Charter Schools - Dividing Communities since 1991

I wish John King and his cohorts would just come clean.
State Education officials are smart people. They know that, no matter what programs they force-feed to Buffalo schools stuffed with poor kids, the test-score needle won’t move much.
It’s a shell game, an accountability dodge, an effort by King & Co. to cover their backs – which are against an immovable wall.
Many people don’t want to hear it, but you could import an army of Teachers of the Year into Lafayette, East or Buffalo’s other “failing” schools without making much of a dent. Whether it’s BOCES or Johns Hopkins University or the Tooth Fairy who rides in, there will be no 180-degree turn.
Granted, that is no reason to stop trying, or not to do everything we can. But let’s stop kidding ourselves.
As reporter Sandra Tan noted Thursday in The News, the bottom half-dozen Buffalo high schools are basically dumping grounds for kids who can barely speak English, or whose grades or attitudes are so bad they can’t leap a low bar into better schools. Some were tossed back to the district by charter schools.
It’s no mystery why East and Lafayette high schools – along with dozens of other city schools