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Open question that wasnt really discussed in the article- Why are charter schools demonized? My local area HATES them, and I'm not sure if its politics or wor

Open question that wasnt really discussed in the article- Why are charter schools demonized? My local area HATES them, and I'm not sure if its politics or worthwhile. EDIT: Why did I get 5 downvotes?

colek42 8y ago
Charter schools are a great option when your school district has poor management and private school is not an option for some reason. Teacher unions hate them for a various number of reasons, in my view the main reason is that they are threatened by them. There are great charter schools and great public schools as well as horrible public schools and charter schools.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
grasshopperpurp 8y ago
>A dozen problems with charter schools Pretty good summary of the common criticisms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/20/a-dozen-problems-with-charter-schools/?utm_term=.fbb66d1d0192 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/...
pitt1980 8y ago
I'm going to try hard to keep this in "Why are charter schools demonized?" territory and out of "Should charter be schools demonized?" territory -------- short answer, is that a lot of them tend to be run by scammers trying to turn a buck -------- Long answer, is that education is actually a weird product, with a lot of information asymmetries baked in, and where a lot of time the quality people are actually hoping to buy is the signal around the product, instead of the product itself And the signal is often elusive if that's what you're actually hoping to buy
elsherbini 8y ago
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."
- sandworm101 8y ago
  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.
- ryanx435 8y ago
  > 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.
  - cdman 8y ago
    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.
thieving_magpie 8y ago
Where I live they are often attended by white students to avoid public schools that have sizable black student populations. There are many benefits and drawbacks to charter schools. The conditions in my area are not universal to other parts of the country.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  That’s an interesting statement. Which area is this?
- jcims 8y ago
  Demographics of charter schools vary widely by state - https://ballotpedia.org/Charter_school_demographics https://ballotpedia.org/Charter_school_demographics There seems to be a prevailing notion that they are enclaves for scared white parents, but the reality is a bit more complex than that.
  - thieving_magpie 8y ago
    That's why I was careful to say these are the conditions only in my immediate region. In my opinion grouping this by State is too macro. There are charter schools in my area predominantly attended by black students but they are central and easily accessible. There are charter schools further away from the city center that require additional travel that is simply not as affordable to lower income students. The numbers at a state level would show a more distributed attendance by race that the reality does not reflect.
Alex3917 8y ago
Read Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life book.
maxerickson 8y ago
Because in practice many of them are intended to defund the public school system. Maybe blowing up the whole thing is the solution to bad management (which is the case in many school systems), but doing it circuitously sucks.
r00fus 8y ago
Kids with special needs are statistically less served by charter schools - significantly. This means a greater burden on the non charter schools with the same budget (charter school students don't pay more) - and special needs kids aren't paid by federal funds (where I live it's mostly local tax). Also they statistically perform equally or more poorly compared to public schools.
- sjg007 8y ago
  I guess one solution is that we then get charter schools that cater to special needs students.. we sort of have these programs already with center based autism "schools". However, going down this path will eventually run into Brown vs board of education.
  - berbec 8y ago
    How do charter schools not do that already? No skin in the game here, but isn't getting rid of special schooling the whole point of eliminating separate yet equal?
    - sjg007 8y ago
      Charter schools typically don't offer special education programs and have selective admissions. They are looking for kids who get high test scores on standardized testing. With special education you want the least restrictive environment and that involves special education support in as normal a school environment as possible (aka regular classes).
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      Depending on the state, there's no requirement for charters to accept everyone like a normal public school.
koolba 8y ago
Because it's not in the interests of the teacher's union to fracture the public school system. The larger, more faceless and immeasurable it gets, the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them. Charter schools (usually) do not have unionized teachers that are part of the larger teacher's unions. That means they have their own standards for hiring and firing teachers that they can do in response to poor performing teachers. The counter argument is that charter schools take money away from public school systems, further leading to their collapse as it's a vicious cycle. Parent pulls child from crappy school, school loses funding, school gets worse, more parents pull their kids, etc.
- pjmorris 8y ago
  > the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes. Maybe there's more to improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-lessons-from-the-failure-of-the-gates-foundations-575-million-effective-teacher-initiative/#1bf50a1e33fe https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less...
  - koolba 8y ago
