Why Failing Charters Must Be Closed
At their core, public charter schools are about one simple trade-off: a charter school receives more autonomy to operate in the way its staff thinks will provide the best results for students.
In return, it accepts greater accountability for the results it achieves academically and operationally — with the understanding that if a school fails, it will be closed. That is why charters get a license to operate for five years at a time — and have to make the case that they should be renewed.
Because accountability and autonomy are what charters are about, the decisions this week to close one poorly performing charter school, only conditionally renew another and provide notice to three others that they will be
A Bronx High School Teacher Tells All
You will never look at Pop-Tarts the same again after reading the account of a Bronx high school teacher in New York magazine’s Workplace Confidential feature this week.
The teacher, who remains anonymous, writes about what it’s like in his high school, which he says has 17 white students among its 3,000 students.
Everyone cheats, he says.
I call it the Mississippi River of cheating: A kid in the front-right corner of the classroom will have a wildly wrong answer to a test, and a kid in the back-right corner of the room will have the same exact wrong answer. With teachers, the cheating is more of a massaging of the numbers on the Regents.
Students call each other out on their place of origin.
And the racism among students is horrible. Upstate, a kid would be expelled for saying the kinds