Charter schools aren't a panacea but they have had great success in multiple cities across this country. The idea that teachers aren't unionized and have more flexibility is anathema to the liberal mindset of some. There was a book written called The Prize about Newark, NJ after Zuckerburg gave his $100 million donation. The whole school system is a racket and "the prize" is who gets to control the billion purse.
This the desire by some for the status quo and 1950's style education system
A Sea of Charter Schools in Detroit Leaves Students Adrift
Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.
Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.
While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.
Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina.
But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.
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The 1993 state law permitting charter schools was not brought on by academic or financial crisis in Detroit — those would come later — but by a free-market-inclined governor, John Engler. An early warrior against public employee unions, he embraced the idea of creating schools that were publicly financed but independently run to force public schools to innovate.
To throw the competition wide open, Michigan allowed an unusually large number of institutions, more than any other state, to create charters: public school districts, community colleges and universities. It gave those institutions a financial incentive: a 3 percent share of the dollars that go to the charter schools. And only they — not the governor, not the state commissioner or board of education — could shut down failing schools.
For-profit companies seized on the opportunity; they now operate about 80 percent of charters in Michigan, far more than in any other state. The companies and those who grant the charters became major lobbying forces for unfettered growth of the schools, as did some of the state’s biggest Republican donors.
“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/...chool-choice-but-not-better-schools.html?_r=0
10 Years After Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure
Test scores tell one story, and residents tell another. A three-month investigation by In These Times reveals the cracks in the education reform narrative.
On eighth-grade reading and math tests, charter-school students performed worse than their public-school counterparts by enormous margins—2 to 3 standard deviations.*
The researchers found that the gap between charter and public school performance in Louisiana was the largest of any state in the country. And Louisiana’s overall scores were the fourth-lowest in the nation.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/183...eans-all-charter-district-has-proven-a-failur
These Charter Schools Tried to Turn Public Education Into Big Business. They Failed.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled...chools_are_failing_and_fading_here_s_why.html
If you want to have this conversation .. let's do it in another thread .. and I'll again demonstrate why for-profit charter schools are not the answer to education in this country.
