calling them "successful" is ... a decision. privatization is always short term gains with a long term cost to society. .. see the prison industry for an example.
calling them "successful" is ... a decision. privatization is always short term gains with a long term cost to society.
I'm annoyed with certain writers who like to call school "child prison" so I'm not wild about that comparison. That's superficial, though. In theory, some schools specializing in better students...
I'm annoyed with certain writers who like to call school "child prison" so I'm not wild about that comparison. That's superficial, though.
In theory, some schools specializing in better students and other schools handling kids with special needs isn't inherently a bad thing. Isn't that what "magnet schools" are all about? The schools that handle special needs need dramatically more funding, though, because it's very expensive.
Magnets in the US have never been a thing for developmentally delayed or disabled kids at least that I've seen. They're usually described as for gifted kids or target certain populations, but...
Magnets in the US have never been a thing for developmentally delayed or disabled kids at least that I've seen. They're usually described as for gifted kids or target certain populations, but never seen that they're "Special Needs*" focused. You'll see them described as "special talents" but that's about gifted kids or kids with a strong interest.
Magnets were about pulling kids into (or out of) different neighborhoods to remedy segregation.
It isn't actually great to separate out certain types of kids from schools, it's better to support funding the schools so they can serve their students well regardless, but pulling funding out means that the regular public schools have less money, and they will not take better care of their students that way.
*I hate the term, so do most SPED students/teachers I know. They don't love "SPED" either but it's entrenched af.
Gifted kids are special needs because they will languish if you put them through a curriculum that can’t keep up with them. Which can sometimes manifest in acting out and other disruptive behavior.
Gifted kids are special needs because they will languish if you put them through a curriculum that can’t keep up with them. Which can sometimes manifest in acting out and other disruptive behavior.
Once again noting that "Special Needs" is not the preferred language for kids with disabilities coming from the kids and adults in question . And "Special talents" or "gifted and talented" or...
Once again noting that "Special Needs" is not the preferred language for kids with disabilities coming from the kids and adults in question . And "Special talents" or "gifted and talented" or whatever language may be used for smart kids is more common than calling them "special needs." I'm not arguing that honestly all kids have individual needs. My "gifted" program was "do freshman math in 8th grade" and "you can read a novel because you're done with all your work." We could do so much better in many ways in the system.
I'm distinguishing because the original person meant disabled kids.
I was in the gifted program and definitely referred to as "special needs" pretty frequently. I had regular meetings about my IEP. They even had me on the "special needs" bus, which was in fact,...
I was in the gifted program and definitely referred to as "special needs" pretty frequently. I had regular meetings about my IEP. They even had me on the "special needs" bus, which was in fact, shorter than all the other busses. That was like, 20 years ago, though, so it's very possible that things have changed.
You're not wrong about what the original person meant, though.
I'm not gonna say no one uses the term. I am saying it's fallen deeply out of favor with pretty much everyone but those looking for a nice euphemism that encompasses developmentally disabled,...
I'm not gonna say no one uses the term. I am saying it's fallen deeply out of favor with pretty much everyone but those looking for a nice euphemism that encompasses developmentally disabled, learning disabled and "bad at school"
But if it's being used for gifted as well, it's even less useful and I think gifted is a questionable label to throw on a kid anyway.
Both you and /u/DefinitelyNotAFae are correct, leaving everyone in the same class is a poor choice but both ends of the spectrum are classified under Special Services and can be equally disruptive...
Both you and /u/DefinitelyNotAFae are correct, leaving everyone in the same class is a poor choice but both ends of the spectrum are classified under Special Services and can be equally disruptive to the other 80% or students, for different reasons. Is putting them in different boxes? Maybe not; what are some alternatives?
There is a whole area of study - pedagogy - that can discuss best practices, my comments about charter schools are about the systemic issues because that's what I'm educated on. I would be out of...
There is a whole area of study - pedagogy - that can discuss best practices, my comments about charter schools are about the systemic issues because that's what I'm educated on. I would be out of my realm of knowledge to say "here's how to teach the top and bottom performing students" other than ensuring Maslov's bottom tier of needs are met. That one seems pretty crucial and effective. (Also in my realm of work).
It's also pretty far afield of the original topic so I'd rather cut my participation in this tangent here.
Right, I meant that the magnet schools probably aren't serving as many special needs kids and I think it's considered okay? (That's an assumption. Anyone know how it works?)
Right, I meant that the magnet schools probably aren't serving as many special needs kids and I think it's considered okay? (That's an assumption. Anyone know how it works?)
Charter schools and private schools omit disabled kids because they don't want to spend the money on them, that means that more disabled kids are left in underfunded public schools as the vouchers...
Charter schools and private schools omit disabled kids because they don't want to spend the money on them, that means that more disabled kids are left in underfunded public schools as the vouchers pull money from them.
Magnet schools may be able to deny students with disabilities, afaik they will often ask if the student applying has an IEP or 504 which is asking if a student has a disability. Which would be discrimination in any other realm. But magnet schools may vary by state/district. They're given much more latitude in general.
Generally no, segregating disabled kids isn't ideal, nor is reducing the "economy of scale" funding for the schools that keep them. A student who has an IEP or 504 may still be very academically skilled and be rejected out of hand by a magnet school because they one, no matter that it's to protect, say, an accommodation for their medication and their fidget toys. Civil rights and education law requires public schools provide an education to all kids. Pulling the public school money is just resegregation and a return to the lack of education for many disabled kids.
At least several of the gifted kids in my classes 20 years ago had IEPs. That was at three different elementary schools and one middle school. I'd assumed all of them had one, but it's possible...
At least several of the gifted kids in my classes 20 years ago had IEPs. That was at three different elementary schools and one middle school. I'd assumed all of them had one, but it's possible that's not true. I just know that when I had my IEP meetings with my parents and teachers, a bunch of other gifted kids' parents were also there, waiting to have their meeting next. Maybe that's changed, but when I was in school, asking if someone had an IEP would not be a good way to determine if they had a disability.
I generally agree with everything that you're saying about charter schools and funding, it's just these few details that clash with my experience in the Florida school system.
This varies on a state-by-state basis. In some states, gifted and talented children fall under the umbrella of special education and can qualify for IEPs, whereas in other states they do not.
This varies on a state-by-state basis. In some states, gifted and talented children fall under the umbrella of special education and can qualify for IEPs, whereas in other states they do not.
Oh definitely! I was just adding some context to your post for everybody else’s sake, since there’s usually a perception that GT kids can’t be on IEPs, especially from people whose states didn’t...
Oh definitely!
I was just adding some context to your post for everybody else’s sake, since there’s usually a perception that GT kids can’t be on IEPs, especially from people whose states didn’t have that as an option.
Sorry if it came across as short or as a correction. I actually meant it as a confirmation of what you were sharing!
Oh not at all! I should have included the fact that it was in Florida in my first comment. It makes sense that different states would do things differently.
Oh not at all! I should have included the fact that it was in Florida in my first comment. It makes sense that different states would do things differently.
Huh so it looks like state law has mapped their gifted kid stuff onto the IEP processes. It's just not a federally protected IEP in the same way unless there are also disabilities which obviously...
Huh so it looks like state law has mapped their gifted kid stuff onto the IEP processes. It's just not a federally protected IEP in the same way unless there are also disabilities which obviously there are.
I went in a relatively small private Catholic school K-8. I was labeled "gifted" but we had very little in the way of a program and so I don't even know exactly what they were doing at the time at a state level. (Plus I was a kid so it probably wouldn't map well to actual policy.)
I work with a lot of students that had IEPs in high school and are now navigating college but the gifted IEP hasn't come up and so I'm not sure our state uses it with the same copied terminology.
You explicitly have to have a disability to have an IEP! Edit: ok there's something called a Gifted IEP that might be different? But perhaps it varies by state as someone else noted. That's sort...
You explicitly have to have a disability to have an IEP!
Edit: ok there's something called a Gifted IEP that might be different? But perhaps it varies by state as someone else noted.
That's sort of why labels like Gifted, Special Needs, and the giant bucket of "everyone else" aren't the most useful. Smart kids can still struggle in a subject or have a disability, disabled kids have few or a lot of support needs, etc. You can be any combination of any of these.
This was in Florida, so it's relevant to the OP, but as far as the broader discussion I don't have any experience and don't disagree with you at all. I do have dyscalculia, but I got my IEP before...
This was in Florida, so it's relevant to the OP, but as far as the broader discussion I don't have any experience and don't disagree with you at all.
I do have dyscalculia, but I got my IEP before that was diagnosed.
Yeah I made it to college before getting an ADHD dx myself, which again I'm old! I replied to another comment that I dug around and learned some stuff so thanks!
Yeah I made it to college before getting an ADHD dx myself, which again I'm old! I replied to another comment that I dug around and learned some stuff so thanks!
Well in general, yes, but school voucher programs are breaking the public school system by design. This is not a side effect, it's the goal. And in states like Florida and Texas the goal is as...
Well in general, yes, but school voucher programs are breaking the public school system by design. This is not a side effect, it's the goal. And in states like Florida and Texas the goal is as much re-segregation (not that we successfully de-segregated really) by race and religion as it is by ability. Instead of creating stratified school systems, it just makes a lot more sense, especially in the matter of scale, to pay for one system (and not with property taxes that once again perpetuate segregation.)
Don't take money out of public schools and then have to put money back in. Like most scale things the "cost per student" isn't actually evenly distributed.
I think this reminds me of capitalist solutions in almost every market. Expand by providing what is genuinely a great product. Get additional funding - off the back of federal funding of course -...
I think this reminds me of capitalist solutions in almost every market. Expand by providing what is genuinely a great product. Get additional funding - off the back of federal funding of course - and ratchet up the offerings. For Uber it was selling cab rides a nearly half the price of a normal cab ride with someone who more closely resembled your peer. For Amazon it was free shipping and discounted prices. It's easy to imagine how that goes for private schools. Add additional language programs, access to new technology, or just well paid/highly competent teachers.
Now, continue that trend until public schools close - as we're starting to see - and ensure that your charter school franchise has a strangle hold on the region. As we've seen in those other industries the point of business isn't to make a great product - it's to maximize profits. So those charter groups create regional monopolies where it is financially infeasible for parents to choose another school. Why provide all those expensive, beneficial additions at that point. Slash the costs the floor and still collect the consistent funding from the state and federal programs. Quality of the schools hits rock bottom but families don't have alternatives. You have a captive audience and regulated payments, an MBA's wet dream and a parent's nightmare.
