should work IMO.

galby 11y ago
That may be true for Success Academy but there are some truly awful charters out there. The problem is that what it means to be a charter school varies so much from state to state and even from district to district.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  There are even more truly awful publicly funded schools out there too. Harlem have their share. That doesn't mean there aren't good public schools too. But that's not a way to discuss this IMO. Teaching is hard, getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment. Charterschools are good because they allow for differentiation in education. We don't want anyone to be educated exactly the same way. Thats not a good thing. That charterschools allow for people to take advantage of them is another discussion and can be solved in many different ways. Instead of just critiquing the fact that they can be misused perhaps it would be more constructive to discuss how to make sure snake oil salesmen doesn't take advantage of the system. Just like we do with other businesses in general.

Shivetya 11y ago

Oh please, get off this idea we don't put enough money into education. We put too much, so much so that they ended up hiring people other than teachers and the carry forward costs are too high. You want to fix education in the US, the money must follow the student. Until the school systems themselves are forced to improve by having students want to attend they won't. The recent issue with testing which they said was putting too much pressure on students and teachers is also a misdirect. The old school method before testing was required was just to pass the student. As in, Johnny got a D where in no way he knew anything but he is now in eight grade. We have no teacher shortage, we have less student per teacher than anytime before. The amounts spent per student are many times higher than in the seventies yet what about the value of that education. It isn't a money issue. With regards to for profit college educations, well the same with all new high costs course at my local state university - they are created to soak up the money because the fed loans it.

wfo 11y ago
Of course it's a money issue. We pay teachers garbage for working harder than anyone else, who wants to do that job? If you got the A-types who go into finance or law or medicine into teaching you'd see a very different scenario play out. Right now it's essentially all-volunteer. People call it "a labor of love" but a double-time job paid at part-time wages is what they mean. Teachers don't make money or have respect. I'd challenge you to do an excellent job in that scenario.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  It's a parent issue first of all and can be solved without more money. http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg
  - specialist 11y ago
    Parental involvement is the number one factor for student achievement. Followed by socio-economic stuff, like food, household income, zip code. Make a ranked list of factors and teacher competency isn't even in the top ten. Which makes all this school reform chatter drive me nuts.

mratzloff 11y ago

You combined two very important points in #3. For instance, how often do charter schools enroll special education students?

ThomPete 11y ago
Are Charter Schools Required to Provide Services to Students with Disabilities? Yes. The responsibility to make a free appropriate public education (FAPE) available to all students with disabilities applies to ALL public schools under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).9 Charter schools are public schools; therefore, they bear the same responsibility. Who is actually responsible for ensuring that special education services are available to students with disabilities in a charter school? The answer depends on how the charter school is legally identified in the state. If a charter school is considered to be an independent Local Education Agency (LEA) under its state’s law, that charter school bears the exact same legal requirements for providing special education services as any other LEA (or district). If a charter school is considered part of an existing LEA, the LEA (or district) retains most or all of the responsibility for special education in the charter school. The charter school is considered a school within that LEA and is responsible for following LEA policy. http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/charters/ http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/charters/
- mratzloff 11y ago
  Dig deeper and you will find that while this is the law, it is not necessarily reality. Hence why I structured the question the way I did rather than focusing on the legal requirement. A new government report shows that charter schools are not enrolling as high a portion of special-education students as traditional public schools, despite federal laws mandating that publicly financed schools run by private entities take almost every disabled student seeking to enroll. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303379204577477003893836734 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023033792045774770...
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    There are many things that aren't reality when you dig deeper. Public schools are no different. Again. Trying to make charter schools the bad schools in defence of the public shools is simply absurd.

partisan 11y ago

One thing that gets lost in the comparison between charter schools and public schools is that charter schools get to cherry pick their students. The students not accepted into charter schools are sent to public schools. Public schools then have a higher concentration of underperforming students and therefore perform worse when compared to charter schools. If you are given the best students and money is thrown at you, you are being handed success. The rest of the schools are being handed failure. When all schools are charter schools then we will see many of them fail and be replaced by more charter schools and the problem will just be perpetuated in a different form. I wish it were true that charter schools were all about giving students a better education. It is unfortunately not. It is part political and part financial. The political aspect comes from showing success through change (see my first paragraph to understand how that success is gained). The financial aspect goes to the higher salaries paid to administrators. The school districts are happy to pay higher salaries now to rid themselves of unions and more importantly, pensions since charter schools are not unionized. Teachers at those schools work long hours for slightly higher pay. The approach is churn and burn. They hire younger teachers who are just passing through the system on their way to their true careers after they burn out and become disillusioned about the system. Some people will make off pretty well during this growth stage, but the long term outlook is poor.

ThomPete 11y ago
Charter schools like Success Academy function by lottery so no cherry picking at all. And keep in mind it was started in Harlem not exactly the best base for the kids with the best resources. The reason why charter schools like Success Academy are popular is because it's strong focus and philosophy.
- dublinben 11y ago
  Every single student in that lottery had to be entered by a parent concerned about their education. That already presents a selection bias that will deliver better testing results than the entire student population.
  - 11y ago