I have a question about the charter schools, that factors in (or not - depending upon the answers). Do charter schools have to take any and all public students that apply at their doors? Or can they pick and choose? Must they take the handicapped? The children that used to be called "retarded?" Junvenile delinquents? Can they limit based on capacity? (In other words can they control class size by limiting enrollment?)

The bone I have to pick with any data that compares public schools with "other" -- whether charter or private -- involves just these factors. If the "other" school can limit capacity, or cherry-pick students, then ALL comparisons are false.

I'd like to see a study of 10 year trends in charter schools. (Hint: charter schools have a nasty habit of folding up shop since it's very difficult to turn a profit in education.)

Of course, charter schools don't have to take whatever is thrown at them. They have the right to suspend and refuse. Public schools don't have that luxury.

I'm actually generally okay with charter schools, as long as they are genuinely used as laboratories -- that their teaching methods and allowed to be observed by the district and teachers within the district as part of teacher training. Even better, teachers in the public schools should have the opportunity to take sabbaticals and teach in the charter schools for a semester here and there as away to refresh and to spread that knowledge around.

If they exist in isolation they benefit no one but themselves.

I have two problems with this.

As you say, the fact that the study was conducted by a charter school advocacy group is a major, major problem. For that reason, I would discount its "conclusions."

Second, if charter schools have the "secret" to more effective education, how is it that schools, teachers, and administrators across the land aren't privy to the "secret"?

C'mon. It's a gimmick.

No, it's just another way to slam the door in the faces of the least among us. In short, it's racist.

hancock

Here in Florida, public schools are "graded" (A-F) based on test results. Over several years, many of the lower-graded schools have improved their grades significantly, with no discernible change in their enrollment, demographics, faculty (other than normal turnover), or funding.

How could this be? Very simple -- grades are determined by the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). So the low-graded schools devote themselves to preparing for the FCAT, nevermind whether they learn anything more than how to do better on tests. (Like the cheap law schools whose curriculum consists of old Bar exams).

It's essential to know HOW schools -- public or charter -- are rated. High ratings don't necessarily mean high learning.

Remember also that charters schools are a generally populated by children whose parents are more concerned and involved in their education than in the general public school population. The students are more motivated by parent(s) who are invested in their success. Public schools are not self selecting in this manner.

Add to this the ability of charters to toss out any child who causes them problems if they so desire and you get a student population that, though perhaps not always the cream of the crop, is far better positioned to learn and achieve than in those general public school.

Give public schools the same freedoms to self-select their population, ditch unions, and have no accountability to the taxpayer and you'll probably see similar results. But then, of course, you've killed off public education, haven't you?

Also, don't charter schools begin with shiny new everything? A school completely outfitted to teach might perform better than a neglected public school down the street.

I agree with Bob's comment about the self-selected nature of charter school student bodies. On the whole. I think this is a good thing. It gives poorer parents who care the ability to send their children to a better school, just as welthier parents do who send their children to a parochial or other private school or who move to a community with "better" schools. These are options that poorer parents do not usually have.

I have a son with some learning disabilities who attends a for-profit charter school in a big city. A majority of the student body is composed of minorities, maybe even to a greater degree than the local public schools. The school is far from perfect and we often have to make noise to get our son the help he needs, but, I expect that would be true in the public school too. The school tends to employee many inexperienced (i.e. lower paid) teachers. The lack of experience is a negative that is offset somewhat by a greater enthusiasm for the job. The charter school almost always outperforms the local public schools on state-wide tests and probably compares well with the education provided at local parochial schools (which are exempt from state-wide testing requirements).

I agree with most of the comments above. Charter schools just take money away from the public schools, which when I was a kid were the best schools in the nation. Why shouldn't America go back to the premise the country was built on, which was an education for every citizen. It was considered the only way to have an informed citizenry.

kedpaw,

No offense, but your comment about the "ability to send their children to a better school" can be taken as "the ability to hasten the establishment of a two-tier school system." The "good" schools for the wealthy and some poor parents who care and the "bad" schools for everyone else.

I think this is a valid concern. It is also a valid concern that we have bad schools which should be fixed.

In general I think the GOP solution is a two-tier school system and the democratic solution is to improve the bad schools.

One of these proposals benefits the rich and the other costs the rich. I think that is no accident.

Charter schools are a parasite to regular public schools. Take the money spent on charter schools to reduce classroom size and increase teaching staff, and you'd attain the same results. End of story.