It's frustrating to see enshittification for things folks don't need like cab rides or video games. I hate the damage it does to workers rights, but the products themselves aren't that important. But education is the cornerstone of a functioning society. This is the shortest of short term thinking I've witnessed since Clinton allowed medical insurance to be for profit.
I don’t think this is accurate for Uber, where it was pretty clearly subsidized by investors rather than government. (Looks like the investors put in 25 billion dollars!) Also the service really...
I don’t think this is accurate for Uber, where it was pretty clearly subsidized by investors rather than government. (Looks like the investors put in 25 billion dollars!) Also the service really was better in many ways, so “enshittification” doesn’t really apply.
Though, nowadays the subsidies are over and prices are up, so that admittedly is worse. I don’t know how service compares to cabs nowadays. Doesn’t everyone have apps now?
Driving a cab has always been low wage job, often done by immigrants, so nothing new there. Many of the nice things we enjoy have historically only been affordable due to low-wage jobs. And not all that affordable either - cabs have always been expensive from a rider’s point of view.
It seems better to talk about each industry individually since they are quite different.
I wasn't trying to say it was a direct proxy, just an example of what happens when you have a captured market. I agree, early days of Uber were great but now it's not - hence the enshittification....
I wasn't trying to say it was a direct proxy, just an example of what happens when you have a captured market. I agree, early days of Uber were great but now it's not - hence the enshittification. I'm using it as a parallel to how the charter schools might actually be better at the moment, hence when they have been so popular, but if they are able to establish a monopoly with public schools closing then you might see trends similar to what happened with Uber. Isn't that how competitive capitalism works? Outcompete competition until you control the market and then drastically slash COGs to maximize profitability?
In my city, charters enroll 15% of the students. It feels like a slippery slope fallacy to assume that if they became a monopoly things would "enshittify" (hate this term). Education is highly...
In my city, charters enroll 15% of the students. It feels like a slippery slope fallacy to assume that if they became a monopoly things would "enshittify" (hate this term). Education is highly regulated and the government could start revoking licenses, assigning licenses to others, or just operating public schools again if they decided charters were operating like abusive monopolies.
As another angle, why do you not assume that public schools at 85% marketshare or whatever it is where you live are already acting like enshittified versions of what they could be?
I haven't heard of any break-out hits among charter schools, so the idea of a monopoly seems far-fetched. Also, some public schools closing doesn't mean public schools are unavailable. It means...
I haven't heard of any break-out hits among charter schools, so the idea of a monopoly seems far-fetched. Also, some public schools closing doesn't mean public schools are unavailable. It means kids have to go to another public school further away.
Which means longer bus rides which means more tired kids, which means poorer academic performance. Which means more people pull their kids from school. Until only those who cannot don't. This is...
Which means longer bus rides which means more tired kids, which means poorer academic performance. Which means more people pull their kids from school. Until only those who cannot don't.
This is very intentionally being done, along with vilifying teachers both as union members and as "groomers," No, an individual charter school isn't the end of the world but this is baked into the intent of what Florida is doing.
They want to abolish the Dept of Education, the last bill for that was introduced in 2022 I believe. It is not a shock that the same people who want to cut or eliminate taxes want to cut public services. They're not hiding it. There is a reason that (at least some areas of) Florida is allowing someone with just a HS diploma/GED to substitute teach.
I just wish we'd believe the people who say this is what they want, when they say it. We wouldn't be so surprised when they do it.
They’re not just out to get rid of the Dept of Ed, but they want to replace the secular education with religious schools. Once they defund public education and reallocate all that money, people...
They’re not just out to get rid of the Dept of Ed, but they want to replace the secular education with religious schools. Once they defund public education and reallocate all that money, people will have the “choice” to either educate their kids at a conveniently located Christian school or a very inconveniently located secular one, if one has been set up.
Yeah removing oversight on education is 100% about religious schools and that includes the white Christian nationalism that places like Prager U have been providing for students.
Yeah removing oversight on education is 100% about religious schools and that includes the white Christian nationalism that places like Prager U have been providing for students.
I don’t really want to get into it, but instead of talking about “them,” it would help to be more specific. Sure, sometimes the same person might want all these things.
I don’t really want to get into it, but instead of talking about “them,” it would help to be more specific. Sure, sometimes the same person might want all these things.
If you don't want to get into it, I don't see the point? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the intent of these policies is the destruction of the system. These aren't side effects.
If you don't want to get into it, I don't see the point? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the intent of these policies is the destruction of the system. These aren't side effects.
What's frustrating about this issue is that the average voter isn't engaged enough to understand what is happening here, they don't understand that it's the culmination of a long battle to...
What's frustrating about this issue is that the average voter isn't engaged enough to understand what is happening here, they don't understand that it's the culmination of a long battle to intentionally de-legitimize public schools. They see reports about a issues that either, point a finger at under performing schools or highlight/twist curriculum content to fit a particular narrative that it is both pervasive and out of touch with parents who want to control their children's exposure to anything.
Legitimately frustrated parents, who have a child who needs help in school, will pull their kids out to send them to a charter school that is well funded and can offer that help. They have every reason to be frustrated! But they don't realize their frustration isn't with a school that doesn't want to offer them help, it's with the politicians and special interest who have worked hard to defund public schools and pay public educators poorly.
More frustratingly, this largely started after schools were integrated. This is just a campaign that white interests have lobbied for decades, in order to obtain the racist separation of classes they want. I see posts like this and read about SCOTUS protecting racist gerrymandering and eyeing Brown V Board and I'm legitimately scared. The average voter doesn't realize what's happening to their America, a country and ideal they would probably fight for passionately.
Americans have the luxury of being largely isolated and that has fostered the idea that America is eternal or something, they don't look at a human history strewn with rising and falling empires and think "This could happen to America." I believe that, like Soviet Union citizens who believed their empire to be strong and viril, despite the rest of the world being able to see the signs of decay, Americans are largely unaware how far America has fallen and at some point it will just be too late to salvage what America used to be.
The thing is, people may not understand the decisions but they are defending them, not just claiming ignorance. Even on here, like right above you, there are posts basically saying “rich people...
The thing is, people may not understand the decisions but they are defending them, not just claiming ignorance. Even on here, like right above you, there are posts basically saying “rich people have the right to send their kids wherever they want, they shouldn’t have to pay for everyone else to go to school.” Like dude that is taxes, you’re describing taxes. It’s not a new concept: the king has money, but he can’t/definitely won’t build a big nice wall by himself, but hey if you guys work and build my wall I’ll give you some land, then when the wall is done you’re safe, just give me some of the crop yield to live inside the wall you built that I’ve paid for. Feudalism notwithstanding, it worked for us for a long time and we got interstates and public utilities out of it, and people who make -max- $200k are saying that no one should be “forced” to use the school system, which leads to “why am I paying for something I don’t use?” Why should retirees be paying taxes for schools when they don’t have any kids? It’s not a slippery slope if we are all actively sliding downhill into boomery self-obsession—kids don’t get to pick their parents, charter schools are just a way to separate people whose parents can pay for school from people whose parents cannot, solidifying the divide generationally. Why would we want to be about that. But I’ve literally had people tell me I’m a conspiracy theorist for saying that worsening public education is a feature not a bug, then tell me that teachers don’t want more money, they just want to be respected.
A story: when I was a kid, school enrollment was declining (end of the baby boom) and my school district decided to close one of the elementary schools. It was the oldest school, which needed...
A story: when I was a kid, school enrollment was declining (end of the baby boom) and my school district decided to close one of the elementary schools. It was the oldest school, which needed significant upgrades and apparently it wasn't worth it.
Unfortunately, it was at the geographic center of a very large, mostly-rural district on the edge of a small city, with the other two schools closer to the city, where it's more populated. So, kids from the far side had to ride busses even further to get to school.
Some parents even started their own school for a while, so their kids wouldn't have to go so far.
But I don't believe anything changed in the long run?
Which is to say, closing schools is disruptive, sad, and sucks for the people involved, and of course they're upset, but it's not really new, and I'm not sure I see anything in this article that points to existential issues.
Since 2019-20, when the pandemic upended education, some 53,000 students have left traditional public schools in these counties, a sizable total that is forcing school leaders to consider closing campuses that have been entrenched in local communities for years.
In Broward County, Florida’s second-largest school district, officials have floated plans to close up to 42 campuses over the next few years, moves that would have a ripple effect across Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood.
The district has lost more than 20,000 students over the last five years, a decline that comes as charter schools in particular experienced sizable growth in the area. Enrollment in charters, which are public schools operating under performance contracts freeing them of many state regulations, increased by nearly 27,000 students since 2010, according to Broward school officials.
Broward County Public Schools claims to have more than 49,000 classroom seats sitting empty this year, a number that “closely matches” the 49,833 students attending charter schools in the area, officials noted in an enrollment overview.
These enrollment swings are pressing Broward leaders to combine and condense dozens of schools, efforts that would save the district on major operating costs. So far, some of the ideas are meeting heavy resistance.
…
The strong opposition to school closures prompted Broward Superintendent Howard Hepburn to abruptly back away from the idea for the upcoming school year. But school board members instead directed Hepburn to formulate a plan to close eight schools in 2025 or 2026, contending it was a tough, yet appropriate, decision.
“If you want us to offer great education to your children and create the Broward County of tomorrow, you want us to close campuses,” school board member Allen Zeman said during a May 14 meeting. “And you want us to spend that money educating your students.”
…
In Miami-Dade, there are expected to be nearly 15,000 new students receiving state funding for education this fall. But all of that growth is flowing to private and charter schools, leaving Miami Dade Public Schools bracing for a decline of more than 4,000 students next year.
There's an interesting paper review here, which is published under the auspices of Education Next, an avowedly nonpartisan journal of education advocacy whose editorial board seems to be dominated...
There's an interesting paper review here, which is published under the auspices of Education Next, an avowedly nonpartisan journal of education advocacy whose editorial board seems to be dominated by by the American Enterprise Institute and Hoover Institution. Detailed critique.
Tl;dr part:
On some widely debated topics, we find little support for either side of the dialogue. For example, we find no higher levels of achievement in states with a larger percentage of public-school students attending charters. Nor do we find a correlation between charter student achievement and the age of the charter school, whether a state permits collective bargaining, or the level of per-pupil funding charter schools receive within a state.
We do find differences when looking at some of the innovative features of charter schools, including authorizing agencies, management structures, and whether schools have an academic or programmatic specialization.
