CURMUDGUCATION: I Should Support Charters

CURMUDGUCATION: I Should Support Charters:

I Should Support Charters

I'm a big fan of the opt-out movement when it comes to testing. I believe, in general, that it's better for people to have a choice, to be free to consider options. It would make a certain amount of sense for me to be a supporter of school choice in general and charter schools as an expression of that choice.

And yet, I am not a supporter of either-- at least not as currently proposed and practiced.

But I think any time one finds inconsistencies rattling around in one's head, intellectual honesty and a desire to live with as much integrity as one can muster demand that one considers what that inconsistency means.

So-- why am I a fan of choice, except when it comes to school.

Dishonesty about the cost

Choice and charter systems are currently constructed as a zero-sum game. In many districts, the charter system forces multiple schools to finance multiple systems with a pot of money that isn't even sufficient to finance a single system. This means that one school must be the loser, and charter policies are written so that the loser is always the public school. This system creates several problems.

There's a problem with rampant inequity-- students who most need extra support are left behind in public schools that have the least per-pupil ability to support them.Challenging application processes, targeted marketing, counseling out, and non-backfilling can all help insure that the public school becomes the holding ground for the students who most need help even as charters strip away the public school's financial ability to deal with them. And that's before we start to consider how a school climate is affected by the absence of the top-tier students.

The system is also unsustainable. Taxpayers funding multiple systems are essentially footing the bill for excess capacity spread over several schools. Schools have to cut programs so that they can have seats for students who may or may not show up on their doorstep. Furthermore, initial stages of a charter system work on a simple dynamic-- all charters drain their money from the public system. But as the market saturates, the charters begin stripping resources from each other. That adds to

System instability and impermanence

Market-driven systems pretty much demand a cycle of growing too much capacity followed by shucking off that capacity. In other words, a choice system is going to have closing schools as a regular feature. This never seems to stop surprising people, particularly when the closing is mid-year and unannounced.

A school should be a permanent feature of a community, not a temporary business venture. A school should not be a store in a strip mall, but a pillar of the community that is, in fact, paying taxes to provide exactly that. A commitment to operate a school should be "until the community decides to CURMUDGUCATION: I Should Support Charters: