The NY Times plays up Secretary Duncan’s coming warning to charter school operators that “low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.” Writes the Times’ Sam Dillon:
The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist,” Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In an interview, Mr. Duncan said he would use the address to praise innovations made by high-quality charter schools, urge charter leaders to become more active in weeding out bad apples in their movement and invite the leaders to help out in the administration’s broad effort to remake several thousand of the nation’s worst public schools.
The Times makes much of last week’s Stanford study indicating that nearly half of all charter schools nationwide “have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”
It will be interesting to see how charter advocates react to Duncan’s call. At worst, it seems like a reminder of the accountability principles undergirding the movement. Indeed, if the movement practices what it preaches, closing bad charter schools should be considered a victory– for the charter movement.
He’s right.
Many of the so-called “failing” charters, at least here in CA, are schools of last resort. See here for an interesting LA Times article on the issue. It’s highly doubtful that the students would do better in traditional schools since most of them are in the charter program after getting kicked out of other schools.
I’d like to see the charter vs. traditional comparison after excluding these types of programs.
Right . . . I wonder about Texas, for example. In Texas, charter schools that serve predominantly students identified as “at risk” can be rated under an alternative accountability system; last year, 43.3% of charter schools in Texas qualified to be rated under that system, compared to a mere 3.3% of public school districts. See page 147 here: http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/research/pdfs/2008_comp_annual.pdf
Seems like, just as in California, there are often some negative selection effects going on: students who were failing or at risk of dropping out from a regular public school end up getting sent to a charter school in the hopes that this might finally work. I don’t see how you can truly compare those students (especially when they end up in a charter school full of other “at risk” students) to other students that didn’t have the same troubles at the public school.
In Minnesota, charter schools are a choice. The emphasis for choosing a particular charter school over a traditional school is usually made by parents who are not happy with the school options offered for their child in a traditional public school situtation.
I know that in Minnesota, if a charter school goes in the “red”, they are immediately closed down. Not so with traditional public schools, they can pass referendums in order to raise money or get short term loans from banks, options that charter schools don’t have. Therefore, poorly managed charter schools are weeded out, which is not the case with a poorly managed traditional school.
I would have to say that at the very least, charter schools are trying to make reformational changes in our educational system that traditional public schools just aren’t capable of,(that’s why foundations such as Gates and Walton don’t work with traditional public schools as much) yet we scrutinize charter schools but never use that same lens to focus on traditional public schools.
I really must commend Minnesota. I believe it has one of the best charter school laws in the US. Our charter school has truly changed lives for some of our students.