For example, charter student performance varies with the type of authorizer that granted its charter. Students whose charter schools are authorized by a state education agency earn higher scores on NAEP than students whose schools were authorized by school districts and comparable local agencies. Compared to charter schools authorized by a state education agency, student achievement is 9 percent of a standard deviation lower at charter schools authorized by local education agencies like school districts, 10 percent lower at charter schools authorized by independent statewide agencies, 15 percent lower at schools authorized by non-education entities like a mayor’s office, and 19 percent lower at charter schools authorized by higher education institutions.
These results should not be interpreted as showing a causal connection between type of authorizer and student outcomes. Still, it might be noted that state education agencies have decades of experience at overseeing educational systems, an advantage not matched by any other type of authorizer. Local school districts do not authorize as effective charters as do state offices, but they outperform agencies that have had no prior experience in the field of education. Perhaps Helen Keller was right when she said, “Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened . . . and success achieved.”
We also find notable differences in student achievement between schools based on their management model. These fall into three categories: freestanding or standalone schools; schools run by nonprofit charter management organizations or networks like KIPP Foundation and BASIS Charter Schools; and schools run by for-profit education management organizations, such as Academia and ACCEL Schools.
Some 55 percent of the students in our sample attend freestanding, independent charter schools—the classic charter type, led by a small team, that is one of the thousand flowers expected to bloom. Another 23 percent of students attend charters that are part of nonprofit networks or management organizations, and 22 percent of the sample are at schools run by for-profit entities.
Compared to students at for-profit and freestanding, independent charters, students at charters that are part of a nonprofit network score 11 to 16 percent of a standard deviation higher on NAEP. This may be because networked charters benefit from an association with a larger entity, or perhaps because successful charters expand beyond a single school.
For-profit schools are arguably the most controversial component of the charter sector. Charter critic Diane Ravitch has argued that “our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises,” and in 2020, the Democratic Party platform proposed a ban on charter schools run by for-profit entities (see “Ban For-Profit Charters? Campaign issue collides with Covid-era classroom reality”, feature, Winter 2021).
The data above are pre-pandemic. Nonetheless, it's fairly clear that charters taken as a whole didn't offer substantial improvements in test performance on a district level, unless for-profit schools were taken out of the picture. I'll admit my biases here - I came from a union teaching family in Michigan. Test scores have always been correlated with neighborhood affluence and relative school funding, with schools in deeply impoverished areas performing worst. Funding cuts to the City of Detroit's schools affected performance so badly that students had to file a lawsuit to get a right to literacy recognized. Detroit's for-profit charter schools have been catastrophic both for teachers and students.
Parents are now understandably frustrated about the pandemic disruption to their kids' education, and seeking alternatives for various reasons. But the study reported in Education Next indicates that charter schools don't, on the whole, provide better outcomes than public schools. There is growing evidence that some charter schools are now pushing a right-wing ideological curriculum in essentially segregated conditions, including in Florida's charters. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this is all long-running political strategy.
They're private schools that take public money. They abandon kids with special learning needs, ranging from speech therapy to full disabilities, to just falling behind on test scores. This...
They're private schools that take public money.
They abandon kids with special learning needs, ranging from speech therapy to full disabilities, to just falling behind on test scores. This artificially inflates their performance and makes the public schools seem worse than they are.
Often charter school kids will be 1-2 grade levels lower than equivalent public school kids in terms of actual knowledge.
They can also kick students out for minor infractions and will often dump "troublesome students" - read low performing - back into the public school system right before state testing begins to...
They can also kick students out for minor infractions and will often dump "troublesome students" - read low performing - back into the public school system right before state testing begins to additionally buffer their score and nerf the local public competition.
And (in our area at least) it's a financial double whammy for the public school. Here our schools have to pull a proportional amount out for each student attending charter school and give it to...
They're private schools that take public money.
And (in our area at least) it's a financial double whammy for the public school. Here our schools have to pull a proportional amount out for each student attending charter school and give it to the charter school. For example, if the public school has 1,000 students and one leaves for a charter school, the public school sends 1/1000 of its tax revenue to the charter school. However the public school doesn't realize a 1/1000th reduction in expenses. Even worse, the public schools are "stuck" with students with special needs with higher costs (i.e. behavioral health, emotional support, intermediate unit services, etc.), so average cost per public school student has increased. Meanwhile, the district school board is elected citizens/wannabe politicians who have no background in education and are adamant about not raising taxes while the district is getting financially choked by these charter schools.
Aaaand sometimes, none of this is true. In many jurisdictions, charter schools have the same requirements for special education as public schools, receive less funding, and are genuinely...
Aaaand sometimes, none of this is true. In many jurisdictions, charter schools have the same requirements for special education as public schools, receive less funding, and are genuinely attempting different methodologies that benefit neurodivergent students.
Not most of them, but the conception of them you've outlined isn't universally true. As someone who never would have graduated from a typical high school, at least the charter I attended gave me a solid education even if I did drop out in the end. It's a politically fraught issue, but some public school systems are terrible anyway, and charters do public good in those situations. Fix the public systems, but there's no need to paint all charter schools one shade.
This is true in some ways but there are a number of ways that charter schools, even when technically mandated to provide the support can push students out or not even offer them an application....
This is true in some ways but there are a number of ways that charter schools, even when technically mandated to provide the support can push students out or not even offer them an application. (They're technically mandated to offer all kids an education the same way any school is nationwide iirc. We still see these trends.) Schools of Choice - It can depend who's choosing
The study – Education for All? A Nationwide Audit Study of Schools of Choice – uncovered significant differences between charter schools and traditional public schools in the rates at which they respond to specific types of inquiries from parents. The evidence suggests schools of choice are less likely to encourage applications from students who have poor behavior and low prior achievement, but charter schools withhold application information from special needs students at higher rates.
... it raises the question of whether high-performing charter schools are successful in part because they screen out the costliest-to-educate students from their applicant pools.”
"We don't have the resources to accommodate you" is another common response. Yeah some kids with IEPs do well there. Some students do well there in general. But I'm opposed to dismantling the public education system in favor of vouchers and charters can be part of that process, which is my largest problem with them. If our public schools were well taken care of and funded I would care less about other school options.
And that is why I replied to a single comment that I felt was slightly inaccurate, rather than defending Schools of Choice as a program. Yes, charter schools often break the law in subtle ways...
And that is why I replied to a single comment that I felt was slightly inaccurate, rather than defending Schools of Choice as a program.
Yes, charter schools often break the law in subtle ways that are hard to police. That does not mean that they universally operate that way, nor does it mean that they are uniformly poorer in quality than the public school systems that they compete with for funding, as the comment I replied to implies.
And I think getting into the details of individual schools neglects the systemic issues. As a whole charter schools do not serve disabled students well. As a whole they use various methods to...
And I think getting into the details of individual schools neglects the systemic issues. As a whole charter schools do not serve disabled students well. As a whole they use various methods to avoid providing services and they deal with behavioral issues in very similar ways. An individual student may have a great experience at an individual school which may overall be great, but do you know if your school engaged in any of the discriminatory behaviors described here, regardless of your individual experience?
And I think that my individual experience has fuck-all to do with how valid any of those criticisms are. Did my comment distract from the problems, or did it just complicate the issue beyond...
And I think that my individual experience has fuck-all to do with how valid any of those criticisms are. Did my comment distract from the problems, or did it just complicate the issue beyond black-and-white?
My individual experience of nearly-failing the majority of my classes, of having about-representative numbers of disabled classmates? Yeah, I do know fairly well that they weren't engaging in those behaviors. Every year the standardized testing scores were released, and that school was above most public schools, alongside one or two of them, and close to a standard deviation below the handful of charter schools who did engage in those discriminatory practices.
I think if you're using your individual experience to contradict something in the aggregate, especially if your experience is mostly as a kid, yeah it distracts from the problems rather than...
And I think that my individual experience has fuck-all to do with how valid any of those criticisms are. Did my comment distract from the problems, or did it just complicate the issue beyond black-and-white?
I think if you're using your individual experience to contradict something in the aggregate, especially if your experience is mostly as a kid, yeah it distracts from the problems rather than meaningfully "complicating" the conversation. That was my reason for responding as I did. But I don't really want to have things be heated like this so I'm gonna back off this thread.
I agree that selection effects are extremely important. More about that here. But it seems like that comparison would heavily depend on who is considered "equivalent." After all, they're different...
I agree that selection effects are extremely important. More about that here.
But it seems like that comparison would heavily depend on who is considered "equivalent." After all, they're different kids. How do the studies do it?
In the upper grades, I would be surprised if the quality of the school mattered all that much for the most motivated students, when there are so many ways to learn outside the classroom nowadays. But being left alone (not bullied) counts for a lot.
Not the studies: My aunt did intake for public schools testing charter kids for grade placement, and parents were appaled their 5th grader was testing at a 3rd grade level.
Not the studies: My aunt did intake for public schools testing charter kids for grade placement, and parents were appaled their 5th grader was testing at a 3rd grade level.
It seems like there might be other selection effects? I would guess that weaker schools would be more likely to lose people and that weaker students would be more likely to switch (or maybe be...
It seems like there might be other selection effects? I would guess that weaker schools would be more likely to lose people and that weaker students would be more likely to switch (or maybe be "encouraged" to leave?) If things were going well, maybe they wouldn't be leaving?
If you want to explore the selection effect, I recommend the book "How the other half learns" by Robert Pondiscio, read with a grain of salt. The main (relevant) part is that charters (like...
If you want to explore the selection effect, I recommend the book "How the other half learns" by Robert Pondiscio, read with a grain of salt. The main (relevant) part is that charters (like Success Academy, the main subject of the book) are selecting for is not academic ability, but for engaged parents who are willing to compliantly navigate the process. There is also absolutely filtering once children have arrived, but that's secondary.
To get into more detail, it's really common in the charter industry to hear assertions of massive wait lists; that hundreds of children are applied but were not admitted; across the network, 3000 seats for 17,000 students, for example. One of the more interesting discoveries Pondiscio makes is how deep Success actually gets into their waitlist; they require parents to jump through multiple hoops, and missing any of them will result in another family getting the slot. For one elementary school, they got well past slot 100 for a 90 seat Kindergarten class.
To quote:
when school started in August, the kindergarten class was filled with children of parents who were fully engaged, aware of what they were getting into, and had voted with their feet not once but repeatedly, demonstrating their ability and willingness show up and follow through. The enrollment process is a de facto screen for parental engagement, enthusiasm, and competence. It is pointless, even dishonest, to deny it
I'm not so sure putting the parents through makework (which is a large part of what forcing people to jump through hoops ultimately is) can be a great way to screen kids for school slots. What...
