Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost | Hacker News Reader

Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost

nytimes.com

30 pointsmooreds16 comments

Contrast that to Colorado, where charter schools are among the best performing and diverse schools in the state.

The cause of Michigan's charter school problem may be more of a Michigan issue than a charter school issue.

http://watchdog.org/215385/charter-schools-top-denvers-list-...

I'm from Michigan and there have been charter schools that have been huge successes and a number that have been huge failures. It may be too easy to create them and some start underfunded from the beginning.

People are fleeing the Detroit Public school system and a larger number of failing charter schools are in the Detroit area. The article fails to mention the huge amount of graft and embezzlement in DPS and the very poor condition of the schools despite a fairly high amount spent per pupil.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edmi/pr/former-detroit-public-s...

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/...

FWIW, I live in Michigan and know people that send their kids to charter schools and they are quite happy with it.

There are people who go to Applebees and enjoy it, too.

Doesn't make it a good restaurant.

(There are, of course, likely to be some genuinely phenomenal charter schools. The article does cite stats for Michigan that say, on average, they're worse than average.)

There are empirical measures of school performance. Anecdotal happiness isn't really one of them.

School performance can be manipulated as well.

Statistics only matter when you are questioning the sample size of a study without examining the power of the sample the study did use.

>There are people who go to Applebees and enjoy it, too. >Doesn't make it a good restaurant.

Ah, good old fashioned snobbery. Never change, HN.

>(There are, of course, likely to be some genuinely phenomenal charter schools. The article does cite stats for Michigan that say, on average, they're worse than average.)

But in Michigan, charter schools tend to be concentrated in some of the poorest areas, right? That could explain some of it.

Charter schools seem to be quite misunderstood in our country for reasons I have yet to understand. My kids are in a charter school (not in MI) and we love it. In talking about it with a co-worker once her comment was, "Oh, they take money from public schools." I had to explain to her that not only was our school also a public school, but in our district non-charter schools actually get more money than ours (this has actually been changed since then, thankfully). Both of her parents were retired public school teachers so perhaps there is some bias coming from that? Or maybe there is a general confusion between charter schools and school vouchers?

EDIT: Formatting

> Charter schools seem to be quite misunderstood in our country for reasons I have yet to understand

It's one of those ideas that Republicans support, so Democrats feel bound to oppose it.

The teachers' unions are one of the highest donors to the Democratic Party. At the top support is almost purely financially motivated. By the time the support message reaches the Democratic rank-and-file, the message becomes more emotional in nature.

I live in an area with several great charter schools, several badly under-performing charter schools, and similarly several under-performing and high performing public schools, all in the same school district.

The biggest difference between those that under-perform vs over-perform boils down to the average SES of the families whose students attend the school, which translates fairly well into the resources (time, $, and skills) that a community is able to put into their school.

At the schools that perform well, regardless of whether they are public vs. charter, there is a critical mass of parents who dedicate not only their money (via PTA donations), but their time, organizational and technical skills (i.e. managing budget, strategic planning, fundraising) to the school. The existence of the critical mass of people with such resources is often a function of geography and other selection biases among the students/families that attend.

All this organizing, fundraising, and student selection bias has a disproportionate effect on school performance. In particular, government funding (California in this case) often falls hundreds to thousands of dollars short per student. So PTAs fund programs like science, art, and music, and teachers aides to support classrooms. As a result, higher SES schools tend to have those programs while lower SES schools tend not to have them.

Anecdata, but I'm the product of a K-8 charter school in Flint, MI, and I do pretty well for myself. I haven't kept fastidious track of my fellow grads, but the handful I talk to every few years or so also seem to be similarly successful. If having kids were in the cards for me, I would have no problem sending them to a charter school as well.

Can I just say I love the attitude re: charter schools ITT, a refreshing change of pace from the public school obsession elsewhere.

It's like I've just nipped into the waterboard room for a quick drizzle, will be riding this high the rest of the day.

This reads like someone set out to write an article on "why charter schools are bad" and then went off to cherrypick some evidence, rather than someone set out to write an article which investigates how Michigan's experiment with charter schools is going.

Welcome to journalism.

Yeah, I suspect if you looked at the worst Michigan public schools, you could make a much stronger case that "Michigan gambled on government-run schools. Its children lost."

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