The parents who send their children to charter schools are more involved than the overall set of public school children's parents. Parental involvement is a key to young students' performance, so it would have been easy to predict charter schools out perform public ones, especially since those involved parents are no longer involved with public schools.

What I dislike about charter schools, is they are publicly financed. The public is paying for the degradation of universal education for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many.

"I agree with Bob's comment about the self-selected nature of charter school student bodies. On the whole."

I agree too. What would be nice is if the study compared charter school students to students that applied for charter school, but didn't get in due to a shortage of slots. Such a study was done in Chicago and determined that the driving factor in a student's education was how much their parents wanted them to get a good education. The students that applied but lost out in the lottery performed as well as those that got into the "good" schools.

This became obvious when went I went to college. I went to one of those elite Ivy league universities and found that my professors weren't very good. They were hired for their ability to attract research grants. But the classes were much better than I would take at other colleges. The reason was that they had better students and could progress through the material much faster. So we learned more because we could, not because the professors were better teachers.

My son just graduated from a charter high school in a suburb of San Diego. It is not a new school. It is part of a district of about 15 high schools, and it is clearly the best one. Because it is charter, the money flows straight through the district to the high school.

They take all the kids from their local attendance area, and open slots after that are filled by a lottery. The local attendance area is not the poorest part of town, but it is poor-ish and high-minority. Their conceit is that all students are assumed to be going to 4-year colleges, so all classes are allegedly college prep. In fact, some kids will end up as busboys, but the general level of education in the school is good. My kid got a fine high school education there.

The difference, it seems to me, is that a successful charter school has a talented leader in charge and talented teachers who buy in completely.

Why shouldn't America go back to the premise the country was built on, which was an education for every citizen. It was considered the only way to have an informed citizenry. Posted by: Mazurka

We can't achieve this any time soon because most Americans now alive today are the product of a public school system that the right wing in this country has been trying its damnedest to destroy altogether for about thirty years now. Too many Americans have been convinced that public school teachers and administrators are all lazy left-wing provocateurs solely concerned with reducing their work load, protecting their jobs, and teaching our children radical ideas about politics, economics and "morality," if they teach at all. Yes, they all got into teaching because it's such an easy job and pays so well.

Bobbi nailed it in the first comment. Charter schools are NOT required to admit handicapped children, children for whom English is a second (or even third) language, or children with behavioral problems that are not quite severe enough to warrant expulsion. Public schools in most states ARE required to admit these students. If they allowed for these factors in this study, perhaps by using correlational analysis or probit/logit regression techniques, they would likely find no statistically significant differences at all. This study is comparing apples to oranges and finding that apples are only slightly sweeter. TOTALLY BOGUS!

Kevin, if you had children, you might understand the problems facing public education and the assault on these schools by right-wing nuts better, instead of lamely offering geography as the reason for these specious differences in test scores.

This is very centrist of you Kevin. You don't want to pull the rug out from under the public schools entirely, just a little.

It's good of you to be so open minded, Kevin. You have the courage to split the difference and see both sides of the issue. Too bad more people aren't as open minded as people like you, Joe Klein and Richard Cohen.

Where I live many parents place their children in charter schools to avoid having their children educated with immigrants. I know a W. Bush family who would prefer to send their child to a charter except their child is borderline autistic, so they send him to a public school, where he receives one on one instruction. This family says they want less government, but are happy to reap the benefits of public education's benefits for their child while wanting to reduce the same benefits for everyone else.

They've been going round and round about this same issue in the San Francisco Bay Area schools. Charter schools brag about their test scores. What they leave out of the PR release is that they teach exclusively to the test - period. They've also been known to cook the test results and change grades. They can also exclude students who aren't already getting good grades, so they skim off the cream from the public schools.

What they leave out is little things like high teacher turn over and the fact that once students are accepted into college their retention rate is not very good.

Today’s corporate sponsors of charters are almost identical to those who advocated vouchers for over a decade, which is why in many instances, charters are really vouchers by the back door.

"First, the study was done by a charter advocacy group."

Lol. Kevin is forever regurgitating the claims of advocacy groups. It's only when he is hostile to those groups that we see a "caveat".

Charter schools have a single purpose -- the destruction of secular public education.

Two kinds of people vote Republican -- rich people and stupid people. Since Republicans believe life is a zero-sum game they can't afford to make more rich people, so their only option for expanding their ranks is to make more stupid people.

Public education is their enemy. Charter schools are their weapons. Millions of disadvanted students are their victims.

