The left doesn't hate charters, it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable. That's a subset of charters plus all vouchers.
Actual public charters, by which public schools are granted some variance of generally applicable rules to trial new methods are not a problem to the left; the hijacking of that process to create super-voucher schools when the voucher model failed to gain sufficient political support is what the left hates.
> Parents choose to send their kids there
Often, after the local regular public school has been replaced by a privately-operated charter in the same facility, and often the parents who most choose to send their children their are the ones whose most-local school was replaced, because it's the most convenient public school and going to a more distant one has added cost.
As opposed to existing publicly subsidized public schools that are not effectively accountable?
These are a few examples from Los Angeles:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/06/17/how-does...
https://patch.com/california/studiocity/la-charter-schools-f...
https://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/04/05/13188/los-an...
Harper’s recently ran a pretty good piece on the matter, if anyone is interested in a longer-form skeptical perspective on charter schools and their lack of accountability:
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/the-k-12-takeover-charte...
This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance.
But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and while discriminating against SPED kids is illegal, the % of SPED kids at charters is disproportionately low[0].
> Charter schools are significantly less likely to reply to students to the IEP message than to the baseline message, while traditional public schools are not. There is also some evidence that schools are less likely to respond to families with Hispanic-sounding names.
[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~psb2101/BergmanMcFarlin_school_choi...
Thats not necessarily true, many (certainly here in MA) charter schools use a blind lottery for admissions.
Blind lotteries were started to combat this prevalent issue (and still fail to address poorly performing/SPED kids dropping out of charters and back into public education at a disproportionate rate, which undermines their goal).
At best, charter schools are public schools granted flexibility to trial new educational approaches on a limited basis to provide concrete evidence to drive decisions on changes in general practices.
But most charter schools, especially private-operated and especially private-for-profit ones, are not “at best”.
In this instance, it's a separation of church and state. You should not get a public dime if they do things like fire an LGBT teacher who had otherwise glowing reviews and successful students or refuse to teach basic science and history.
But the arguments against charter schools as a suck for public dollars as well as the way voucher programs can be abused (with support by the present Secretary of education, someone who has investments and connections to charter programs) is another huge issue.
It's not that the left opposes education, it's that they want actual education in schools. It's not that we shouldn't spend the money to improve education, it's that we need to invest in programs and schools that meet federal guidelines and respect federal law and constitutional rights.
And for me it's because the first amendment should guarantee freedom of and FROM religion. If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
What is stopping other schools from improving their standards? After all, they also have access to the same public dollars and I am not aware of any funding imbalance between charter vs public schools (though please correct me if I am wrong here).
1. Have an exam to pass up to the next grade. This isn’t necessarily intended to be malicious but it means that kids who are struggling, have less than fully supported disabilities, unstable home environments, etc. aren’t in their stats for the higher grades but will be in the comparison schools.
2. Have a graduation requirement that, say, you pass a ton of AP exams. Struggling students are probably going to bail when the odds aren’t looking good.
3. Not offering support services: charters have a financial incentive not to hire specialists for special needs, psychologists, librarians, cafeteria workers, etc. Parents will often pull kids over to the public schools where they’ll get more support, which also makes the cost differential and difficulties accurately comparing performance more pronounced.
4. Favor high levels of family support: academic performance tracks closely with family wealth so anything which favors affluence will have the effect of removing more lower-performing kids. That can be homework requiring laptops which aren’t provided, having a schedule or location which doesn’t work well for transit users, after school / weekend clubs or courses with supply fees, etc.
5. Tailor the curriculum to attract certain types of student: require things like taking Latin/Greek or a STEM load, don’t offer much in the way of arts/music/sports, or simply requiring more classes total, etc.
Again, this doesn’t need to be malicious - it just means that you’re encouraging kids who aren’t hyper-focused on academics and well supported to go elsewhere. That makes the numbers harder to accurately compare with public schools who have to serve everyone and also confounds the question of how many of those kids would have been high performers at any school. People like to say this pushes them to be better, and that’s true in some cases but not as many as lore would have it and tends to ignore the kids who burn out but would have done well with a bit less pressure.
Additionally, the US system punishes underperforming schools by deallocating funds. In what world does that make sense? Any rational society would send in an educational SWAT team to lift the school up, not handicap it further.
You'll probably understand better when you quit thinking that you can automatically identify the players involved. Perhaps simply ask why some folks oppose charter schools.
Others have responded with good answers, such as increased inequality and siphoning funds from public schools. If you take those to be left/right issues, well, there's your problem: does "the right" support increasing inequality and the draining money from public schools? That's kind of a rhetorical question (the assumed answer on my end is, "of course they don't"), but then again, maybe it's not.
The other declared reasons seemed unconvincing to me.
[A] Benchmarking - competing schools provide parents with a direct comparison point, so it's much harder for a struggling public school to disclaim responsibility for some of their own problems.
