ROSEN: Say no to charter schools
Looking Left
The News reported three weeks ago on plans to open new charter schools in New Haven (“State may get new charter schools,” Jan. 23). Over the past several years, charters have been expanding in the Elm City, as well as across the country. My hometown of Chicago has already opened 59 charter schools and has plans to open many more over the next few years. But these paradoxically publicly funded, yet privately operated, institutions need to be critically examined.
Charter schools, freed from the regulation of the public school system, were supposed to fix public education through innovation. Instead, lack of regulation has led to a variety of problems, including hiring inexperienced teachers, failing to serve difficult-to-educate students and using taxpayer dollars corruptly. What charters haven’t created, though, are better-educated students.
In Chicago, charter school operators claimed for years that their schools produced better performing students. In late 2011, however, state standardized achievement tests showed that only one of the nine charter school networks in the city had outperformed district averages. Six of the networks fell below average at all or a majority of their schools.
And just last week, Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization Charter School Network was revealed to be using a $98 million state grant to dole out contracts to the close family and friends of UNO