Thursday, June 28, 2012

Charter Schools aren't necessary

Wait, I know this.
We'll make another charter school!
From NYC Educator: Charter School closes and leaves parents and students in a pinch.
On the second to last day of school, the principal at my school got a phone call from a parent. His daughter's charter school was being closed, and he'd received a letter in the mail saying that my school was to be his daughter's new school. Could he, the father asked, come by to see the school and meet the principal?
And there you have it.  The primary difference between a public school and a charter school. When the charter school doesn't make enough money to satisfy its backers or simply becomes less exciting to run than its founders thought it would be back in the halcyon days of three years ago, it quits and closes up shop. That's how you tell the difference between involved and committed, between "nice to have if everything is perfect" and "necessary to the community".
  • Can't make those vaunted teachers work harder for less?
  • Can't keep pretending that your off-the-cuff charter was off-the-charts good?
  • Your students didn't buy into your KIPP-like gulag?
  • Are your test scores comparisons leaving you lacking?
  • Your admissions filtering system didn't work well enough?
  • The principal and the principal owners aren't each making $200K per year?

That's okay. You can quit and someone else will pick up the pieces. No skin off your back.
It wasn't about the students after all, was it?

3 comments:

  1. My charter school is always crying that they get less money and that is why the teachers are paid less, but from all the money we are supposedly saving by being an online school I call BS, even if we only get 1/2 of the 5700 state funding, for 14,300 students, that's still a lot. We take money from districts with poor students and pretty much waste, a very small minority of our students benefit from the school, the rest would be much better off at their local school and have the funding go towards creating systems to help chronically ill or bullied students there.

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