[B] Skimming - picking out the best-performing and the least-demanding students.
And religious schools can discriminate in a separate decision.
I will add "skimming" into the list, thanks for bringing this up.
1. Most of the big claims about charter school performance is due to small sample size or short measurement time. There's a notorious cycle in the field where someone announces that they have a brilliant way to make kids succeed and publishes results which get a lot of attention, but regression to the mean sets in once they try to scale it up or have more than a few years worth of data. Once you get enough data they perform very similarly to the public schools serving the same community — worse as often as better.
2. Schools which show consistently better performance are the ones who can select students who were higher performing when they enrolled. If you can consistently attract richer, educated parents to your school — say with a pitch telling everyone how it's the best possible education for their children — you will post great numbers but those kids would have done well almost anywhere. This can be overt in the states which allow test-in or in the structure of the school (i.e. hit students with enough outside homework and you're going to lose a lot of kids who don't have family resources to support that extra time) or hidden in other areas: for example, a school in a state which doesn't require schools to offer free/reduced lunch will exclude poor kids without explicitly doing so, as will not offering bus service in a suburban area, having limited support for anyone with special needs, etc.
When evaluating schools, you have to do a value-added analysis comparing like cohorts of students. Public schools serve both a greater number of students and a much higher degree of diversity and very few are truly “bad” as — what you're usually seeing is that poor kids have more obstacles to success, and the United States runs a lot of special needs support through schools, and averages hide that information. I live in Washington DC which has tons of charters and there are a couple which have some great things for certain kids but not everyone (e.g. a language immersion) and a whole bunch which look pretty similar to the data from the local public schools when you match for equivalent parental SES.
The money is diverted from the public schools to the charter schools... because the student has moved from a public school to a charter school.
Or is that wrong?
I'm fine with properly managed charter schools. However, opting out of public education does not entitle you to defund public education.
What's the problem? If people don't want to send their children to your public schools then take a look at why.
Imagine two groceries. One that has to, by law, serve every kind of customer, and one that is allowed to throw out shoplifters, drunks, people high-out-of-their-minds-on-meth, etc.
Which one of these will provide better groceries for lower prices?
The question is if there is a net benefit in educational outcomes for the combined charter and public system.
Maybe I could see charter schools as a reasonable option in some cases. With Betsy Devos at the helm, they should be fought at every turn.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/...
[2] https://www.michiganadvance.com/2019/02/12/how-25-years-of-c...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170217112809/https://www.fox2d...
The wapo article was garbage (really, 3 sentences?) , but I found the michigan advance ariccle informative. I still don't agree with your conclusions, but now know there is a questionable track record in Detroit. I think the connection between Devos and charters and her influences is overstated, as they existed in numerous states long before she held any federal positions.
But second, even if the funding is exactly the same, the result is that all the "cheap" i.e. wealthy students (books and technology readily available at home, familial support for their studies, financially able to engage in more expensive educational opportunities outside the classroom) end up in one school while those without these privileges, or with disabilities, end up in the other. Even if you give both the same resources the second school is going to perform worse. And under current US policy, the school that performs worse then gets even less money while the school of rich kids gets more! It's wealth consolidation, pure and simple.
I don't understand - are charter schools allowed to refuse to admit disabled students?
Edit: "your mask is slipping" isn't a productive characterization. What I meant was, your statement comes off as bias - "tribes", "the left", "protecting itself against competition" all scream pro-capitalist propaganda on a topic that, frankly, should stay as far away from capitalism as possible.
That's my interpretation of your remarks and I am well aware that my own biases may distort your message.
But typically, when someone introduces "competition" to a discussion on education and laments teach unions, they have an agenda. Again, I could easily be wrong.
So it's entirely reasonable to separate the reasons for the NEA to (1) exist, and (2) dislike charter schools -- that is, because their job is to protect teachers -- from the educational merits of charter schools. We shouldn't expect a teacher union to balance the merits of charter schools, because it's _not their job_.
We can talk about those points separately, but we need to expect that those talking points are completely independent of whether a teacher protection union (and I don't mean that negatively) objects to the schools which cut them out of the picture.
What are you insinuating?
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I have one username, and it's my name. It's all in my profile too. I don't pretend anything.
Charter schools are a threat to the public school system, so the public school system will naturally oppose charter schools.
If you are a public school without charter schools, a parent only has two choices: (1) public school, or (2) pay $20k+/yr/child to do private school. For the vast, vast majority of parents, public school is the only option.
Once you add charter schools to the mix, there is a new option that is viable for a much larger population. When parents choose charter schools, they lose public funding. Hence, this is a threat to public schools, and public school systems will strongly oppose it.
I think the reason you're having trouble understanding this is that you assume the public school union has the interests of children as it's top priority. With that assumption, opposition to charter schools doesn't make sense. But if you assume rational self interest, then you can easily explain the opposition.