I'm not so sure putting the parents through makework (which is a large part of what forcing people to jump through hoops ultimately is) can be a great way to screen kids for school slots.
What about parents who are poor, working three to five jobs between them (or two or three as a single parent) who just won't have time to jump through the hoops? Or the money to get into position to jump through the hoops? Parents who might very much want their kids to have a better chance than they do, but who are unable to have any actual (fiscal) advantages to realize in pursuit of that goal?
Those parents deserve to have their kids dumped into some "lesser" scholastic program?
Further, what happens when the admissions process becomes gamed? Gameified? You turn some process into A Process with hoops and rigor and bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, if what The Process leads to has some value, someone else comes into game it and charge for being good at the game.
It happens constantly. "Advisors" and "consultants" and "facilitators" who will step in (for a price) to jump those hoops for you. Or, at the very least, hold your hand (for that price) every step of the way to ensure you jump just where and how you're supposed to. College has long since gotten to that point at all the "elite" facilities, and the scandals taking place in various admissions programs (high and low profile) are the natural result of it.
So, at that point, it's money twice over that'll tip the scales. Wealthy parents, connected ones, they'll slide through these gameified admissions processes enjoying a low friction coast, while the "normals" struggle to figure out what seems like an arcane and mysterious process successfully while ice skating uphill the whole way.
Look, parents being properly and honestly engaged with the well being of their children is one of the absolute best indicators of a healthy environment for that child. I'm not just not so sure turning school admissions into a pass/fail hurdle for parents is a great way to find them. And I seriously doubt it'll do much encouraging.
Mostly it'll just sap time and money from parents ill equipped to spend it (the poor, the compressed middle class) while proving as little more than a check to write for the wealthy and comfortable parents.
So I wasn't actually arguing for this method of using the selection effect, but I will step in to clarify Pondiscio's views a bit more; I do recommend reading the book. Even though I disagree with...
So I wasn't actually arguing for this method of using the selection effect, but I will step in to clarify Pondiscio's views a bit more; I do recommend reading the book. Even though I disagree with a lot of his conclusions (hence my suggestion of reading with a grain of salt), the book did a good job at examining the mechanics of a "successful" charter program somewhat skeptically.
So, Pondiscio's argument is that the wealthy and most of the middle class have already been exempted from the need to navigate this process; they vote with their feet and move to a more academically successful school district, or pay private school tuition. So that leaves only the poor and lower middle class as needing alternatives in district.
So then he argues that since everyone else has alternatives to filter for successful schools at at monetary cost, how is unethical to provide alternatives at an awareness/time/effort cost for those without money? The argument in the book is a bit more detailed and nuanced, but that's the net I got out of it. Like you said, it's fundamentally unfair, but his point is that it's unfair because the way we allocate all children to schools in general is unfair -- some children have parents with more dedication than others, just like some have parents with more money.
For my own opinion, it's something I struggle with somewhat. I think that charters are clearly and obviously harmful in the case of small or rural school districts, where there are a limited number of students and they disrupt the possibility for economy of scale. They're harmful when their only methodology of improvement is their selection process and not an actual innovation in teaching (since they then leave public schools with only the more expensive to educate students at minimal net benefit to the students they receive).
Where I struggle with a bit is whether they are harmful when the charter is actually providing a quality educational alternative to those who would otherwise be stuck in incredibly poor schools. That said, that category of charter is in most cases very much an outlier and exception to charter schools as a whole, so my personal outlook is mostly against charter schools.
And also, more simply, it's shown time and time again that kids perform better when their parents are actively involved in their schooling, regardless of the quality of the school. While it's...
And also, more simply, it's shown time and time again that kids perform better when their parents are actively involved in their schooling, regardless of the quality of the school.
While it's certainly not a direct 100% overlap, I'm betting the parents jumping hoops for their kids to attend a better school are helping with their homework more than the ones that don't.
I’d say that the charter schools are significantly worse with hoops than elite universities. Especially early in the process, there is little to differentiate students, so it’s all on the parents...
I’d say that the charter schools are significantly worse with hoops than elite universities. Especially early in the process, there is little to differentiate students, so it’s all on the parents to jump through hoops. In elite universities, athletes, 36 ACT scores, and legacy admissions all get the velvet rope lifted. A (metaphorical?) green paper clip is added to their admission packet to mark that their personal essays about volunteering in Africa aren’t important: those hoops are for the upper middle class strivers.
It can definitely depend. I knew an 11 year old in St. Louis (where "where'd you go to High School" is the first question natives ask of each other) who was interviewing for private junior highs,...
It can definitely depend. I knew an 11 year old in St. Louis (where "where'd you go to High School" is the first question natives ask of each other) who was interviewing for private junior highs, in a suit, with a backup plan of buying an apartment in a particular suburb if he didn't get into a good school on his own.
Both are wild and parents even of people we'd call rich have to get involved for college if they're not at the peak - the admissions scandals demonstrate that.
My internal dialog reading your comment: "I want to vote this based upon my preconceived notions because I think charter schools are the worst invention since sliced bread, but I don't have any...
My internal dialog reading your comment:
"I want to vote this based upon my preconceived notions because I think charter schools are the worst invention since sliced bread, but I don't have any actual evidence for these claims, so I mustn't, in good conscience. Plus I'm half wasted on Memorial Day weekend and on my phone in a place with bad Internet access, so I'll just move on, but I wish I could vote based upon facts."
Ostensibly, a charter school is a public school that is not part of a public school district and therefore able to set its own policies and curriculum. They are open admission and charge no...
Ostensibly, a charter school is a public school that is not part of a public school district and therefore able to set its own policies and curriculum. They are open admission and charge no tuition which makes them distinct from private schools. Generally they have a written contract with the state that outlines the school's performance measures, and conceivably if they fail to meet the targets for those measures the state can revoke the contract and the school has to cease operation.
In reality it gets much more complicated, because politicians and other officials can be strict or lenient towards these schools based on whether the politicians like the school or not. And despite being "open" admission, there are a lot of ways for charter schools to avoid or expel special needs students, forcing those students back into the public system and making the charter's performance look better for lack of those more difficult students.
That being said, charters aren't bad by definition, there are some of them out there doing really good work. It's just unfortunately a very exploitable system by bad actors, especially now that republicans have learned they can use charters as a back channel to dismantle public schools. It may be the system is not worth keeping around any longer.
The way I see it, the charter school system and the private school system are both just bad ways of avoiding the real problem: properly funding schools. The difference between a bad public school...
The way I see it, the charter school system and the private school system are both just bad ways of avoiding the real problem: properly funding schools.
The difference between a bad public school and a good one in New Jersey is much less than in Pennsylvania, in no small part because of better distribution of funds.
I call out private schools (which I still class charters), even though they mostly don't take public funds, because the people who are paying those prices for private schools should be taxed that tuition amount to properly fund public schools. They also are able to poach teachers with their better funding, because teacher pay is so abysmal.
Private schooling only serves two real purposes: Serving the elite a better education, and bypassing the 'no religion in the schools.'
I've found education has an almost directly proportional relationship with money, and an infinite capacity to spend it, even outside of wages. Given a decent amount of teachers and a not-incompetant administration, more money means better schooling. Lower headcounts/student. More decidated support. Not needing to beg students to donate school supplies. Feeding lunches to hungry kids, hiring enough staff to make healthy lunches and not prepackaged garbage.
My understanding is that private schools don't actually pay better than public schools, at least not the non-elite ones. The impression I got from my teachers in high school was the opposite --...
They also are able to poach teachers with their better funding, because teacher pay is so abysmal.
My understanding is that private schools don't actually pay better than public schools, at least not the non-elite ones. The impression I got from my teachers in high school was the opposite -- they got paid less than they would as public school teachers. Which makes some sense given that they weren't members of any teacher's union and didn't have to meat the same state requirements as public school teachers (for example, my high school math and science teachers weren't accredited in any way, and it caused one of my peers problems when he transferred credits to a public school).
Overall I agree with your point, though. Private schools really only exist to amplify existing class-based disparities in access to quality education or to infuse education with religious elements that take time away from effective education.
One of the best elementary schools in California is a dual language immersion charter school in Oakland called Yu Ming. They’re in West Oakland, which is a gentrifying but still poor and violent...
One of the best elementary schools in California is a dual language immersion charter school in Oakland called Yu Ming. They’re in West Oakland, which is a gentrifying but still poor and violent area. I recall their at-grade math and reading proficiency rates are above 90%.
They pay significantly less than the public OUSD. Like… $47–52k to teachers. It’s insane.
They attract middle-income families that are too poor to send their kids to private schools but also don’t want to send their kids to OUSD — where the at-grade proficiency rates are around 30%. But a quarter of their students come from low-income families.
I definitely don't want to imply that there aren't situations where charter and private schools give better education to the students who can attend them. I don't fault parents for wanting the...
I definitely don't want to imply that there aren't situations where charter and private schools give better education to the students who can attend them. I don't fault parents for wanting the best education possible for their kids. But the problem is with a system where that's necessary to get a good education. Stratifying education into a class system like that enhances What about the kids who can't get into the charter school? Those kids don't deserve to go to a public school that is almost definitely extremely underfunded. A system where we syphon money out of public schools only increases the gaps between these classes of students. And that's not even touching on areas of the US where public vs private schools are highly racially segregated, which is absolutely the case in parts of the South.
Personally, I was sent to a religious private school that was not better in terms of its educational outcomes or resources compared to my local public school. My parents went into debt to pay to send me and my siblings there, and while my education was satisfactory it was no better than the local public schools (and in fact in math specifically it was much worse, we most of my peers needed math tutors to get up to speed for college entrance even though they were honors students). So I also have a perspective on how private schools can function in a way that really doesn't benefit students at all educationally.
One of the best decisions my parents made was to put my siblings & I in public schools instead of the local Catholic school. Not only were the public schools some of the best in the state, but...
One of the best decisions my parents made was to put my siblings & I in public schools instead of the local Catholic school. Not only were the public schools some of the best in the state, but they also had a clue on how to handle students outside the median child and disciplinary problem children—not a good environment for students on the far ends of the scholastic ability spectrum. They were generous enough to funnel the money they otherwise would have spent on K–12 tuition into college savings funds for us. To this day, I don’t understand how that school remains open when the public schools of that suburb remain top shelf.
How do they not know of the reputation for Catholic K–12 schooling to be atheist factories? Their alumni turn out 10% tradcaths, 20% dawkinite atheists, and the balance are grill pilled agnostic...
