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You're wrong. Charter schools do NOT get to select, at least not in Minnesota (and states that allow selectiveness are being dumb).

You are right, though, in that you're starting with a pool of students whose parents care enough to look for something better and take an active role in their children's education. You might have a problem with that. If so, I suggest you read Harrison Bergeron.

So if a kid grows up in an abusive home, fuck him forever because his parents don't give a shit.

I grew up in an abusive home with parents who didn't give a shit. So did a lot of successful people.

Your anecdote doesn't prove your point.

It does, however, disprove yours.

edit: More to the point... if I could have attended the fine charter my kids attended, I would have had a better trajectory overall. But more important than the schooling was my innate talent and determination. I'm way over on the nature end of the nature-vs-nurture scale. Bad families and bad schools make the success formula more difficult for kids, but not impossible.

Apparently not, given that I did not make a point.

I didn't read it was trying to prove a point except to counter someone else's generalization by providing a specific counter-case.

Hopefully not, but a charter can't forcibly compel an abusive parent to send his/her child there. You'd hope that wasn't the case, but ever since the Founding Fathers flipped their shit over taxation without representation, we've built a country that favors the ambitious and fortunate 94 percent of the time.

I was going to write basically the exact same thing. The comparison isn't fair.

Public schools have to accept everyone, charter schools can be selective.

The ones with lotteries are self-selecting too, because you have to have an involved parent to even enter the lottery, which means only the kids with "good parents" go to that school, which again biases them towards greater success.

While the comparison isn't perfectly apples to apples, I don't think it is fair to rule out the possibility that charter schools might do a better job of serving students with so-called "good parents". If it is the case, why is that a bad thing?

Do we not want schools that serve the needs of many different groups?

This isn't a comparison between luxury items like ski resorts. Shouldn't we hold the education of the next generation to a higher standard? Shouldn't children have equal access to good schools, regardless of the quality of their parents?

The funny thing is that this isn't the case even in the world of public education. In my hometown, students must go to the school that serves the part of town where they live. What happens is that families will move around town to get their student into the public school that serves their needs best.

No, the point is that when you make a comparison as unfair as this one, you're doing something unjust.

It also marks you as a person who is conspicuously dishonest. Seriously, saying it isn't "perfectly"" apples to apples is a gross mischaracterization. And yes, that's a very real form of dishonesty.

None of this is to say that anything about public schools, from their founding principles to their day to day administration, is above criticism. That's not the case. But slandering them by way of inappropriate comparisons - then adding to the dishonesty by downplaying just how inappropriate that comparison really is - is wrong.

I said that it wasn't a perfect comparison - "isn't perfectly apples to apples" - because having been a teacher, I understand how important involved parents are for students and I didn't want to minimize that fact.

But saying "apples and oranges" makes it sound like we're talking about elite private schools and urban public schools. We're not. We're talking about schools that are both publicly funded, but have different mandates in how they run their particular institutions.

My point is that if charter schools are a legitimate way to better serve one segment of the population, it seems foolish to discount them just because of the types of people that go to them. We should be striving to give all students the best possible opportunity for success, not hampering them on purpose by making them attend schools that don't meet their needs.

Sorry, but that's not going to fly.

Spinning an already misleading comparison is dishonest, full stop. And saying you were "concerned" that an accurate analogy "makes it sound like we're talking about elite private schools and urban public schools" is even more ridiculous when we are very explicitly talking about the difference between involved and uninvolved parents.

Moreover, if you were truly "concerned" about being misunderstood in this fashion, there's an honest way of handling that - which is saying so in your post. After, all there's no character limit on HN. You're free to be as clear as you need to be.

If you want to argue that charters are better because they can select better students AND they're free to operate in ways that have proven beneficial, then by all means do so. Indeed it would be fascinating to hear about approaches that produce clear benefit regardless of the quality of the students. But that's a much tougher case to make.

Indeed, the most famous example - that of Geoffrey Canada in Harlem - reveals how even the freest, best endowed schools struggle to educate people well enough to break the cycle of poverty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/education/13harlem.html?pa...

I view the different types of schools (Charter, Public, Private, Homeschool) as being types of apples (Granny Smith, Fuji, Pink Lady). They are all varieties of schools/apples, but each has different qualities that make them unique.

Within those parameters, making a comparison between a Charter School and a Public School is apples to apples - and is a valid comparison to make. It is also completely valid to make what I will call "Granny Smith to Granny Smith comparisons" between different schools of the same variety.

My original point was just to state that Charter Schools might better serve students who have more involved parents - and that I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.

And now I'm hungry for apples.

The problem with this is funding. The state funds charter schools. Are we supposed to have separate schools for kids who's parents care more? Those schools would take funding away from other kids. I think the money should be spent on the schools serving the most kids so it has the biggest impact.

charter schools can be selective

Charter schools cannot be selective, by law, in most states, including my state (Minnesota), where charter schools have existed longest.

If educating the masses at a public school is so much more difficult, then why do we even try that?

Shouldn't we work to break up the student population into smaller, more manageable chunks? That way you can target the specific needs of a smaller group and work to make each succeed rather than doing a mediocre job of trying to meet the incredibly diverse needs of a much larger group.

That sounds really expensive.

Having a poorly educated workforce is more expensive than most of the options, but you'll only notice that twenty years later.

"If educating the masses at a public school is so much more difficult, then why do we even try that?"

We do not want to have a society where an elite, educated aristocracy rules over an uneducated serf class. That means we need to educate everyone, including people who have less potential.

