-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
California bills aim to crack down on for-profit charter schools
- Thread starter Tripon
- Start date
- Status
Electric Eye
Banned
From stats that I've seen charter schools don't seem to rank any better than your average good public school and it funnels away money from public schools. I know friends that have kids in them and I think the allure is that they resemble private schools so it's fools them into thinking their kids are now "better" than the other kids.
CyclopsRock
Member
Why not just stop the ones that are offering low quality educations and let the ones offering good quality educations keep providing that good education?
Charter schools have not proven to be any better than their traditional counterparts.
Why don't you ask them instead of 'thinking'?
Electric Eye
Banned
Your right, but lets not pretend this is for anything but anti-trump political points. If CA cared about primary education the real estate tax cap would be lifted and the revenue shared among communities.
Ask them if their kids are smarter? They aren't.
Lol.
Karsticles
Member
Each charter school has its own contract with the government - it's disingenuous to group them all when gauging success rates. Some charter schools are significantly better than the average charter school, while others are far worse. Ideally, governmental entities would deny the charter renewals for the bad charter schools while supporting the good ones.
Or, their finding could go exclusively to public institutions, and the department of education could integrate the ideas of the currently successful charters to EVERY child's education that's using federal funding.
Chmpocalypse
Blizzard
Like clockwork. Your posts are always good for a bewildered laugh.
thehypocrite
Member
Oh look somebody that knows why charter schools were created in the first place. I salute you.
SciencePilot
Member
I don't know about this. The benefits of charter schools are obviously mixed -- they have their good points and they have their bad points. But either way, it feels wrong for California to go shutting them down since California doesn't have a real solution for public education to replace them. Charter schools were one response to failing public education -- if you don't like that response, you need to try another one.
Karsticles
Member
So every time a charter school figures something good out, you close it down after sharing what it learned? Lol
It's only for profit charter schools, non profit charter schools would still exist.
entremet
Member
He's right in this instance. Prop 13, which capped property taxes, has been disastrous for funding public schools, especially in poorer communities.
thehypocrite
Member
That's not what he wrote. Lol......
The "best" charter schools tend to be the schools where there's a lottery, or enrollment is highly limited. Pretty easy to get a great crop of students when you can just toss out the kids you don't want and send them back to public schools (which have to admit every kid by law). Parents are also more likely to support the school when they fight hard to get them into the school in the first place. Private schools benefit from this tactic as well, since parents are paying for their kids to be there.
Whats the difference between a for profit and a non profit?
Administrators getting paid!
What prevents someone from setting up a non profit and hiring a for profit management company?
R10Neymarfan
Member
But education is already a for profit venture. Charter schools is just the final step
madstarr12
Member
Betsy DeVil won't approve of this, she loves her money.
What prevents a public school district from doing the same thing? Who do you think develops the tests students take as a state wide assessment, or who develops district testing, or who develops school information systems like Aries, Tobin World, or hiring a 3rd party food vendor?
There's a lot of ways you can win a contract from a public school district, and there's a lot of money in the system. When I worked at a public school district, I didn't see the oversight that is currently required at the charter school I'm working at.
I understand and share your concerns about for profit management companies potentially fucking shit up, (Hell, that's what happening with Celerity, a group of charter schools based in South L.A. and richer parts of the L.A. region, two of their schools are potentially going to get shut down because their parent company is shady as shit, and I will also note that I made a thread about that very topic last week, but got no replies for that) but that's the situation with all schools in general. There isn't enough oversight and there's a lot of schools and districts getting away with shit that isn't reported either.
Wafflecakes
Member
Difference is that public charter schools have a popularly elected school board, just like public school districts, and have to follow most state education regulations.
There has to be more than that, at that point it just seems like it is a competing school district.
Wafflecakes
Member
That is pretty much what it is.
However, at least in my state, a public charter school must have a very specific instructional philosophy that is different from the traditional public schools in order to receive approval.
CadetMahoney
Member
Isn't there a correlation between things John Oliver covers and pushback on the issue?
So even if we simply look at early data and say, "Well, Charter Schools so far have shown no significant advantages over public schools in the main, and that of course exceptions to both exist" we still have to look at the intent of Charter Schools at the political and corporate level.
A parent may well wish to improve their child's education, but...
A pro-Charter school conservative politician wishes to expand religious schools for a certain portion of his base. He wishes to privatize more schools for his corporate donors. He wishes to create "smaller govt" by effectively handing over public schools, incrementally (this is already happening) to the private sector. That is the end game for conservative politicians. There's nothing controversial about that. Some are not, certainly, but the weight of lobbying and campaign finance is definitely tilted wildly in that direction.
