Too much potential profit to be ignored. If only they can privatize schools!!

education.comments@tn.gov

Oh Yeah....

Don't eat Ruby Tuesday's crappy food or buy Hondas from those tools.

I am a supporter of public schools. That's where I went. That's where my kids went. I did PR for Knox County Schools for a few years.

That said, I think Charter Schools are probably a good idea and worth trying. Maybe they will find ways to do some things better. Or differently...because school systems do not change easily.

I think condemning people for supporting this concept is wrong. If you choose not to do business with them because they have an idea or belief different than yours...well, I think that's a fairly dangerous, crappy path to follow, but it's your choice. But labeling them as anti public education seems wrong.

I do not feel the same way about vouchers, which I do view as bad for public education. But Charter schools...we should give them a try.

If you want to see real-life laboratory in parental 'choice' as advertised by the charter school lobby, look at the results in New Orleans where 70% of the schools are managed by private corporate charters. All choices are one-sided in favor of the charter investors.

Parents no longer have a right to a neighborhood school because they must apply for acceptance into charters. There is no guarantee their children will get in, parents have no voice on the charter school boards and no influence into acceptance decisions. Charters rob parents of the choice from going to schools closest to home and input into their child's education. Some families are forced to place different children in different charters as one charter will not accept all children in the family.

Families cannot count on stability and continuity of a child to stay in a charter once they attend. Students with disabilities or behavior problems, or those who can't make the high test scores are either rejected outright or counseled out and placed in the few segregated, poorly funded, overcrowded public schools. If the charter operator waits to expel a child after the state sends the funding, the money does not follow the child to the public school.

Corporate lobbyists have re-written the laws to exempt their charter schools from ALL IDEA mandates for children with disabilities and are not required to comply with children's legally binding Individual Education Plans (IEPs) that all public schools must comply.

This is the New Orleans School model of private charters "choice", coming to a community near you paid for by our tax dollars (most of which may go to out of state investors.) Here are some parents who have experienced the privatized charter juggernaut first hand.
(link...)

So, "choice" is a euphemism for segregation and exclusion for kids who are too expensive to educate. When your only metric of morality is profit, it's hard to judge where the truth lies. A legitimate question is what do businesses have to gain by advocating for charter schools? Who is profiting when tax dollars are laundered through charter schools and where is that money going? Here's one reason to be skeptical of these business endorsements:

(link...)

And here are hundreds of millions of reasons to reject charter schools:
(link...)

We should boycott all businesses that endorse charters until they comply with all of the same mandates of transparency, parent involvement, and compliance with equal opportunities for all children.

Yeah, on reflection I was wrong on the protest part. I overreacted. If you don't like somebody, it probably makes sense not to do business with them.

I'm not wavering on Charter schools. Will they be great? Maybe and maybe not. Some may excel, some may falter. But the status quo has to be challenged. One of the sources in the study you sent was a Finnish approach. I grew up in an area where Finnish was the predominant nationality and have nothing but respect for their thinking and their ethics, work and otherwise. But I don't see what might be working there being embraced here. Very, very different viewpoints. I'd love to see us embrace the kind of change and yield the kind of results that Finland has made. Just don't see it happening.

I understand the fear that diverting any money from the traditional school system is crossing a line that many don't want to cross. I just think on at least a limited basis, it is worth a try.

Two more points:

First, I'm always fascinated by the "different view points" argument. When you look at what was behind Finland's reforms in the early 1990's, they were very much the same concerns that we say we're concerned with: remaining competitive in a global knowledge economy; innovation; etc. And they wanted to accomplish the same things that we say we want to do: de-centralization; experimentation; etc. Yet, critics will always say that what they have done in Finland is not relevant in this context. That befuddles me. It is certainly true that we cannot take the Finnish model and plop it down en toto on this side of the Atlantic. However, that does not mean that we can't learn some lessons from them. In fact, if you look at what Canada has been up to for the past decade, you will see that they have followed much the same path with great success, ie. de-centralization coupled with investments in the professional and institutional capacity of schools. While Finland has a unique culture that cherishes education and reading, it is a modern nation-state made up of social institutions inhabited by human beings operating under specific institutional frameworks and incentive structures just like the good ol' US of A.

Second, being critical of current trends in education policy that lack an empirical basis is not the same thing as being for the status quo. That is a hollow rhetorical flourish. Personally, I'd like to burn this mutha down and start anew, but that is highly unlikely.

While we may base our basic issues and solutions in the same terms, I think the Finnish are far different in how they will approach a solution. And they may be politically more aligned behind a solution. We're at a pretty bad place politically in the U.S. right now. Virtually everything gets turned into a partisan fight. It makes getting anything done almost impossible and is incredibly discouraging.

Incidentally, while systems are generally resistant to change, Knox County has been far less so. Sarah Simpson, the longtime Assistant Superintedent for Instruction and Curriculum (or viewed another way, damn near everything really important) loved the idea of doing things differently if it would help kids. She really wanted to do a Montessori style school because she believed it really worked for a lot of kids. And Knox was where value-added was developed and tested...because Sarah and others knew that data could help them spot teachers who weren't doing well and then help them do better.

She was a hell of a lady.

Metulj:

There is no question that some parents will go to Charter schools to avoid being with a socio-economic or intellectual group unlike their own.

But I don't think it's most and I don't think that's a valid reason to not do them.

In terms of special ed and other challenged groups: it would suit me fine if some level of such students, perhaps the system average per school, were required at Charter schools.

But the concept itself is worth testing. It might work, it might not. But I just think it's worth a shot.