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Ty Cole
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Ty commented on the article |It's hard to take this blog seriously with it's almost blind bias against charter schools.
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Ty commented on the article |Jim, a couple responses to your post.
First off, I agree with you insofar as the government should hold new charters accountable (whatever that means). I would also suggest that there ought to be transparency in their financial planning since most charters operate on a good portion of tax payer $.
Also, not sure where you get the idea that charter schools being any different than public schools in terms of administering standardized exams. The exams themselves are made by a third-party but they are always administered by the school itself.
Lastly, I'm not sure I follow where you are going with your Enron comparison. Because the collapse of Enron and the the rise of charter schools coincide, there is some relationship? I get that both of them were/are deregulated, but that seems more like a post hoc fallacy than anything else. -
Ty commented on the article |
I've been reading your blog with interest for the past few weeks but I disagree with your beefs re: Duncan's agenda to support charter schools (two of your three strikes).
First of all, I think you take his points out of context to a certain degree. Duncan does not say that charter school are THE answer, but rather that charter schools are part of the answer.
"Well, what I've said repeatedly is that, you know, charter schools aren't in and of themselves the answer, but they're part of the answer. And let me be clear: I'm not for more charters. I'm for more good charters. And what I'm actually for is for more good schools."
In Strike one: "the best of the best," we can surmise by Duncan's long history of touting KIPP and Green Dot and other "brands" - let's call them "chain schools" - perform so well on standardized tests (as if proficiency in reading and math are a full measure of what it means to be educated) because they usually don't enroll the lowest-performing students, and can expel those they do enroll for continuing to perform poorly.
I agree that this is one of the downsides to charter schools like KIPP. Admission to charter schools are based on lottery, and at KIPP for example, parents must sign a contract (not legally enforced of course, but KIPP can and does occasionally refer back to the contract as grounds for dismissal). By the very fact that these charters require parents to sign up their children for the lottery and sign a contract, you are in a sense selectively choosing for students who have parents that care and will get involved. It's important to note that this does not necessarily mean that these students are well behaved or that they are higher achievers.
Here's my point. Charters like YES, Green Dot, and KIPP will not single-handedly close the achievement gap (as Duncan says), but they are making significant advances in accelerating the academic outcomes of many low-income students who would otherwise coast through the public school system and find themselves in need of serious remediation before college (if indeed that is an option, as 54% of students from my school district in Houston even graduate high school, and that statistic is based on students who started off the year in the 12th grade, which is, in itself, ridiculous).
Oh, and I just re-read your point about charters being able to kick out low-performing students and believe that to be false. Oftentimes charter schools require a student to repeat a grade if they have not met the standards for promotion to the next grade. When this happens, these students know that they can retreat back to the public school system and be promoted to the next grade so they oftentimes choose this path.
All of this is to say that I think you come down too hard on Duncan (specifically, his faith in charter schools) and may have misrepresented him in others.
My biggest problems with schools like KIPP is that they do selectively leave out the "bottom of the barrel" by the very fact that admission to the charter requires parental involvement (in the sense that they must call or visit the school to sign up their student for the lottery and sign a contract to support their student).
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts or anyone else's in regard to this matter. -
Ty commented on the article |
very cool. some nice shots of the university of edinburgh in the background ...
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