Why focus on problems with Charter Schools

Why focus on problems with Charter Schools when the focus should be on how to fix education in our country?

With so much “reform” focused on expanding charter schools it is important to realize that they are not the magic bullet many have made them out to be. You can’t compare Public and Charter schools in NYC, because the charters are playing by different rules with different students.

Several high performing charter schools have changed the threshold for grade promotion from 65 to 80. Its not hard to have a 100% passing rate on standardized tests when only students that have 80’s in the class take the test. If a student has less than an 80, it is likely they will be transferring out of the charter to a public school, rather than being left back. That’s why the charter schools with high standardized test scores are also the ones with 30% attrition.

In addition, we know that the charter schools that are enrolling fewer ELL’s and SPED students.

Charter schools are also investing big money on PR and advertising. As a result we hear about the success of Harlem Success Academy or Harlem Village academy, but we don’t hear about the great work P.S. 83 is doing in the same district.

The PR campaign has worked. Reform to many now means, expanding charter schools and providing them with huge (multi million dollar) donations. We can’t address the current reform movement unless we also address the fact that CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE NOT PROVIDING PUBLIC EDUCTION, but education for the top 2/3 of students. If we listen to their PR firms long enough we will forget that the bottom 1/3, the group of students our reform movement should focused on, are left out. I guess not all of them are left out. Some of them will attend P.S. 83 a high performing public schools that is humbly doing the job they were meant to do - Educating all children.

If we were to sit down with Geoffrey Canada for a drink he would tell us what reform really means. “Keep the kids that make your test scores and graduation rates look great. Create policies that ensure the low performing students transfer back to a public school. Once your numbers look good hire a PR firm to get you on Oprah.”