    > The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes. Did you actually read the article to which you linked? Some choice quotes (emphasis mine): > The reforms demanded too much time. The evaluations required an enormous amount of time and paperwork, and were frequently seen as a burden and distraction by teachers and school leaders alike. > Principals tended to rate teachers highly, and scores inflated over time. It turns out that principals generally don’t like to give negative evaluations to their teachers, especially when they don’t really trust that poor performers will be removed. If principals expect that teachers will stick around regardless, they’d rather be on good terms and avoid alienating their staff. > None of this means that teacher evaluation “doesn’t work.” [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less.. https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less.... The problem isn't that rating and firing teachers doesn't work. It's that rating without the ability to fire is pointless and whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. I blame both of those on teacher's unions which are, IMHO, one of the worst forms of public sector unions.
Spooky23 8y ago
The core issue is that they figure out how to deliver schooling at a minimal operating cost while maximizing returns to the investors who hold the bonds on the building. The investors are often charter school advocates or in the know. Frankly, it's a corrupt and disgusting system. Once they start operating, they are intensely focused on minimizing cost. That translates into alot of student displacement as children who are disruptive or have various disabilities get tossed back, and increases the costs and operational challenges. They are also disruptive to orderly and efficient operations of school districts. Kids and bureaucracies don't accept change well -- bouncing these kids creates problems. In the small city I live in, charters appeared like locusts, and led the city district to close and sell a couple of schools. As the charters attrit troublesome students and get shut down for poor performance, hundreds of kids get "dumped". That results in overcrowded and high churn schools. My local elementary school lost it's music room, half of the library and has two outdoor classrooms as additional space that had to be cleared out to accomodate disabled students and handle growing class sizes. They're stuck in a catch-22 -- their budgets are out of wack because they need proportionally more special ed teachers, and it's hard to know true capacity and more charters open and close.
frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
Here's two articles that might help explain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-idUSBRE91E0HF20130215 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-i... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-schools-special-needs_us_574f0be2e4b0ed593f12e8a4 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-schools-special...
bradenb 8y ago
A few years ago we put my daughter into a new charter school. We were really excited because on the surface it seemed like she would get a much more tailored and personalized education with better facilities and staff. The only problem is that my daughter has ADHD. As soon as there were social issues between my daughter and her teachers or her and other students (bullying by other students), the staff quickly turned against us. We met with the principal several times about specific students bullying her but all they wanted to talk about was how she wasn't showing up often enough to school (she often faked being sick to avoid her bullies). We quickly realized that the school was only concerned about losing funding because of attendance metrics and we pulled her out. It was a horrible experience for us.
acjohnson55 8y ago
That's a tough question to answer because "charter school" doesn't have a very specific definition. It's just a publicly-funded school whose charter opts it out of some number of the regulations that apply to typical public schools in the same jurisdictions. In some states/districts, they're basically public schools that have an external partner. I taught at such a school in Baltimore. In other places, they're more or less completely independent of the district that funds them. Anywhere on that spectrum, you can cherry-pick successes and disasters. But certainly, they have introduced a great deal more complexity and ambiguity in the discourse of education. Much of the negativity towards charters comes from a skepticism that is difficult to fully inform. So people are forced to take the shortcut of deciding whether they are for or against "charter schools", broadly speaking. Fact is, not everyone has time to become an expert, in order to hold more nuanced opinions. I prefer to frame the debate around the "school choice" movement, which is broader idea that districts should work more like marketplaces or laboratories for education. I'm very skeptical. For one thing, the "choice" that results isn't free and isn't equally distributed. For another, it tends to centralize the blame for poor outcomes on poor performers in the district, rather than systemic issues. Yet, most of the poor performers are the very schools that have the highest risk students, because these are the same students unlikely to have the agency and social capital to effectively exercise their choice.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
I happened across a free play in the park by Lake Merritt (Bay Area). It was well produced, singing, acting, sets, the whole nine yards. At first I just thought it was a schoolroom drama, but then I realized it was a full on anti-charter school propaganda piece. Like, mustache twisting, “if I can only get rid of this pesky teaching thing, I can get rich!” villains. It struck me as bizzarre. Not because I disagree with their position... maybe that’s in fact happening in the Bay. I just didn’t understand who is enjoying such an overt propaganda piece. Where’s the joy in being beaten over the head with a political message? And what are the producers thinking? People are too dumb to be informed or to form their own conclusions so we need to trick them into hating charter schools?
pbreit 8y ago
I'd rather see the energy go into improving the non-charter schools. Charter schools seem like a cop-out that only make a very limited contribution.