Charter Schools, on every level and in some way, all select their students. They do not tale all comers. They all set up critera regular public schools are not allowed to establish. For example, Saturday school that KIPP schools have. This eliminate all the students whose parents are unable or unwilling to accomdate this reaquirment. Mature charters weed out even more challenging students and therefore, I believe, are able to improve more that beginning charters.

1) Charter schools may not need to take handicapped or kids with behavioral problems, but they have to take minority and disadvantaged (poor) kids. I can't believe that the ESL/handicapped kids are the main reason that are bringing down the scores of public schools. As stated in one comment above, one of the charter schools have a higher proportion of minority kids.

2) They're taking money away from "public" schools, but it's a zero sum game - either the state pays for the kid to be educated in the public school, or they pay for the kid to be educated in the charter school. This should be good - the schools are "competing" for the students.

3) It's true that the study may be flawed because it's conducted by a charter advocacy group, but the conclusions aren't necessarily false. A fruits and vegetables advocacy group saying fruits and vegetables are good for you doesn't mean that statement is necessarily false.

4) This is an old argument, but if they are teaching to a test, isn't that good? At least they're learning the material on the test, as opposed to learning little to nothing at all.

I think we need to keep open minds - I'm not necessarily for charter schools, but let's look at all the facts before we jump to conclusions. If it can be shown that charter schools are actually good at teaching, why would you be against it?

"This is an old argument, but if they are teaching to a test, isn't that good? At least they're learning the material on the test, as opposed to learning little to nothing at all."

Uh no. They "teach to the test" and then when the students enter the unprotected world of college life where they're not spoon fed the questions and answers, they sink like a stone.

There is an interesting statistical question. Everything else being equal you would expect half of the schools to randomly outperform the mean. That's why it's called a mean. 7 schools rather than 5 ain't that different.

However, if they're dramatically outperforming the mean then you expect a smaller number to randomly reach that level of performance, e.g. 2 out of 10 or something like that.

So to answer the question of significance one needs to know how much they're outperforming the other schools. That requires knowledge of what the scale of an "API" score is, etc. Are we talking 10 points on top of 50 or a 1000, etc.

The thread seems to be unanimous in calling the charter system bogus.

I'll add to Kevin's facile centrism and say that at least charter schools create more small schools, instead of just building an annex to an already gargantuan bureaucratic school system.

As a resident of Los Angeles, I would like to add my two cents to this discussion: My corgi's obedience school outperforms the L.A. school system.

How about, Charter schools choose their students... Traditional schools do not.

Bleah.

You can never really compare charter schools vs. public schools.

Why? Chater schools take who they want and throw out students they don't want.

(thought exercise:imagine a student pulling a knife on a nun in a Catholic school (student gets thrown out immediately) vs. pulling a knife on a public school teacher (may go to court , may not, could take years to punish student, if at all)

Public schools take all students who reside in the district--throwing out a student is out of the question

I've always said let me choose who goes to a school and I will turn any poor performing school into a exemplary school.

I don't know where people get the idea that charter schools can pick their students. Our charter high school has to take anyone who applies. This is state law, though the terms of the charter say that the school is required to admit in-district kids before out-of-district kids. If there are more applicants than slots, the school has to hold a lottery, again by state law.

Because of the strangeness of school funding, our charter school gets less state money per student (by a lot) than the other public high schools in the district. This is because we're in a rich district, and the other schools get to benefit from the high property taxes with high per-pupil funding. Charter schools across the state all get the same amount per student, which is considerably less.

As far as the shiny new facilities go - for our first three years we were in an old bank. The next year we were in trailers. This year we have a nice place that was fixed up by another charter school that didn't survive. None of these sites had/have any outdoor space.

Our teachers are almost all straight out of school. They're inexperienced but very well-educated and enthusiastic. Our students are about half white, half non-white. I think about 20% qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Yes, our test scores are way better than the traditional schools in the district, but the district made it a condition of the charter that the school can never talk about that publicly.

Forgot to say above - we have a disproportionately large number of kids with learning differences, because they tend to thrive in a small-school environment with lots of personal attention. We also have plenty of students who grew up not speaking English at home and who will be the first generation in their families to go to college.

Kids with behavior problems can be asked to leave, so this is a big difference from traditional high schools. They can come back if they behave well elsewhere and want to return, and this has happened (for example, after a drug infraction).

What a ridiculous post.

Charter schools cherry-pick, as several people here have already noted. They do not have the same population as a base, so the comparison is already apples and oranges.

And if you believe any statistics presented by a party with a vested interest in the outcome of a study, then you are exactly the kind of dupe that deserves to be misled.