Reply to Time for Charter Schools?

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Reply to "Time for Charter Schools?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Charter schools may attract students who do not benefit from spending on particular groups e.g. GT, SpecEd and ESL.  School resources are increasingly allocated to small subsets and the "regular kid" gets less attention and resources.  This is one population that may feel shortchanged by declining spending in public schools.[/quote]

Many parents don't know what they have until they have it. No one plans for their child to have special needs. It's the luck of the draw in a lot of ways. Public schools make it so we all know that if our children have special needs, they'll get the help they need. Charters put that in jeopardy.[/quote]

This is such BS. By law special needs will be met. Charters simply offer new ideas to the system. Parents then elect if those new ideas make any sense to them.

It's true that in public schools the union is strong. That's why experienced teachers refuse to teach 3rd grade, leaving this to newer teachers without tenure. As a parent, that unionized environment is not helping my child. It's shamelessly helping the teacher. I understand unionized teachers in the public school have an entrenched interest in bashing charter schools. But I'm not a teacher. I'm a parent. APS is failing my child. She is 12, at that age when girls often think they are bad at math. She has 32 kids in her math class. She hates the class already. You think she is going to get any attention in this class? She has no special needs. She's just a tween who is beginning to feel "bad" at math. I'd welcome a school with a smaller environment, more dynamic teaching,new ideas about teaching math and keeping her interested. [/quote]

Have you seen a DC charter school in action? When it comes to an IEP? Yeah, it's bad. They aren't giving services a student should have and they actively discourage faculty from advocating for student's with disabilities. That teacher has no protections for her job (because unions are evil, right), so she's stuck either going along to get along or moving onto a school system with more fair labor conditions (btw there are no unions in Virginia).

And the kicker is that they are operating in a high poverty, high stress community. The parents are struggling to keep up with life themselves and even the most involved ones at the school who attend IEP meetings don't understand they are being short changed. Part of the targeted focus of charter expansion has been the low information communities because they can cut corners. In high income areas, they struggle and cut services to general education students. Because they can't with special needs kids.

I cannot for the life of me see this working in a place like McLean or Arlington. If anything, I think charters would be terrified to try to open shops because the regulatory expense and litigation would put the school under.[/quote]

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