NBC's 2012 Education Nation tour kicked off with a conversation about the viability of using charter schools to improve the American education system. While two of the panelists onstage for the discussion—MSNBC contributor Jonathan Alter and Better Education for Kids' Derrell Bradford—argued that charter schools were good for the country, National Education Association Vice President Lily Eskelson and University of Texas educational policy professor Julian Vasquez Heilig offered a more skeptical view.
"Here's why you cap charters," Heilig said during Sunday's panel, moderated by MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry. "Because 83 percent of them do not perform better than our urban schools, our traditional urban schools." He pointed to a recent study he had co-written on the charter network KIPP, which he said found, "about 40 percent of African American students left KIPP in Texas over the last ten years. That's their dirty little secret."
Alter questioned the validity of Heilig's data, and suggested that charter schools offer a good site for testing new models of education. "The highly performing charters are schools that all schools can learn from," he said. "So what I'd like to see more of is sharing of best practices between those charter schools that are working—and some of them don't work, many of them don't work—but the ones that are working have 90, 95 percent graduation rates in very impoverished neighborhoods. These are terrific schools."
In a statement responding to Heilig's study, KIPP said, "Vasquez Heilig relied on previous studies that claimed KIPP achieves results through high student attrition, while completely ignoring findings from the independent research group Mathematica that KIPP loses fewer black male students than neighboring district schools."
Charter school proliferation has been a hot topic of debate lately, and it was one of the major factors that caused the Chicago Teachers' Union to go on strike earlier this month. One Chicago public school teacher, John Kuijper, told Lean Forward that charter schools in Chicago were helping to create a "two-tiered" education system.
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In Tulsa, groups of teachers, sitting around the TV, yelling "you got that right!", "exactly", "that is the complete truth".
My guess is that Education Nation is a rather huge success. ☺
Call me the eternal pessimist, but "For Profit" means just that,,
profit before results,, profit above people.
More middlemen is not the answer.
a typical Liberal who doesn't understand how capitalism works
if you provide a crappy service that has bad results no one buys your service hence you don't make a profit
good service and profits go hand and hand
Right because businesses put quality before profit, then there is reality really you should try living in it instead of just repeating the nonsense you been told by the GOP. Charter schools cost twice as much and produces about the same results that public schools produce.
It's called competition whom....if you don't provide the highest quality for the least cost.....you will be replaced by someone who will.....Today our public schools have poor quality at high cost....Just the opposite of what we should be striving for....
Charter schools cost twice as much and produces about the same results that public schools produce.
http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2011/12/05/nationwide-charters-schools-spend-1800-less-per-student/
Well whom....good thing we keep an eye on your posts....
Really tap how is it competition when charter schools have the same amount of failed students as public schools have. Really tap competition produced no savings in fact charter schools charge more then public schools yet the produce the same number of failures so you pay more for the same product.
Apparently you didn't read my link from NPR.....Nationwide charter schools spend $1800 per child less than Public Schools....so get your facts straight for once....
Do you go to the store and pick up a can of beans that has 65 cents when there is an Identical can next to it that is 55 cents????? No wonder you want the government to spend your money for you....
They spend less per student due to the profit being extracted for duplicate bureaucracies and bloat at the top. In other words, they redistribute the wealth up, out of the middle class and out of the economy, since teachers will have less to spend.
For more evidence, go to Julian Vasquez Heilig’s blog cloakinginequity.com
Two factors enter into disparity between public vs. charter school per-pupil expenditures: teachers in charter schools are usually just starting out and at the low end of the salary scale; charter schools don't have special needs students whose education is more costly, per pupil, than non-special-needs students, whereas public schools must accept and provide a "free and appropriate education" to all.
I agree with Alter: we need to look at the successful charter schools and apply those new ideas in all our schools. it was infuriating to me that we got so few questions from the students in the audience. this was not a student forum it was a bunch of adults on stage talking to each other, with lots and lots of commercial breaks. when we finally got to a student question (a good question about free thought in the classroom) the adult who tried to answer (Lillian Eskelson) gave a long-winded rambling reply that had nothing to do with the question. she was still arguing about charter schools even though the question was about free thought in the classroom. I wish we could have heard more from the students.
Let's agree on basic facts: Charter schools nationwide pay their teachers far less than traditional schools. (In Chicago, average teacher salaries in charters are 2/3 of a traditional teacher) That is a fact. Charter schools have a higher teacher turnover rate as a consequence of"cost cutting" as a motivation for these schools. In the end, charter schools create instability not only in the school communities but also in the larger economic community. Charter schools help create and promote a system of constantly changing employees, and as a consequence, students never get the stability of knowing that a teacher (adult) is in it for the long haul. Consider traditional elementary schools that have a stable work force. Kindergarten students enter a school knowing that most of the adults have been around for a number of years and the institution itself is stable. In charters, however, teachers don't stay (3-5 year average) and thus, the children never know, year to year, who will be a "familiar" adult by the time they reach 8th grade. In short, charter schools, like businesses, are constantly trying to save a buck. The best way to do this is keep labor costs down through constant attrition and minuscule pay raises that drive teachers out. Why doesn't anyone ask charter advocates WHY they don't pay their employees as well as traditional public schools? These charters supposedly have not only public financing but also private financing. With those kind of resources, shouldn't charter school teachers be paid more? Why isn't this happening? Why is it that charter operators make more than the highest paid district employees? C