Marcus A. Winters: Public schools should experiment like charter schools
By: Marcus A. Winters
OpEd Contributor
The new line of attack against charter schools is that they have failed to achieve their original mission. In her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch joins the chorus lamenting that charters were never meant to compete with public schools or offer alternatives for a large population of students.
When union godfather Albert Shanker first promoted charter schools, the argument goes, he saw them acting as laboratories for new strategies that could then be adopted in the public schools. According to critics like Ravitch, the charter school laboratories have not produced consistent lessons for the public school sector to adopt and thus the experiment has been disappointing.
Of course, we would be justified in embracing charter schools solely on the evidence that in some school systems, such as New York City's, they provide children with a better education while also improving public schools through competition. But the "laboratory" argument fails even on its own terms. Charter schools do experiment with alternative education strategies. The problem is, public schools don't like the results of these experiments.
Nearly two decades of experience with charter schools have yielded some lessons in what works for improving student performance. There are easily perceptible patterns among the few charter school networks -- KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Democracy Prep, Achievement First, and DC Prep among others -- that have systematically yielded impressive (even miraculous) results with the most challenging students. Attributes of these schools include: exceptionally high goals, rigorous standards, frequent analysis of performance data, longer school days and years, firm discipline, willingness and ability to remove ineffective teachers, and
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Manhattan-Moment/Public-schools-should-experiment-like-charter-schools-90036087.html#ixzz0kS4GzAYq