How do they not know of the reputation for Catholic K–12 schooling to be atheist factories? Their alumni turn out 10% tradcaths, 20% dawkinite atheists, and the balance are grill pilled agnostic cultural Catholics.
I’ve heard that Protestant religious schools are more thorough on the brainwashing. Catholicism finds the attrition acceptable if it means they teach that 10% with enough critical thinking rigor to handle the philosophy heavy years of seminary. Evangelical Protestantism has no such requirement.
Oh I can confirm, the evangelical protestant school I attended was much more thorough at the brainwashing. We thought of the local Catholic schools as dens of sin. But of course we didn't believe...
Oh I can confirm, the evangelical protestant school I attended was much more thorough at the brainwashing. We thought of the local Catholic schools as dens of sin. But of course we didn't believe Catholics were real Christians in general, so.
Granted, my entire friend group turned out queer, so they clearly weren't that good at their job... not for lack of trying though. One of my friends came out in high school and was asked not to come back.
Because most American Catholics are cafeteria casual Catholics who don't think too hard about dogma and disagree with the church in a number of ways, and the Church has various orders dedicated to...
Because most American Catholics are cafeteria casual Catholics who don't think too hard about dogma and disagree with the church in a number of ways, and the Church has various orders dedicated to education. They won't gain more devout members by not having the schools, and some places they provide an excellent education. Especially since they usually do actually teach science as the Big Bang and Evolution are not in opposition to their faith. The parents want educated kids who learn about their religion and become general American Catholics, and they probably want some level of financial segregation whether they admit it or not.
Of course some do not provide good education, and the private school system can be as problematic in different ways as the charter schools especially when vouchers are involved.
I was very directly involved in this type of situation except in Canada, as an independent school principal in direct competition for students with the local school board. The difference being...
I was very directly involved in this type of situation except in Canada, as an independent school principal in direct competition for students with the local school board. The difference being that, at that time, we didnt receive full funding and only got about 60% of the funding that the public schools received, so in economic terms we were a very good deal for the provincial gov since we taught the mandated curriculum but for 60% of the cost to the taxpayer.
But I was and remain a huge supporter of independent and alternate school programs. Alberta is Canada's Florida in that regard, generally conservative and somewhat untrusting of gov agendas. Independent schools thrive in this environment because they meet parents goals, which can be pretty varied. We have schools of all stripes - religious (Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Catholic, Jewish), science based, athletics based, project based, technology based, a school for single teenage parents, Special Needs schools specializing in different areas, indigenous schools, French schools, Waldorf, Montessori, early childhood specialist schools - independent schools cover it all and thats in addition to charter schools.
The ironic part is that when I was the principal I went to the local school board and inquired if our school (3 campuses, pop. about 650 at that time) would be able to come under their umbrella as an alternate program. That would've meant they would receive some provincial funding for our students and we would also receive more funding so it was a win-win in our view.
I was soundly rejected by the chair of the school board, with very detectable disdain. She made it very clear that the public school was capable of doing it all, serving every student and parent need except for religious parents. They weren't going to touch us.
Then in an inventive twist, our school applied to become an alternate school in a rural division just outside the city. At that point the city school division took us to court! Their argument was that no other school division could fund us if we weren't geographically within their area. Turns out the court saw through that shady argument and ruled against them.
The school is now a FULLY funded school through that rural school division and has grown substantially - so the city divison loses out on hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because frankly, they were too stuck up to accept a religious school. Not so ironically there are now multiple religious schools within the city division. I guess they learned their lesson.
If public schools arent meeting parent and student needs they need to allow freedom of choice in education and support that choice. The public schools cannot and should not expect to be all things to all people. There are just too many special interest and special need students to do a good job of educating all students and that's where the freedom to choose comes in. The province still mandates the core curriculum that we all teach but every school can add its own specialties on top - parents are happy, kids needs are met and the only one upset is the public school because they've lost their monopoly. Competition works in every other aspect of our society - it works in education too.
I'll toss out a counterpoint I just learned about, from someone deeply involved in the matter: Private Pre-K Montessori school, a very highly respected one, gets grants from state during COVID to...
I'll toss out a counterpoint I just learned about, from someone deeply involved in the matter:
Private Pre-K Montessori school, a very highly respected one, gets grants from state during COVID to expand public access to pre-k, and they figure they can do it better than all the public programs, as they were doing 'more with less.' This essentially brought them under the fold of a public school, and were now forced to comply with all the things a public school must adhere to.
It turns out that they were in a self-selection bubble, because they soon got sued into the ground for violating the American Disabilities Act, for trying to charge families additional to pay for their kids added developmental needs. They have gone bankrupt within the span of 3 years as a result.
Freedom of choice more often than not gives alternative providers outs to avoid dealing with 'the hard students,' whom are the ones that need help the most, at a much higher cost.
Well, that’s unfortunate. It’s closing a school due to bad policies. The way I see it is that some kids costing significantly more than others to teach is just reality and systems that pay the...
Well, that’s unfortunate. It’s closing a school due to bad policies.
The way I see it is that some kids costing significantly more than others to teach is just reality and systems that pay the same for everyone are denying reality out of misguided egalitarianism. Something like insurance is needed and government funding can do that. This doesn’t mean that special-needs kids have to be evenly distributed over all schools - why not specialize?
But the funding system needs to be designed to allow for specialization by paying different amounts, or there’s going to be a strong financial incentive to avoid taking special-needs kids.
Ironically that’s a “to each according to their needs” policy, but that’s just what insurance is supposed to do. It’s a way of mitigating the inherent unfairness of life circumstances.
There is truth to that. The schools can be selective and that is part of the appeal to parents. They are looking for a homogenous group and many are looking to get their kids out of classrooms...
There is truth to that. The schools can be selective and that is part of the appeal to parents. They are looking for a homogenous group and many are looking to get their kids out of classrooms with high needs kids.
I will note that our school, despite being an alternative religious program, also had a very well developed Special Needs program with those students integrating into regular subjects wherever they could and taking classes on their own for the subjects where they needed one on one attention (like Language Arts and Math).
But the counter to the "Montessori problem" is for an entrepreneurial educator to create a school especially for high needs kids, which has happened in our city too. We have three schools for students with special education requirements, learning disabilities or/and ADHD and one that would accept children with autism on a case-by-case basis if they can accommodate their needs.
I fully support students with high needs being in a school that specializes in helping them, and can provide the much more developed and intensive support they need. Those schools have teachers, teacher aides, speech therapists, occupational therapists, counsellors and social workers all working as a team who are all familiar with the accommodations, modifications, and remediations each student will need. They are all students who will need carefully constructed Individual Education Programs and that takes a ton of work and experience. Having that amount of labor intensive work for each student is something many public schools can only dream of - they end up leaving ALL those roles to a regular classroom teacher who is understandably overwhelmed.
The idea of just integrating students with high needs into regular public classrooms has been an abject failure in my opinion and its one of the reasons that teachers burn out at such a high rate and why parents prefer to send their kids elsewhere - the public school cannot be all things to all students as much as it wants to make that claim.
I'm gonna jump up on my soapbox and yell a lil bit. Imo, these school choice programs are just union busting. They cut funding to public schools to the point of failure, then clutch their pearls...
I'm gonna jump up on my soapbox and yell a lil bit. Imo, these school choice programs are just union busting. They cut funding to public schools to the point of failure, then clutch their pearls about the poor quality of public education. They create this alternative system where they don't have to negotiate with the teachers union and they get to extract profit from public money.
It doesn’t help matters that a significant portion of teachers will gladly take the pay cut if it means they don’t have to deal with the problem students anymore.
It doesn’t help matters that a significant portion of teachers will gladly take the pay cut if it means they don’t have to deal with the problem students anymore.
calling them "successful" is ... a decision. privatization is always short term gains with a long term cost to society.
.. see the prison industry for an example.
I'm annoyed with certain writers who like to call school "child prison" so I'm not wild about that comparison. That's superficial, though.
In theory, some schools specializing in better students and other schools handling kids with special needs isn't inherently a bad thing. Isn't that what "magnet schools" are all about? The schools that handle special needs need dramatically more funding, though, because it's very expensive.
Magnets in the US have never been a thing for developmentally delayed or disabled kids at least that I've seen. They're usually described as for gifted kids or target certain populations, but never seen that they're "Special Needs*" focused. You'll see them described as "special talents" but that's about gifted kids or kids with a strong interest.
Magnets were about pulling kids into (or out of) different neighborhoods to remedy segregation.
It isn't actually great to separate out certain types of kids from schools, it's better to support funding the schools so they can serve their students well regardless, but pulling funding out means that the regular public schools have less money, and they will not take better care of their students that way.
*I hate the term, so do most SPED students/teachers I know. They don't love "SPED" either but it's entrenched af.
Gifted kids are special needs because they will languish if you put them through a curriculum that can’t keep up with them. Which can sometimes manifest in acting out and other disruptive behavior.
Once again noting that "Special Needs" is not the preferred language for kids with disabilities coming from the kids and adults in question . And "Special talents" or "gifted and talented" or whatever language may be used for smart kids is more common than calling them "special needs." I'm not arguing that honestly all kids have individual needs. My "gifted" program was "do freshman math in 8th grade" and "you can read a novel because you're done with all your work." We could do so much better in many ways in the system.
I'm distinguishing because the original person meant disabled kids.
I was in the gifted program and definitely referred to as "special needs" pretty frequently. I had regular meetings about my IEP. They even had me on the "special needs" bus, which was in fact, shorter than all the other busses. That was like, 20 years ago, though, so it's very possible that things have changed.
You're not wrong about what the original person meant, though.
I'm not gonna say no one uses the term. I am saying it's fallen deeply out of favor with pretty much everyone but those looking for a nice euphemism that encompasses developmentally disabled, learning disabled and "bad at school"
But if it's being used for gifted as well, it's even less useful and I think gifted is a questionable label to throw on a kid anyway.
Agreed on all counts.
Both you and /u/DefinitelyNotAFae are correct, leaving everyone in the same class is a poor choice but both ends of the spectrum are classified under Special Services and can be equally disruptive to the other 80% or students, for different reasons. Is putting them in different boxes? Maybe not; what are some alternatives?
There is a whole area of study - pedagogy - that can discuss best practices, my comments about charter schools are about the systemic issues because that's what I'm educated on. I would be out of my realm of knowledge to say "here's how to teach the top and bottom performing students" other than ensuring Maslov's bottom tier of needs are met. That one seems pretty crucial and effective. (Also in my realm of work).
It's also pretty far afield of the original topic so I'd rather cut my participation in this tangent here.
