Reply to Time for Charter Schools?

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Reply to "Time for Charter Schools?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Charter schools sound good until you look at some of the details.  First, they do not have to be open enrollment.

Guess what?  No Special Ed, and your school will perform better.

You can limit it to only higher performing kids (not unlike magnet schools).

Meanwhile, it is taking resources away from the public schools that are not allowed to put on those limitations.

How?  Say the cost per student is 14K on average.  But, in reality, the cost per student without special needs is lower:  20 kids in a class...with a teacher is about 100K for labor (teacher and admin), plus a bit for the other resources.  But, in the charter, at 14K/student, in that class, they would get 280K in revenue.

So, they either can profit (if it is a company like Basis), or use the money other ways.

Meanwhile, the public schools, well, they are left with a higher percentage of special needs students...which are more expensive.  But, they can not support them, so they do even worse.

[/quote]

In my experience, it's not just the issue of teacher treatment; it's that you get what you pay for. Charters proponents like to claim that the market drives performance, but in my view, when you are doing what you can to push out special needs kids and taking shortcuts to save money, it's not an even comparison to public schools. When you have awful working conditions, good teachers aren't going to be bothered putting up with it because there's a teacher shortage. If they want to work in a high poverty environment, who in their right mind would choose to work for more, with less support and less pay and less security instead of choosing a county system that pays teachers fairly, has a fair system of evaluation. It's a no brainer. Charters get unlicensed teachers or inexperienced TFA alums.

Also, despite what people say on here, I think most people respect teachers and understand that there's an art and science to teaching that takes years of experience to develop. When my kids when to a DCPS charter, the new college grads were not just inexperienced, they were ineffective, not supportive and both of my kids' teachers quit mid-year with no notice whatsoever. I pulled them and went private before we moved to MoCo, where I'm fairly happy with their education so far.[/quote]

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