A New School Hopes to Learn From the Charters - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

A New School Hopes to Learn From the Charters - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

One of the main arguments for charter schools is that they will improve the school system as a whole by introducing innovations that traditional schools then adopt. But charter school critics charge that this is not happening — and they say that charters on the whole are weakening the schools around them by siphoning off their resources.

A new primary school proposed by Teachers College at Columbia Universityaims to address this issue head-on. The school’s goal, its founders say, is to transfer some of the best charter school features to a school run by the Department of Education, while showing how a primary school can benefit from a close affiliation with a college.

Called the Teachers College Community School, it is likely to open in September 2011 in northern Manhattan, and while there is no site yet, Teachers College hopes for a place somewhere between West 110th and West