Right, I meant that the magnet schools probably aren't serving as many special needs kids and I think it's considered okay? (That's an assumption. Anyone know how it works?)
Charter schools and private schools omit disabled kids because they don't want to spend the money on them, that means that more disabled kids are left in underfunded public schools as the vouchers pull money from them.
Magnet schools may be able to deny students with disabilities, afaik they will often ask if the student applying has an IEP or 504 which is asking if a student has a disability. Which would be discrimination in any other realm. But magnet schools may vary by state/district. They're given much more latitude in general.
Generally no, segregating disabled kids isn't ideal, nor is reducing the "economy of scale" funding for the schools that keep them. A student who has an IEP or 504 may still be very academically skilled and be rejected out of hand by a magnet school because they one, no matter that it's to protect, say, an accommodation for their medication and their fidget toys. Civil rights and education law requires public schools provide an education to all kids. Pulling the public school money is just resegregation and a return to the lack of education for many disabled kids.
At least several of the gifted kids in my classes 20 years ago had IEPs. That was at three different elementary schools and one middle school. I'd assumed all of them had one, but it's possible that's not true. I just know that when I had my IEP meetings with my parents and teachers, a bunch of other gifted kids' parents were also there, waiting to have their meeting next. Maybe that's changed, but when I was in school, asking if someone had an IEP would not be a good way to determine if they had a disability.
I generally agree with everything that you're saying about charter schools and funding, it's just these few details that clash with my experience in the Florida school system.
This varies on a state-by-state basis. In some states, gifted and talented children fall under the umbrella of special education and can qualify for IEPs, whereas in other states they do not.
This was in Florida, specifically, so it's relevant to the OP.
Oh definitely!
I was just adding some context to your post for everybody else’s sake, since there’s usually a perception that GT kids can’t be on IEPs, especially from people whose states didn’t have that as an option.
Sorry if it came across as short or as a correction. I actually meant it as a confirmation of what you were sharing!
Oh not at all! I should have included the fact that it was in Florida in my first comment. It makes sense that different states would do things differently.
Huh so it looks like state law has mapped their gifted kid stuff onto the IEP processes. It's just not a federally protected IEP in the same way unless there are also disabilities which obviously there are.
I went in a relatively small private Catholic school K-8. I was labeled "gifted" but we had very little in the way of a program and so I don't even know exactly what they were doing at the time at a state level. (Plus I was a kid so it probably wouldn't map well to actual policy.)
I work with a lot of students that had IEPs in high school and are now navigating college but the gifted IEP hasn't come up and so I'm not sure our state uses it with the same copied terminology.
Ty for the info tho, I got to learn something
You explicitly have to have a disability to have an IEP!
Edit: ok there's something called a Gifted IEP that might be different? But perhaps it varies by state as someone else noted.
That's sort of why labels like Gifted, Special Needs, and the giant bucket of "everyone else" aren't the most useful. Smart kids can still struggle in a subject or have a disability, disabled kids have few or a lot of support needs, etc. You can be any combination of any of these.
This was in Florida, so it's relevant to the OP, but as far as the broader discussion I don't have any experience and don't disagree with you at all.
I do have dyscalculia, but I got my IEP before that was diagnosed.
Yeah I made it to college before getting an ADHD dx myself, which again I'm old! I replied to another comment that I dug around and learned some stuff so thanks!
It seems like part of the solution is to provide more funding to schools who take more disabled kids. (Yeah, probably public schools.)
Well in general, yes, but school voucher programs are breaking the public school system by design. This is not a side effect, it's the goal. And in states like Florida and Texas the goal is as much re-segregation (not that we successfully de-segregated really) by race and religion as it is by ability. Instead of creating stratified school systems, it just makes a lot more sense, especially in the matter of scale, to pay for one system (and not with property taxes that once again perpetuate segregation.)
Don't take money out of public schools and then have to put money back in. Like most scale things the "cost per student" isn't actually evenly distributed.
I think this reminds me of capitalist solutions in almost every market. Expand by providing what is genuinely a great product. Get additional funding - off the back of federal funding of course - and ratchet up the offerings. For Uber it was selling cab rides a nearly half the price of a normal cab ride with someone who more closely resembled your peer. For Amazon it was free shipping and discounted prices. It's easy to imagine how that goes for private schools. Add additional language programs, access to new technology, or just well paid/highly competent teachers.
Now, continue that trend until public schools close - as we're starting to see - and ensure that your charter school franchise has a strangle hold on the region. As we've seen in those other industries the point of business isn't to make a great product - it's to maximize profits. So those charter groups create regional monopolies where it is financially infeasible for parents to choose another school. Why provide all those expensive, beneficial additions at that point. Slash the costs the floor and still collect the consistent funding from the state and federal programs. Quality of the schools hits rock bottom but families don't have alternatives. You have a captive audience and regulated payments, an MBA's wet dream and a parent's nightmare.
It's frustrating to see enshittification for things folks don't need like cab rides or video games. I hate the damage it does to workers rights, but the products themselves aren't that important. But education is the cornerstone of a functioning society. This is the shortest of short term thinking I've witnessed since Clinton allowed medical insurance to be for profit.
I don’t think this is accurate for Uber, where it was pretty clearly subsidized by investors rather than government. (Looks like the investors put in 25 billion dollars!) Also the service really was better in many ways, so “enshittification” doesn’t really apply.
Though, nowadays the subsidies are over and prices are up, so that admittedly is worse. I don’t know how service compares to cabs nowadays. Doesn’t everyone have apps now?
Driving a cab has always been low wage job, often done by immigrants, so nothing new there. Many of the nice things we enjoy have historically only been affordable due to low-wage jobs. And not all that affordable either - cabs have always been expensive from a rider’s point of view.
It seems better to talk about each industry individually since they are quite different.
I wasn't trying to say it was a direct proxy, just an example of what happens when you have a captured market. I agree, early days of Uber were great but now it's not - hence the enshittification. I'm using it as a parallel to how the charter schools might actually be better at the moment, hence when they have been so popular, but if they are able to establish a monopoly with public schools closing then you might see trends similar to what happened with Uber. Isn't that how competitive capitalism works? Outcompete competition until you control the market and then drastically slash COGs to maximize profitability?
In my city, charters enroll 15% of the students. It feels like a slippery slope fallacy to assume that if they became a monopoly things would "enshittify" (hate this term). Education is highly regulated and the government could start revoking licenses, assigning licenses to others, or just operating public schools again if they decided charters were operating like abusive monopolies.
As another angle, why do you not assume that public schools at 85% marketshare or whatever it is where you live are already acting like enshittified versions of what they could be?
I haven't heard of any break-out hits among charter schools, so the idea of a monopoly seems far-fetched. Also, some public schools closing doesn't mean public schools are unavailable. It means kids have to go to another public school further away.
Which means longer bus rides which means more tired kids, which means poorer academic performance. Which means more people pull their kids from school. Until only those who cannot don't.
This is very intentionally being done, along with vilifying teachers both as union members and as "groomers," No, an individual charter school isn't the end of the world but this is baked into the intent of what Florida is doing.
They want to abolish the Dept of Education, the last bill for that was introduced in 2022 I believe. It is not a shock that the same people who want to cut or eliminate taxes want to cut public services. They're not hiding it. There is a reason that (at least some areas of) Florida is allowing someone with just a HS diploma/GED to substitute teach.
I just wish we'd believe the people who say this is what they want, when they say it. We wouldn't be so surprised when they do it.
They’re not just out to get rid of the Dept of Ed, but they want to replace the secular education with religious schools. Once they defund public education and reallocate all that money, people will have the “choice” to either educate their kids at a conveniently located Christian school or a very inconveniently located secular one, if one has been set up.
Yeah removing oversight on education is 100% about religious schools and that includes the white Christian nationalism that places like Prager U have been providing for students.
I don’t really want to get into it, but instead of talking about “them,” it would help to be more specific. Sure, sometimes the same person might want all these things.
The "them" is GOP representatives in the house and senate, and many local GOP representatives.
If you don't want to get into it, I don't see the point? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the intent of these policies is the destruction of the system. These aren't side effects.
What's frustrating about this issue is that the average voter isn't engaged enough to understand what is happening here, they don't understand that it's the culmination of a long battle to intentionally de-legitimize public schools. They see reports about a issues that either, point a finger at under performing schools or highlight/twist curriculum content to fit a particular narrative that it is both pervasive and out of touch with parents who want to control their children's exposure to anything.
Legitimately frustrated parents, who have a child who needs help in school, will pull their kids out to send them to a charter school that is well funded and can offer that help. They have every reason to be frustrated! But they don't realize their frustration isn't with a school that doesn't want to offer them help, it's with the politicians and special interest who have worked hard to defund public schools and pay public educators poorly.
More frustratingly, this largely started after schools were integrated. This is just a campaign that white interests have lobbied for decades, in order to obtain the racist separation of classes they want. I see posts like this and read about SCOTUS protecting racist gerrymandering and eyeing Brown V Board and I'm legitimately scared. The average voter doesn't realize what's happening to their America, a country and ideal they would probably fight for passionately.
Americans have the luxury of being largely isolated and that has fostered the idea that America is eternal or something, they don't look at a human history strewn with rising and falling empires and think "This could happen to America." I believe that, like Soviet Union citizens who believed their empire to be strong and viril, despite the rest of the world being able to see the signs of decay, Americans are largely unaware how far America has fallen and at some point it will just be too late to salvage what America used to be.
The thing is, people may not understand the decisions but they are defending them, not just claiming ignorance. Even on here, like right above you, there are posts basically saying “rich people have the right to send their kids wherever they want, they shouldn’t have to pay for everyone else to go to school.” Like dude that is taxes, you’re describing taxes. It’s not a new concept: the king has money, but he can’t/definitely won’t build a big nice wall by himself, but hey if you guys work and build my wall I’ll give you some land, then when the wall is done you’re safe, just give me some of the crop yield to live inside the wall you built that I’ve paid for. Feudalism notwithstanding, it worked for us for a long time and we got interstates and public utilities out of it, and people who make -max- $200k are saying that no one should be “forced” to use the school system, which leads to “why am I paying for something I don’t use?” Why should retirees be paying taxes for schools when they don’t have any kids? It’s not a slippery slope if we are all actively sliding downhill into boomery self-obsession—kids don’t get to pick their parents, charter schools are just a way to separate people whose parents can pay for school from people whose parents cannot, solidifying the divide generationally. Why would we want to be about that. But I’ve literally had people tell me I’m a conspiracy theorist for saying that worsening public education is a feature not a bug, then tell me that teachers don’t want more money, they just want to be respected.