Open question that wasnt really discussed in the article- Why are charter schools demonized? My local area HATES them, and I'm not sure if its politics or worthwhile. EDIT: Why did I get 5 downvotes?

colek42 8y ago

Charter schools are a great option when your school district has poor management and private school is not an option for some reason. Teacher unions hate them for a various number of reasons, in my view the main reason is that they are threatened by them. There are great charter schools and great public schools as well as horrible public schools and charter schools.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

grasshopperpurp 8y ago

>A dozen problems with charter schools Pretty good summary of the common criticisms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/20/a-dozen-problems-with-charter-schools/?utm_term=.fbb66d1d0192 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/...

pitt1980 8y ago

I'm going to try hard to keep this in "Why are charter schools demonized?" territory and out of "Should charter be schools demonized?" territory -------- short answer, is that a lot of them tend to be run by scammers trying to turn a buck -------- Long answer, is that education is actually a weird product, with a lot of information asymmetries baked in, and where a lot of time the quality people are actually hoping to buy is the signal around the product, instead of the product itself And the signal is often elusive if that's what you're actually hoping to buy

elsherbini 8y ago

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."

sandworm101 8y ago
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.
ryanx435 8y ago
> 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.
- cdman 8y ago
  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.

thieving_magpie 8y ago

Where I live they are often attended by white students to avoid public schools that have sizable black student populations. There are many benefits and drawbacks to charter schools. The conditions in my area are not universal to other parts of the country.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
That’s an interesting statement. Which area is this?
jcims 8y ago
Demographics of charter schools vary widely by state - https://ballotpedia.org/Charter_school_demographics https://ballotpedia.org/Charter_school_demographics There seems to be a prevailing notion that they are enclaves for scared white parents, but the reality is a bit more complex than that.
- thieving_magpie 8y ago
  That's why I was careful to say these are the conditions only in my immediate region. In my opinion grouping this by State is too macro. There are charter schools in my area predominantly attended by black students but they are central and easily accessible. There are charter schools further away from the city center that require additional travel that is simply not as affordable to lower income students. The numbers at a state level would show a more distributed attendance by race that the reality does not reflect.

Alex3917 8y ago

Read Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life book.

maxerickson 8y ago

Because in practice many of them are intended to defund the public school system. Maybe blowing up the whole thing is the solution to bad management (which is the case in many school systems), but doing it circuitously sucks.

r00fus 8y ago

Kids with special needs are statistically less served by charter schools - significantly. This means a greater burden on the non charter schools with the same budget (charter school students don't pay more) - and special needs kids aren't paid by federal funds (where I live it's mostly local tax). Also they statistically perform equally or more poorly compared to public schools.

sjg007 8y ago
I guess one solution is that we then get charter schools that cater to special needs students.. we sort of have these programs already with center based autism "schools". However, going down this path will eventually run into Brown vs board of education.
- berbec 8y ago
  How do charter schools not do that already? No skin in the game here, but isn't getting rid of special schooling the whole point of eliminating separate yet equal?
  - sjg007 8y ago
    Charter schools typically don't offer special education programs and have selective admissions. They are looking for kids who get high test scores on standardized testing. With special education you want the least restrictive environment and that involves special education support in as normal a school environment as possible (aka regular classes).
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Depending on the state, there's no requirement for charters to accept everyone like a normal public school.

koolba 8y ago

Because it's not in the interests of the teacher's union to fracture the public school system. The larger, more faceless and immeasurable it gets, the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them. Charter schools (usually) do not have unionized teachers that are part of the larger teacher's unions. That means they have their own standards for hiring and firing teachers that they can do in response to poor performing teachers. The counter argument is that charter schools take money away from public school systems, further leading to their collapse as it's a vicious cycle. Parent pulls child from crappy school, school loses funding, school gets worse, more parents pull their kids, etc.

pjmorris 8y ago
> the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes. Maybe there's more to improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-lessons-from-the-failure-of-the-gates-foundations-575-million-effective-teacher-initiative/#1bf50a1e33fe https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less...
- koolba 8y ago
  > The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes. Did you actually read the article to which you linked? Some choice quotes (emphasis mine): > The reforms demanded too much time. The evaluations required an enormous amount of time and paperwork, and were frequently seen as a burden and distraction by teachers and school leaders alike. > Principals tended to rate teachers highly, and scores inflated over time. It turns out that principals generally don’t like to give negative evaluations to their teachers, especially when they don’t really trust that poor performers will be removed. If principals expect that teachers will stick around regardless, they’d rather be on good terms and avoid alienating their staff. > None of this means that teacher evaluation “doesn’t work.” [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less.. https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less.... The problem isn't that rating and firing teachers doesn't work. It's that rating without the ability to fire is pointless and whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. I blame both of those on teacher's unions which are, IMHO, one of the worst forms of public sector unions.

