EDUCATION: The other side of charter schools
Total Recommendations (0)
After a public meeting about opening two new charter schools in the city ended last Thursday, a public meeting concerning the proliferation of charter schools began. Duels over charter schools are occurring across the country.
The first charter schools were created in the mid 1990's, said Shawgi Tell, an associate professor of education at Nazareth College at the latter meeting, and there are now more than 5,400 charter schools in 39 states. They are opening at an explosive pace regardless of what the evidence shows about their effectiveness, he said.
Tell was a co-speaker to parents and educators at School Without Walls. His forthcoming book, "Charter School Report Card," is the result of his research on charter schools and education governance.
Charter schools are often promoted as incubators for innovation: settings where new approaches to education can be tested and then transferred to traditional public schools. But critics contend there is little meaningful crossover or collaboration. And charter schools on the whole, they say, are sometimes not any better performance-wise than the schools they are supposed to help improve.
"We now have two systems of education plagued by problems," Tell said.
And if charter schools enrolled the same percentages of special-education students as most urban schools, they would close, he said. The literature shows, Tell said, that charter schools that do enroll special- education
Read Comments (4)