A story: when I was a kid, school enrollment was declining (end of the baby boom) and my school district decided to close one of the elementary schools. It was the oldest school, which needed significant upgrades and apparently it wasn't worth it.
Unfortunately, it was at the geographic center of a very large, mostly-rural district on the edge of a small city, with the other two schools closer to the city, where it's more populated. So, kids from the far side had to ride busses even further to get to school.
Some parents even started their own school for a while, so their kids wouldn't have to go so far.
But I don't believe anything changed in the long run?
Which is to say, closing schools is disruptive, sad, and sucks for the people involved, and of course they're upset, but it's not really new, and I'm not sure I see anything in this article that points to existential issues.
From the article:
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There's an interesting paper review here, which is published under the auspices of Education Next, an avowedly nonpartisan journal of education advocacy whose editorial board seems to be dominated by by the American Enterprise Institute and Hoover Institution. Detailed critique.
Tl;dr part:
The data above are pre-pandemic. Nonetheless, it's fairly clear that charters taken as a whole didn't offer substantial improvements in test performance on a district level, unless for-profit schools were taken out of the picture. I'll admit my biases here - I came from a union teaching family in Michigan. Test scores have always been correlated with neighborhood affluence and relative school funding, with schools in deeply impoverished areas performing worst. Funding cuts to the City of Detroit's schools affected performance so badly that students had to file a lawsuit to get a right to literacy recognized. Detroit's for-profit charter schools have been catastrophic both for teachers and students.
Nationwide, many for-profit charters and education management companies used by not-for-profit charters are actually thinly-disguised real estate investment trusts (PDF warning).
Parents are now understandably frustrated about the pandemic disruption to their kids' education, and seeking alternatives for various reasons. But the study reported in Education Next indicates that charter schools don't, on the whole, provide better outcomes than public schools. There is growing evidence that some charter schools are now pushing a right-wing ideological curriculum in essentially segregated conditions, including in Florida's charters. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this is all long-running political strategy.
It's also worth considering the impact of private equity investment in charter schools as of a piece with public goods takeovers of child care, healthcare, prisons, charter schools and nursing homes, and infrastructure.
How do charter schools work? Can anyone go to them or do they cost extra on top of the vouchers
They're private schools that take public money.
They abandon kids with special learning needs, ranging from speech therapy to full disabilities, to just falling behind on test scores. This artificially inflates their performance and makes the public schools seem worse than they are.
Often charter school kids will be 1-2 grade levels lower than equivalent public school kids in terms of actual knowledge.
They can also kick students out for minor infractions and will often dump "troublesome students" - read low performing - back into the public school system right before state testing begins to additionally buffer their score and nerf the local public competition.
And (in our area at least) it's a financial double whammy for the public school. Here our schools have to pull a proportional amount out for each student attending charter school and give it to the charter school. For example, if the public school has 1,000 students and one leaves for a charter school, the public school sends 1/1000 of its tax revenue to the charter school. However the public school doesn't realize a 1/1000th reduction in expenses. Even worse, the public schools are "stuck" with students with special needs with higher costs (i.e. behavioral health, emotional support, intermediate unit services, etc.), so average cost per public school student has increased. Meanwhile, the district school board is elected citizens/wannabe politicians who have no background in education and are adamant about not raising taxes while the district is getting financially choked by these charter schools.
Aaaand sometimes, none of this is true. In many jurisdictions, charter schools have the same requirements for special education as public schools, receive less funding, and are genuinely attempting different methodologies that benefit neurodivergent students.
Not most of them, but the conception of them you've outlined isn't universally true. As someone who never would have graduated from a typical high school, at least the charter I attended gave me a solid education even if I did drop out in the end. It's a politically fraught issue, but some public school systems are terrible anyway, and charters do public good in those situations. Fix the public systems, but there's no need to paint all charter schools one shade.
This is true in some ways but there are a number of ways that charter schools, even when technically mandated to provide the support can push students out or not even offer them an application. (They're technically mandated to offer all kids an education the same way any school is nationwide iirc. We still see these trends.)
Schools of Choice - It can depend who's choosing
"We don't have the resources to accommodate you" is another common response. Yeah some kids with IEPs do well there. Some students do well there in general. But I'm opposed to dismantling the public education system in favor of vouchers and charters can be part of that process, which is my largest problem with them. If our public schools were well taken care of and funded I would care less about other school options.
And that is why I replied to a single comment that I felt was slightly inaccurate, rather than defending Schools of Choice as a program.
Yes, charter schools often break the law in subtle ways that are hard to police. That does not mean that they universally operate that way, nor does it mean that they are uniformly poorer in quality than the public school systems that they compete with for funding, as the comment I replied to implies.
And I think getting into the details of individual schools neglects the systemic issues. As a whole charter schools do not serve disabled students well. As a whole they use various methods to avoid providing services and they deal with behavioral issues in very similar ways. An individual student may have a great experience at an individual school which may overall be great, but do you know if your school engaged in any of the discriminatory behaviors described here, regardless of your individual experience?
And I think that my individual experience has fuck-all to do with how valid any of those criticisms are. Did my comment distract from the problems, or did it just complicate the issue beyond black-and-white?
My individual experience of nearly-failing the majority of my classes, of having about-representative numbers of disabled classmates? Yeah, I do know fairly well that they weren't engaging in those behaviors. Every year the standardized testing scores were released, and that school was above most public schools, alongside one or two of them, and close to a standard deviation below the handful of charter schools who did engage in those discriminatory practices.
I think if you're using your individual experience to contradict something in the aggregate, especially if your experience is mostly as a kid, yeah it distracts from the problems rather than meaningfully "complicating" the conversation. That was my reason for responding as I did. But I don't really want to have things be heated like this so I'm gonna back off this thread.
I agree that selection effects are extremely important. More about that here.
But it seems like that comparison would heavily depend on who is considered "equivalent." After all, they're different kids. How do the studies do it?
In the upper grades, I would be surprised if the quality of the school mattered all that much for the most motivated students, when there are so many ways to learn outside the classroom nowadays. But being left alone (not bullied) counts for a lot.
Not the studies: My aunt did intake for public schools testing charter kids for grade placement, and parents were appaled their 5th grader was testing at a 3rd grade level.
It seems like there might be other selection effects? I would guess that weaker schools would be more likely to lose people and that weaker students would be more likely to switch (or maybe be "encouraged" to leave?) If things were going well, maybe they wouldn't be leaving?
If you want to explore the selection effect, I recommend the book "How the other half learns" by Robert Pondiscio, read with a grain of salt. The main (relevant) part is that charters (like Success Academy, the main subject of the book) are selecting for is not academic ability, but for engaged parents who are willing to compliantly navigate the process. There is also absolutely filtering once children have arrived, but that's secondary.
To get into more detail, it's really common in the charter industry to hear assertions of massive wait lists; that hundreds of children are applied but were not admitted; across the network, 3000 seats for 17,000 students, for example. One of the more interesting discoveries Pondiscio makes is how deep Success actually gets into their waitlist; they require parents to jump through multiple hoops, and missing any of them will result in another family getting the slot. For one elementary school, they got well past slot 100 for a 90 seat Kindergarten class.
To quote:
I'm not so sure putting the parents through makework (which is a large part of what forcing people to jump through hoops ultimately is) can be a great way to screen kids for school slots.
What about parents who are poor, working three to five jobs between them (or two or three as a single parent) who just won't have time to jump through the hoops? Or the money to get into position to jump through the hoops? Parents who might very much want their kids to have a better chance than they do, but who are unable to have any actual (fiscal) advantages to realize in pursuit of that goal?
Those parents deserve to have their kids dumped into some "lesser" scholastic program?
Further, what happens when the admissions process becomes gamed? Gameified? You turn some process into A Process with hoops and rigor and bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, if what The Process leads to has some value, someone else comes into game it and charge for being good at the game.
It happens constantly. "Advisors" and "consultants" and "facilitators" who will step in (for a price) to jump those hoops for you. Or, at the very least, hold your hand (for that price) every step of the way to ensure you jump just where and how you're supposed to. College has long since gotten to that point at all the "elite" facilities, and the scandals taking place in various admissions programs (high and low profile) are the natural result of it.
So, at that point, it's money twice over that'll tip the scales. Wealthy parents, connected ones, they'll slide through these gameified admissions processes enjoying a low friction coast, while the "normals" struggle to figure out what seems like an arcane and mysterious process successfully while ice skating uphill the whole way.
Look, parents being properly and honestly engaged with the well being of their children is one of the absolute best indicators of a healthy environment for that child. I'm not just not so sure turning school admissions into a pass/fail hurdle for parents is a great way to find them. And I seriously doubt it'll do much encouraging.
Mostly it'll just sap time and money from parents ill equipped to spend it (the poor, the compressed middle class) while proving as little more than a check to write for the wealthy and comfortable parents.
So I wasn't actually arguing for this method of using the selection effect, but I will step in to clarify Pondiscio's views a bit more; I do recommend reading the book. Even though I disagree with a lot of his conclusions (hence my suggestion of reading with a grain of salt), the book did a good job at examining the mechanics of a "successful" charter program somewhat skeptically.
So, Pondiscio's argument is that the wealthy and most of the middle class have already been exempted from the need to navigate this process; they vote with their feet and move to a more academically successful school district, or pay private school tuition. So that leaves only the poor and lower middle class as needing alternatives in district.
So then he argues that since everyone else has alternatives to filter for successful schools at at monetary cost, how is unethical to provide alternatives at an awareness/time/effort cost for those without money? The argument in the book is a bit more detailed and nuanced, but that's the net I got out of it. Like you said, it's fundamentally unfair, but his point is that it's unfair because the way we allocate all children to schools in general is unfair -- some children have parents with more dedication than others, just like some have parents with more money.
For my own opinion, it's something I struggle with somewhat. I think that charters are clearly and obviously harmful in the case of small or rural school districts, where there are a limited number of students and they disrupt the possibility for economy of scale. They're harmful when their only methodology of improvement is their selection process and not an actual innovation in teaching (since they then leave public schools with only the more expensive to educate students at minimal net benefit to the students they receive).
Where I struggle with a bit is whether they are harmful when the charter is actually providing a quality educational alternative to those who would otherwise be stuck in incredibly poor schools. That said, that category of charter is in most cases very much an outlier and exception to charter schools as a whole, so my personal outlook is mostly against charter schools.
And also, more simply, it's shown time and time again that kids perform better when their parents are actively involved in their schooling, regardless of the quality of the school.
