Charter Schools: Worth your Rights?
Charter schools have become a new buzz word in education.
Charter schools started up in 1991 and have been getting a lot of media attention.
So what are they exactly? And are they worth it?
Charter schools are publically funded elementary or high schools that have been freed of some of the rules, regulations and statutes of other public schools in the U.S.. In exchange, charter schools are held to some type of accountability for producing certain results. Student requirements can vary from school to school or state to state, but they are laid out in each school’s charter.
In other words, they are schools that are formed by parents, business people or educators who are sick of the rules in the public school system, but still promise to make sure students succeed.
Are these just empty promises, or do charter schools offer an alternative form of education that can actually prepare students for college?
Evidence seems to be unreliable. Most studies have been inconclusive, but there seem to be two main arguments:
Charter schools that have been around for awhile can be quite successful offering small class sizes, opportunities for low income families and alternative teaching methods that help students that would not fare well at a regular public high school. These types of schools have been excellent stepping stones to college.
But newer and less established charter schools can be a bit shaky and have closed by not living up to the charters standards.
In February 2006, the Center for Education Reform released a report on charter school closures. At that time they found that 436 of the 4000 charter schools has closed for reasons ranging from district consolidation to failure to attract students. The report states that the “majority are closed for financial or management deficiencies.”
The charter school trend is definitely catching on. There are 1.2 million students at charter schools and numbers are growing. So if you go charter over public you’ll probably want to do your homework–about the charter school itself.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:42 am
This article has all the characteristics of a “union hitpiece”, those being a substantial lack of facts and an abundance of misrepresentatios.
Charter schools (at least those in the most “backward” school system in the country) not only have to comply with every law and regulation that traditional public schools do, they actually have ADDITIONAL laws and regulations to which they must comply.
In some cases, particularly in Louisiana, charter school applcants must jump through unique “hoops” to obtain approval which are purposeful barriers put in place by union supporters defending a failng status quo.
Further, charter schools are PROVEN to be superior to a vast majority of traditional public schools, most notably in the State of Louisiana.
The mention of money clearly exposes the true nature of the opposition to charter schools. The false claims that public charter schools take away funds from the county (parish) is a deliberate misrepresentation of the fact that what charter school funding actually does is shifts the CONTROL of monies into the hands of administrators of the charter school and out of the the incompetent hands of partisan school board members.
Going further, it is the despicable policies of teacher unions that are most responsible for the downward trend in education as those policies are designed to protect the union roles/dues, and do nothing to improve the qualty of education in this country. The teacher unions are all about money and power, at the expense of our children’s and our country’s future.