Charter schools: Wave of the future?
http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/15/charter-schools-wave-of-the-future/?hpt=hp_bn2
I am not sure how I feel about charter schools. To the extent the cause public schools to improve, they are a good thing, but I am not wild about taking a large proportion of our education tax dollars and putting them into the hands of any for profit institution (not-for-profit institutions have problems as well, whenever the senior executives pay gets out of whack). I like that our current situation forces people who want to send their kids to private school to subsidize the public schools. I do not, however, like the current distribution method and advocate a more generalized system (see “It’s poverty and punitive funding formulas, stupid”).
The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University studied charter school performance in 16 states. Researchers concluded that 17% of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools. But 37% of charter schools performed at rates below their public school counterparts. The remaining 46% showed no significant difference.
The Rand Corp., a nonprofit research foundation, looked at charter schools in eight states and found that, on average, charter schools as a whole aren’t producing results that differ substantially from traditional public school systems. However, the study showed that students at charter high schools are between 7% and 15% more likely to graduate than their traditional public school counterparts.
It would seem to me that charter schools, on average, are no different than public schools. If they somehow manage to cost 20% less (as the article mentions at one point), then there may be reasons to explore these alternatives, but if all charter schools use a lottery system to select students (something implied by the article) then there really isn’t any sort of market force driving the system and you have just added more complexity onto the system without any benefit.
I’m guessing that charter schools in ho-hum to upper-class areas won’t perform significantly better than public schools, while charter schools in depressed areas will.
Kids are put into charter schools when the public schools in the area are merely day-care institutions and they are put there by parents who care and can afford it.