Spooky23 8y ago

The core issue is that they figure out how to deliver schooling at a minimal operating cost while maximizing returns to the investors who hold the bonds on the building. The investors are often charter school advocates or in the know. Frankly, it's a corrupt and disgusting system. Once they start operating, they are intensely focused on minimizing cost. That translates into alot of student displacement as children who are disruptive or have various disabilities get tossed back, and increases the costs and operational challenges. They are also disruptive to orderly and efficient operations of school districts. Kids and bureaucracies don't accept change well -- bouncing these kids creates problems. In the small city I live in, charters appeared like locusts, and led the city district to close and sell a couple of schools. As the charters attrit troublesome students and get shut down for poor performance, hundreds of kids get "dumped". That results in overcrowded and high churn schools. My local elementary school lost it's music room, half of the library and has two outdoor classrooms as additional space that had to be cleared out to accomodate disabled students and handle growing class sizes. They're stuck in a catch-22 -- their budgets are out of wack because they need proportionally more special ed teachers, and it's hard to know true capacity and more charters open and close.

frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago

Here's two articles that might help explain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-idUSBRE91E0HF20130215 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-i... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-schools-special-needs_us_574f0be2e4b0ed593f12e8a4 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-schools-special...

bradenb 8y ago

A few years ago we put my daughter into a new charter school. We were really excited because on the surface it seemed like she would get a much more tailored and personalized education with better facilities and staff. The only problem is that my daughter has ADHD. As soon as there were social issues between my daughter and her teachers or her and other students (bullying by other students), the staff quickly turned against us. We met with the principal several times about specific students bullying her but all they wanted to talk about was how she wasn't showing up often enough to school (she often faked being sick to avoid her bullies). We quickly realized that the school was only concerned about losing funding because of attendance metrics and we pulled her out. It was a horrible experience for us.

acjohnson55 8y ago

That's a tough question to answer because "charter school" doesn't have a very specific definition. It's just a publicly-funded school whose charter opts it out of some number of the regulations that apply to typical public schools in the same jurisdictions. In some states/districts, they're basically public schools that have an external partner. I taught at such a school in Baltimore. In other places, they're more or less completely independent of the district that funds them. Anywhere on that spectrum, you can cherry-pick successes and disasters. But certainly, they have introduced a great deal more complexity and ambiguity in the discourse of education. Much of the negativity towards charters comes from a skepticism that is difficult to fully inform. So people are forced to take the shortcut of deciding whether they are for or against "charter schools", broadly speaking. Fact is, not everyone has time to become an expert, in order to hold more nuanced opinions. I prefer to frame the debate around the "school choice" movement, which is broader idea that districts should work more like marketplaces or laboratories for education. I'm very skeptical. For one thing, the "choice" that results isn't free and isn't equally distributed. For another, it tends to centralize the blame for poor outcomes on poor performers in the district, rather than systemic issues. Yet, most of the poor performers are the very schools that have the highest risk students, because these are the same students unlikely to have the agency and social capital to effectively exercise their choice.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

I happened across a free play in the park by Lake Merritt (Bay Area). It was well produced, singing, acting, sets, the whole nine yards. At first I just thought it was a schoolroom drama, but then I realized it was a full on anti-charter school propaganda piece. Like, mustache twisting, “if I can only get rid of this pesky teaching thing, I can get rich!” villains. It struck me as bizzarre. Not because I disagree with their position... maybe that’s in fact happening in the Bay. I just didn’t understand who is enjoying such an overt propaganda piece. Where’s the joy in being beaten over the head with a political message? And what are the producers thinking? People are too dumb to be informed or to form their own conclusions so we need to trick them into hating charter schools?

pbreit 8y ago

I'd rather see the energy go into improving the non-charter schools. Charter schools seem like a cop-out that only make a very limited contribution.