Part of the problem is that religious parents, middle class white parents in bad school districts, African American parents desperate to improve their institutionally horrible public school issues, and dozens of other good, well-meaning people, are creating a wedge for this to happen. And it will be a disaster for the poor and create a deeper and more ingrained underclass. An underclass that won't have retail, or Uber, or fast food jobs to fill.
I think it's one of the most frightening potentials in Amrican life and politics.
We need great education for our kids. Not just for jobs, but for quality of life and underdstanding of issues in an economy that is shrinking away from the poor, with no plan or vision to fill it back in. Betsy De Vos has no interest whatsoever in improving public schools. She will immediately repeat the actions of the Tories with the NHS. Start hamstrining it on purpose and say, "Oh look it's not working!"
I don't think it's all doom and gloom. Fifty years from now we'll have a significant energy solution through renewables. Emissions will drop. The environment will get better. Automation will make a lot of things in life much easier and less dangerous. Traffic, for example, will be safer thanks to robots. But all those driving jobs will be gone. People already, in theory, have access to better and more information than before. But we see how that can be manipulated for ill. But jobs aren't anywhere on that horizon, and if we're going to have a large unemployed class - let's call it a leisure class, then it's safer and better for the stability of the nation that it be properly educated.
They've already started doing this with the VA. It's the strategy of right wingers everywhere.
You are very optimistic on how the ruling class of inherited wealth will respond to the diminished return of labor.
Also are you jumping between continents in that post? lol.
I agree with this I don't think charters anywhere should be able to make a profit. We see how for profit schools that do post secondary education have worked out. I also think that shitty charters should be closed too so if they for profit schools were shitty they should be closed anyway.
The idea that non-profits, don't make profit, is a myth.
Mm, I mean it's reasonable to assume basically everything politicians do includes some measure of political posturing, but this isn't really a good comparison. This bill is easy. Getting rid of Prop 13, as you seem to be suggesting here, is... not. It might be bad law, but it's basically untouchable politically. Like, end-your-political-career untouchable.
Wafflecakes
Member
Meaningless argument because ANY government agency or creation has the same struggle.
AuthenticM
Member
Yes there is.
The problem also lies with them "creaming" their students and not providing services for students that have even minor learning disabilities, thus artificially inflating their results. The fact that they aren't held to the same transparency requirements as regular schools is also questionable.
This isn't true at all. The law is written that all public schools, charter, district, etc. Has to accept all students that enroll in the school. I'm a special education teacher at a charter school, and this is the first year where my caseload wasn't over 28, which is the max a teacher can have unless you sign a waiver.
The idea that they are rolling is cash is also a myth.
Many charter schools have been found guilty of this though. Maybe yours is doing a good job, but not all are.
Yes, and they should get slammed to the full letter of the law on it. But that doesn't mean that charters schools on masse get to not allow students with special needs.
I was talking with a colleague who is a principal at a charter school, and he told me that elementary schools with the local school district are telling parents that his school won't service students with special needs. He has to constantly tell parents that isn't the case, but you have people with their own agenda and issues trying to slander schools, trying to frame his school at doing something illegal.
Karsticles
Member
That is certainly not the case with my charter school. In my 500-student school, about 1/5 of them are on an IEP or 504. I don't know how that compares with the general population (Tripon might know), but that seems relatively high to me.
I can't speak to the transparency requirements, but I do know that all of our salary information is posted online.
I have had so many special education students. Last semester nearly half of one of my classes had a learning disability.
Wafflecakes
Member
That isn't necessarily a charter school problem, and is more of a small school problem.
Many accommodations for high need students are incredibly expensive and virtually impossible if you only have one student using the services. This puts a massive strain on charter schools, which generally are smaller, but it is not always a problem created by the school.
Team Alucard
Banned
Good. Shut them down. Charter schools exist for one reason, and that's to bust teachers unions.
In general, the average (at least in CA) is that the special education student pollution is 15% of the general education population. I don't know what is Colorado's percentages though.
Unions can run charter schools as well, there are several in the L.A. region that are run by UTLA, which is the union for teachers for L.A. unified.
JesseEwiak
Member
Cool, so when will the heads of charter schools stop bashing teachers unions for the cause of all of the ills in education and pushing for laws that make it easier to hobble unions and fire teachers without cause?
Also, at least in LA, "percentage of total LAUSD charter school students with severe disabilities is less than one-third the percentage of students with disabilities in LAUSD public schools."
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Locked