Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I was going to say something similar but with less facts :-) We've talked with a number of charter school efforts and one of the supports for such schools is the notion that the students that attend want to attend so being expelled is an actual deterrent. Further, teachers who want to teach classes of students who want to be there don't want to be fired which provides incentive to be better teachers.

I think the NAACPs primary agenda here is that they feel Charter schools create a policy "out" for the history of being unwilling to take the steps necessary to make public schools work (and union reform is high on that list). As a result they can't get any traction on getting the public schools fixed if the policy maker says "well get your children into the charter school if you have a problem with it." and since Charter schools cannot serve the entire population, people will not make it in who would have benefited from being in, and the school they are "forced" to go to, is being neglected by people who should fix it.

> and since Charter schools cannot serve the entire population

Citation please. Seriously, I see no reason whatsoever why charter schools, over time, could not service 100% of the population.

There is no reason per se to reform the public school system, just like there is no reason per se to continue to develop DOS—just use Windows. Or Linux. Etc.

Not everything needs to live forever, including "public schools".

I see private schools with the same disdain as I see bottled water. People drinking bottled water and refusing to drink tap water is our failure whether it be actual investment in water infrastructure or in "optics" of our water infrastructure. People sending their kids to privately managed schools is a failure of our public schools or the "optics" of our public schools.

I remember that I just said the other day that we can train and retrain law enforcement all day long but we won't see any meaningful improvement without enforcement with "teeth" and that unions are actively hurting their members if not because of what they do then because of the "optics" of what they do. I think the same applies for teachers' unions as well.

We talked about the case of interns being fired en masse a little while ago and some of not many people in that discussion agreed that it didn't look good that the interns were riled up over something (dress code) that didn't help the business much. When teachers bring up the issue of low pay, I can't help but feel a lot of parents and voters see it as selfish in the same way. "The teachers should not spend so much time thinking about their own pay but rather about the students and what they can do to help students."

> I think the NAACPs primary agenda here is that they feel Charter schools create a policy "out" for the history of being unwilling to take the steps necessary to make public schools work (and union reform is high on that list).

Absolutely! I kind of want to go back to the topic of tap water versus bottled water. The people who can't afford to buy bottled water are unlikely to have much of a voice in local government to have their issue fixed. The parents who can't get their kids in chartered schools or who don't care enough to get their kids in chartered schools are unlikely to have much of a voice in local government to make public education better either. Now that I think about it, it sounds just like segregation. The only difference is that instead of an official policy, it is a little more latent.

Charter schools are public schools, just managed by private organizations. And it's not a situation where only rich people can get their kids into charter schools. For example, in D.C. the public schools in rich white neighborhoods (Georgetown, Capitol Hill) are district-run. Charter public schools are concentrated neighborhoods with mostly minority populations.

Nationally, Charters often have comparable proportions (and in some cases, a larger proportion) of students from disadvantaged groups: http://www.publiccharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NAP....

Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades, and are usually not obligated to provide special education services. They are not public schools. They are corporate-run political organizations that prop up dozens of these PACs pushing an pro-charter agenda.

https://cloakinginequity.com/2016/08/01/breaking-news-aclu-f...

> Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades

Those are good things. These kids almost always have serious impulse control problems, and it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs. Teachers should be teachers--they shouldn't have to do double-duty as behavioral therapists.

> and are usually not obligated to provide special education services.

That's just false. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act's (IDEA) requirement to provide education appropriate to individuals with disabilities applies to charter schools: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/charterqa/chardisab....

> corporate-run

Those aren't dirty words. Do you want your school run like an Apple Store, or like a DMV location?

Thank you for pointing out the falsehood.

The charter school I work for puts a special emphasis on SpEd. I don't know if we are required to, but we do. And we are pretty damn good at it.

We can debate whether they're good things or not, but they clearly confound comparisons with non-charter schools, which do not get to apply those kinds of selection powers to improve their published outcomes.

> We can debate whether they're good things or not, but they clearly confound comparisons with non-charter schools

I don't understand your comment at all, but I am very curious to know what you actually mean. Can you please clarify and expand? To begin, what do you mean by "they" when you say we can debate whether they're good things or not?

I'll try. People often say that students from charter schools outperform students from (other) public schools. If we let charter schools kick students out, we should let all public schools let kick students out so as to level the playing field.

Imagine we compare Denver Broncos against Miami Dolphins. Just a small adjustment. We require Miami Dolphins to let anyone who is a resident of Florida in the team. We put no such restriction on the Denver Broncos (because Go Broncos!) Now, we compare average 40 yard dash between the "average" Denver Broncos player and the "average" Miami Dolphins "player". What do you think will happen?

Those allow charter schools to boost their performance not by actually performing better, but by simply kicking out kids whose results would drag their average performance down. Which means that any comparison with public schools that can't do this is misleading The UK equivalent of charter schools has exactly the same problem.

>it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs

OK so who provides that?

> and are usually not obligated to provide special education services

This is 100% false in California.

> Charter schools are public schools, just managed by private organizations.

Charter schools are publicly-funded schools exempted, via the grant of a special charter (hence the name), from some of the generally-applicable rules governing the public school systems of which they are a part (which particular rules exceptions are made for varies from charter to charter.) They may be publicly operated, operated by private for-profit enterprises, or operated by private non-profit enterprises.

> And it's not a situation where only rich people can get their kids into charter schools.

While that may be the case, among the rules that charters are often exempted are ones which prevent them for cherry-picking students on grounds which, while they may not directly relate to wealth, are strongly correlated with it.

> Charter public schools are concentrated neighborhoods with mostly minority populations.

That's actually part of the problem that minority-interest groups have with them; among the problems that this creates is that they often displace schools that are subject to the normal public rules from those areas, forcing children who are not admitted under the charters rules to go to more distant traditional public schools than they would have to if the charter did not exist. (Another is that, for less-selective charters, members of the population may be effectively coerced into attending the charter as opposed to a traditional public school by the lack of access to traditional public school caused by the charter placement.)

From the parent's point of view their interaction with the school system is very transactional - they have a limited number of years to interact with any given school (elementary, middle, high) and they would like the best experience for their child. Changing the school system in its entirety requires a mainly lifelong commitment and mainly suits activist organizations, such as NAACP, who has time for these multi-decade battles.

Think about other limited-time transactions, such as car ownership. Yes, one can spend countless years petitioning Dodge and Kia to improve its quality standards, or just buy a Toyota and call it a day.

I agree with you on water, as it's not a limited-time engagement, and therefore the attitude people have towards it is not transactional.

> I see private schools with the same disdain as I see bottled water. People drinking bottled water and refusing to drink tap water is our failure whether it be actual investment in water infrastructure or in "optics" of our water infrastructure. People sending their kids to privately managed schools is a failure of our public schools or the "optics" of our public schools.

What do we since people haven't managed to fix public schools yet? Just outlaw the bottled water?

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