"Shouldn't we work to break up the student population into smaller, more manageable chunks?"

1. Who is going to pay for it? You will need more teachers, and you will need to pay for a system for dividing students.

2. Politics will come into play. The moment you divide students by anything other than their age, you face accusations of bias. Education is highly political; here is an example that should resonate with the HN crowd:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/nyregion/software-enginee...

It if pretty unfair to characterize private school as being some sort of bastion where elites get away from the "uneducated serf class". My private school experience (both attending, and then teaching at one) has shown me that many private school students come from working class families that are anything but elite.

> We do not want to have a society where an elite, educated aristocracy rules over an uneducated serf class.

True, the serf class needs to be educated.

[edit]

...and I guess an uneducated aristocracy as well.

Grouping people by age during their developmental years is a great way to stunt some people and leaves others hopelessly behind.

[/edit]

We do not want to have a society where an elite, educated aristocracy rules over an uneducated serf class. That means we need to educate everyone, including people who have less potential.

I agree with that goal. And that is why I support public policies that allow more learner choice in education, so that everyone can shop for a good fit, and all providers of education are on notice that they can lose revenue if they don't meet learner needs.

My basis of knowledge: I have lived in more than one country, and see that learner power to shop is an important incentive to improved education. I live in the state of the United States that had charter schools the earliest,

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

and that had statewide open enrollment first,

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

so I have a direct experience base with living in a state with a moderate degree of learner choice, and that is not harmful to learners.

"all providers of education are on notice that they can lose revenue if they don't meet learner needs."

By which you mean, "If they don't meet the expectations of parents, school board members, and politicians." By what criteria will schools be judged?

Right now, we have a serious problem in education in America: we focus on standardized tests. Schools do "better" if students get high test scores; they do "worse" if students get low test scores. Nobody is asking, "Can the students think for themselves? Can they solve problems they have not seen before?" Is that what you want schools to do -- to just train students to score high on tests?

Politicians love tests, because they are single-dimensional numbers that are easy to point to. Parents like tests because that is what colleges use to filter applicants. School boards like tests because they can point to them when they need to ask the government for money. Nobody cares if students are learning anything other than test taking skills, except for dedicated teachers who actually want to teach. There are exceptions, but such people are, well, exceptional.

The real issue here is that the results of education are long-term, but these "market based" or "accountability based" approaches to school focus entirely on the short-term. You need to look at what the graduates of a particular school are doing 10 or 20 years later. Are they curing cancer? Did they overthrow a corrupt government? Are they working an honest job? Test scores do not tell you these things. It makes sense to shut down a school whose graduates are more likely to wind up in prison than to live a good life. It does not make sense to shut down a school based on standardized tests or college admissions (which is not independent from standardized test scores).

It is not an easy problem. It means taking risks. Yet right now, we are not even trying; we just point to test scores, talk about how terrible unions are, and continue to pretend that "the market" will find a good answer for us.

How is that different from an honors, IB, etc. program?

The same students do better at charter schools than when they go to a public school though. So it's not just selection bias. Getting away from the masses that have no interest in education is just as important in some places.

Sure, that's something that a public school -- bound by law to include everyone -- can't do, but it's no reason to drag others down into the mess that is public schools.

Selection bias. The poor performers that move schools do so because they have involved parents, and involved parents are the #1 indicator of success in school.

It's not just selection bias, though. Charters, having distinctive education styles, will be more appropriate for some students and less appropriate for others. The other layer of "selection bias", then, is that parents/children will be more inclined to charters that seem more suitable for their own needs.

For example, in MN, we have a number of Somali-language bilingual charters for our massive Somali immigrant population. Fantastic option for Somali immigrant kids. Not so fantastic for other kids. That's not just selection bias on parental involvement, that's appropriate environment for the kids' needs.

Not just selection bias. Look up how some of them are selected, through lottery. Involved parents sign up kids for the lottery and they end up going to either school randomly. The kids getting into charter schools show more improvement than those going to public schools. Both groups probably outperform their peers in their individual schools.

You could argue that charters have a selection bias for more passionate teachers and staff, but that's kind of proving the point of the charter schools.

Ideally we would help ALL students improve, but isn't it better that we give the kids with more involved parents a fighting chance by letting them opt into a more rigorous school?

Otherwise we create a situation that looks like this:

1. Parents who are involved fight a losing battle to help their kids succeed in a school that is simply not equipped to educate them.

2. Those students fail to achieve in traditional ways, reinforcing the idea that it's pointless to try.

3. Repeat until everyone suffers from an acute case of learned helplessness.

> isn't it better that we give the kids with more involved parents a fighting chance by letting them opt into a more rigorous school?

Not if the funding for the more rigorous school is coming from the same pool of funds that could have gone to the public school.

I went to a charter school during my last two years of high school and it was probably one of the most important choices I have made to date. The charter school I went to used a lottery based system that got students in. This was kind of a negative thing in my opinion. For me the traditional public educational process was in a way meaningless. I have always been self-taught and the charter school I went to allowed me to. In high school things were kind of going downhill for me until I made the decision of going to a charter school.

People learn in many different ways. There were people at the charter school I went to that really didn't care all that much so their experience was a lot different from mine. I complete agree with you when you say that you don't like how people state "this charter school is better than this public school." People learn differently than others. The traditional route is perfect for some and charter schools are better for others. Not all charter schools are the same along with public schools.

The article explains fairly well what this study does to counter your point. The charter advantage seems to be fairly narrow: urban overcrowded areas. However, in those areas there does seem to be an advantage and it appears to be due to longer hours.