4 ms·

Charter schools. There are a wide range of approaches, but the charter school I attended provided an alternative for both teachers and parents looking for flex

Charter schools. There are a wide range of approaches, but the charter school I attended provided an alternative for both teachers and parents looking for flexibility in their child's education.

milesskorpen 14y ago
Some charter schools are amazing, and some are awful ... just like public schools. Research has failed to find any evidence that charter schools perform better as a group -- which is surprising, since they can (by and large) select their students and have flexibility in hiring. Moreover, they undercut public schools in the same district. Seems like a net-negative to me.
- jmcqk6 14y ago
  Thank you so much for pointing this out. For people who are so focused on "data-driven education" they always seem to ignore this. The fact of the matter is that collectively they perform no better than public schools, while undermining those very schools they are trying to 'fix.' Perhaps part of the issue is that people are focusing on a 'silver bullet' for education. Standardized tests, charter schools, and even things like kahn academy have been offered, but it's all based on a false premise. There is no silver bullet. We know the strategies we need to take to improve education, but we always fail at tactics because of the assumption that there is one tactic that can be applied everywhere and it's just going to work. That said, there might be one tactic that could work everywhere: teacher autonomy. Let the people in the classroom decide the tactics they need to use in order to teach the children they are charged with educating.
  - jessaustin 14y ago
    Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so? Education is far from the only service industry for which there is no silver bullet. Other such industries function by fostering expertise at management levels in addition to the "work" level, but always leaving the final decision in the hands of the consumer. On the other hand, USA public education takes no consumer input at all, and it's crap. The reason we continue to attempt doomed one-size-fits-all strategies (and really, always using a single poor tactic is poor strategy, despite what we think we may know) is because we intentionally ignore the primary input that helps other industries regulate quality. I actually don't think teachers as a whole are that bad (of course there are individual exceptions), but the management/administration of USA public education is abysmal. If most current administrators were actually responsible for firing underperformers while recruiting talented new teachers, they would fail miserably at those tasks. I'm all in favor of teacher autonomy when we have sufficient public vouchers and other similar mechanisms in place to guarantee parental choice as well.
    - whiddershins 14y ago
      One way a charter school can undermine the normal public school is by draining away motivated students, since they do get to choose who is admitted, thereby skewing stats.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      > Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so? Tragedy of the anti-commons, basically.
    - milesskorpen 14y ago
      A few reasons: * Charter schools would pull out the best students (or at least the ones with the most motivated parents). Research generally suggests weak students get lots of benefit from being in class with strong students. * Public schools benefit greatly from economies of scale. If 10% of students (and thus money) is taken away, the public school still needs to pay for existing fixed infrastructure * Charter schools frequently take the cheapest students — special ed students, for example, are still left to public schools. Taken together, this makes charter schools a net negative.
      - smsm42 14y ago
        Weak students may benefit, but strong students don't. Some of them are strong enough to work through a class of couple dozens of peers not interested in learning and disrupting the class out of boredom, but some of them just give up. I'd like to see some data about this "net negative" claim. I think forcing bright kids that want to learn and advance to suffer through substandard school and disruptive environment that suppresses their will to learn and prevents them from achieving better results because the school needs their parents' money and they will be "good influence" on those bullies and delinquents - is plain wrong. A person - even a kid - should not be means to an end. It's just immoral - and judging from the results public school achieve statistically, being more expensive and less successful that private ones - also impractical.

Charter schools. There are a wide range of approaches, but the charter school I attended provided an alternative for both teachers and parents looking for flexibility in their child's education.

milesskorpen 14y ago

Some charter schools are amazing, and some are awful ... just like public schools. Research has failed to find any evidence that charter schools perform better as a group -- which is surprising, since they can (by and large) select their students and have flexibility in hiring. Moreover, they undercut public schools in the same district. Seems like a net-negative to me.

jmcqk6 14y ago
Thank you so much for pointing this out. For people who are so focused on "data-driven education" they always seem to ignore this. The fact of the matter is that collectively they perform no better than public schools, while undermining those very schools they are trying to 'fix.' Perhaps part of the issue is that people are focusing on a 'silver bullet' for education. Standardized tests, charter schools, and even things like kahn academy have been offered, but it's all based on a false premise. There is no silver bullet. We know the strategies we need to take to improve education, but we always fail at tactics because of the assumption that there is one tactic that can be applied everywhere and it's just going to work. That said, there might be one tactic that could work everywhere: teacher autonomy. Let the people in the classroom decide the tactics they need to use in order to teach the children they are charged with educating.
- jessaustin 14y ago
  Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so? Education is far from the only service industry for which there is no silver bullet. Other such industries function by fostering expertise at management levels in addition to the "work" level, but always leaving the final decision in the hands of the consumer. On the other hand, USA public education takes no consumer input at all, and it's crap. The reason we continue to attempt doomed one-size-fits-all strategies (and really, always using a single poor tactic is poor strategy, despite what we think we may know) is because we intentionally ignore the primary input that helps other industries regulate quality. I actually don't think teachers as a whole are that bad (of course there are individual exceptions), but the management/administration of USA public education is abysmal. If most current administrators were actually responsible for firing underperformers while recruiting talented new teachers, they would fail miserably at those tasks. I'm all in favor of teacher autonomy when we have sufficient public vouchers and other similar mechanisms in place to guarantee parental choice as well.
  - whiddershins 14y ago
    One way a charter school can undermine the normal public school is by draining away motivated students, since they do get to choose who is admitted, thereby skewing stats.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so? Tragedy of the anti-commons, basically.
  - milesskorpen 14y ago
    A few reasons: * Charter schools would pull out the best students (or at least the ones with the most motivated parents). Research generally suggests weak students get lots of benefit from being in class with strong students. * Public schools benefit greatly from economies of scale. If 10% of students (and thus money) is taken away, the public school still needs to pay for existing fixed infrastructure * Charter schools frequently take the cheapest students — special ed students, for example, are still left to public schools. Taken together, this makes charter schools a net negative.
    - smsm42 14y ago
      Weak students may benefit, but strong students don't. Some of them are strong enough to work through a class of couple dozens of peers not interested in learning and disrupting the class out of boredom, but some of them just give up. I'd like to see some data about this "net negative" claim. I think forcing bright kids that want to learn and advance to suffer through substandard school and disruptive environment that suppresses their will to learn and prevents them from achieving better results because the school needs their parents' money and they will be "good influence" on those bullies and delinquents - is plain wrong. A person - even a kid - should not be means to an end. It's just immoral - and judging from the results public school achieve statistically, being more expensive and less successful that private ones - also impractical.