While it's certainly not a direct 100% overlap, I'm betting the parents jumping hoops for their kids to attend a better school are helping with their homework more than the ones that don't.
I’d say that the charter schools are significantly worse with hoops than elite universities. Especially early in the process, there is little to differentiate students, so it’s all on the parents to jump through hoops. In elite universities, athletes, 36 ACT scores, and legacy admissions all get the velvet rope lifted. A (metaphorical?) green paper clip is added to their admission packet to mark that their personal essays about volunteering in Africa aren’t important: those hoops are for the upper middle class strivers.
It can definitely depend. I knew an 11 year old in St. Louis (where "where'd you go to High School" is the first question natives ask of each other) who was interviewing for private junior highs, in a suit, with a backup plan of buying an apartment in a particular suburb if he didn't get into a good school on his own.
Both are wild and parents even of people we'd call rich have to get involved for college if they're not at the peak - the admissions scandals demonstrate that.
My internal dialog reading your comment:
"I want to vote this based upon my preconceived notions because I think charter schools are the worst invention since sliced bread, but I don't have any actual evidence for these claims, so I mustn't, in good conscience. Plus I'm half wasted on Memorial Day weekend and on my phone in a place with bad Internet access, so I'll just move on, but I wish I could vote based upon facts."
Ostensibly, a charter school is a public school that is not part of a public school district and therefore able to set its own policies and curriculum. They are open admission and charge no tuition which makes them distinct from private schools. Generally they have a written contract with the state that outlines the school's performance measures, and conceivably if they fail to meet the targets for those measures the state can revoke the contract and the school has to cease operation.
In reality it gets much more complicated, because politicians and other officials can be strict or lenient towards these schools based on whether the politicians like the school or not. And despite being "open" admission, there are a lot of ways for charter schools to avoid or expel special needs students, forcing those students back into the public system and making the charter's performance look better for lack of those more difficult students.
That being said, charters aren't bad by definition, there are some of them out there doing really good work. It's just unfortunately a very exploitable system by bad actors, especially now that republicans have learned they can use charters as a back channel to dismantle public schools. It may be the system is not worth keeping around any longer.
The way I see it, the charter school system and the private school system are both just bad ways of avoiding the real problem: properly funding schools.
The difference between a bad public school and a good one in New Jersey is much less than in Pennsylvania, in no small part because of better distribution of funds.
I call out private schools (which I still class charters), even though they mostly don't take public funds, because the people who are paying those prices for private schools should be taxed that tuition amount to properly fund public schools. They also are able to poach teachers with their better funding, because teacher pay is so abysmal.
Private schooling only serves two real purposes: Serving the elite a better education, and bypassing the 'no religion in the schools.'
I've found education has an almost directly proportional relationship with money, and an infinite capacity to spend it, even outside of wages. Given a decent amount of teachers and a not-incompetant administration, more money means better schooling. Lower headcounts/student. More decidated support. Not needing to beg students to donate school supplies. Feeding lunches to hungry kids, hiring enough staff to make healthy lunches and not prepackaged garbage.
My understanding is that private schools don't actually pay better than public schools, at least not the non-elite ones. The impression I got from my teachers in high school was the opposite -- they got paid less than they would as public school teachers. Which makes some sense given that they weren't members of any teacher's union and didn't have to meat the same state requirements as public school teachers (for example, my high school math and science teachers weren't accredited in any way, and it caused one of my peers problems when he transferred credits to a public school).
Overall I agree with your point, though. Private schools really only exist to amplify existing class-based disparities in access to quality education or to infuse education with religious elements that take time away from effective education.
One of the best elementary schools in California is a dual language immersion charter school in Oakland called Yu Ming. They’re in West Oakland, which is a gentrifying but still poor and violent area. I recall their at-grade math and reading proficiency rates are above 90%.
They pay significantly less than the public OUSD. Like… $47–52k to teachers. It’s insane.
They attract middle-income families that are too poor to send their kids to private schools but also don’t want to send their kids to OUSD — where the at-grade proficiency rates are around 30%. But a quarter of their students come from low-income families.
I definitely don't want to imply that there aren't situations where charter and private schools give better education to the students who can attend them. I don't fault parents for wanting the best education possible for their kids. But the problem is with a system where that's necessary to get a good education. Stratifying education into a class system like that enhances What about the kids who can't get into the charter school? Those kids don't deserve to go to a public school that is almost definitely extremely underfunded. A system where we syphon money out of public schools only increases the gaps between these classes of students. And that's not even touching on areas of the US where public vs private schools are highly racially segregated, which is absolutely the case in parts of the South.
Personally, I was sent to a religious private school that was not better in terms of its educational outcomes or resources compared to my local public school. My parents went into debt to pay to send me and my siblings there, and while my education was satisfactory it was no better than the local public schools (and in fact in math specifically it was much worse, we most of my peers needed math tutors to get up to speed for college entrance even though they were honors students). So I also have a perspective on how private schools can function in a way that really doesn't benefit students at all educationally.
One of the best decisions my parents made was to put my siblings & I in public schools instead of the local Catholic school. Not only were the public schools some of the best in the state, but they also had a clue on how to handle students outside the median child and disciplinary problem children—not a good environment for students on the far ends of the scholastic ability spectrum. They were generous enough to funnel the money they otherwise would have spent on K–12 tuition into college savings funds for us. To this day, I don’t understand how that school remains open when the public schools of that suburb remain top shelf.
Religious parents prioritizing that over anything else is my suspicion.
How do they not know of the reputation for Catholic K–12 schooling to be atheist factories? Their alumni turn out 10% tradcaths, 20% dawkinite atheists, and the balance are grill pilled agnostic cultural Catholics.
I’ve heard that Protestant religious schools are more thorough on the brainwashing. Catholicism finds the attrition acceptable if it means they teach that 10% with enough critical thinking rigor to handle the philosophy heavy years of seminary. Evangelical Protestantism has no such requirement.
Oh I can confirm, the evangelical protestant school I attended was much more thorough at the brainwashing. We thought of the local Catholic schools as dens of sin. But of course we didn't believe Catholics were real Christians in general, so.
Granted, my entire friend group turned out queer, so they clearly weren't that good at their job... not for lack of trying though. One of my friends came out in high school and was asked not to come back.
Because most American Catholics are cafeteria casual Catholics who don't think too hard about dogma and disagree with the church in a number of ways, and the Church has various orders dedicated to education. They won't gain more devout members by not having the schools, and some places they provide an excellent education. Especially since they usually do actually teach science as the Big Bang and Evolution are not in opposition to their faith. The parents want educated kids who learn about their religion and become general American Catholics, and they probably want some level of financial segregation whether they admit it or not.
Of course some do not provide good education, and the private school system can be as problematic in different ways as the charter schools especially when vouchers are involved.
I was very directly involved in this type of situation except in Canada, as an independent school principal in direct competition for students with the local school board. The difference being that, at that time, we didnt receive full funding and only got about 60% of the funding that the public schools received, so in economic terms we were a very good deal for the provincial gov since we taught the mandated curriculum but for 60% of the cost to the taxpayer.
But I was and remain a huge supporter of independent and alternate school programs. Alberta is Canada's Florida in that regard, generally conservative and somewhat untrusting of gov agendas. Independent schools thrive in this environment because they meet parents goals, which can be pretty varied. We have schools of all stripes - religious (Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Catholic, Jewish), science based, athletics based, project based, technology based, a school for single teenage parents, Special Needs schools specializing in different areas, indigenous schools, French schools, Waldorf, Montessori, early childhood specialist schools - independent schools cover it all and thats in addition to charter schools.
The ironic part is that when I was the principal I went to the local school board and inquired if our school (3 campuses, pop. about 650 at that time) would be able to come under their umbrella as an alternate program. That would've meant they would receive some provincial funding for our students and we would also receive more funding so it was a win-win in our view.
I was soundly rejected by the chair of the school board, with very detectable disdain. She made it very clear that the public school was capable of doing it all, serving every student and parent need except for religious parents. They weren't going to touch us.
Then in an inventive twist, our school applied to become an alternate school in a rural division just outside the city. At that point the city school division took us to court! Their argument was that no other school division could fund us if we weren't geographically within their area. Turns out the court saw through that shady argument and ruled against them.
The school is now a FULLY funded school through that rural school division and has grown substantially - so the city divison loses out on hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because frankly, they were too stuck up to accept a religious school. Not so ironically there are now multiple religious schools within the city division. I guess they learned their lesson.
If public schools arent meeting parent and student needs they need to allow freedom of choice in education and support that choice. The public schools cannot and should not expect to be all things to all people. There are just too many special interest and special need students to do a good job of educating all students and that's where the freedom to choose comes in. The province still mandates the core curriculum that we all teach but every school can add its own specialties on top - parents are happy, kids needs are met and the only one upset is the public school because they've lost their monopoly. Competition works in every other aspect of our society - it works in education too.
I'll toss out a counterpoint I just learned about, from someone deeply involved in the matter:
Private Pre-K Montessori school, a very highly respected one, gets grants from state during COVID to expand public access to pre-k, and they figure they can do it better than all the public programs, as they were doing 'more with less.' This essentially brought them under the fold of a public school, and were now forced to comply with all the things a public school must adhere to.
It turns out that they were in a self-selection bubble, because they soon got sued into the ground for violating the American Disabilities Act, for trying to charge families additional to pay for their kids added developmental needs. They have gone bankrupt within the span of 3 years as a result.
Freedom of choice more often than not gives alternative providers outs to avoid dealing with 'the hard students,' whom are the ones that need help the most, at a much higher cost.
Well, that’s unfortunate. It’s closing a school due to bad policies.
The way I see it is that some kids costing significantly more than others to teach is just reality and systems that pay the same for everyone are denying reality out of misguided egalitarianism. Something like insurance is needed and government funding can do that. This doesn’t mean that special-needs kids have to be evenly distributed over all schools - why not specialize?
But the funding system needs to be designed to allow for specialization by paying different amounts, or there’s going to be a strong financial incentive to avoid taking special-needs kids.
Ironically that’s a “to each according to their needs” policy, but that’s just what insurance is supposed to do. It’s a way of mitigating the inherent unfairness of life circumstances.
There is truth to that. The schools can be selective and that is part of the appeal to parents. They are looking for a homogenous group and many are looking to get their kids out of classrooms with high needs kids.
I will note that our school, despite being an alternative religious program, also had a very well developed Special Needs program with those students integrating into regular subjects wherever they could and taking classes on their own for the subjects where they needed one on one attention (like Language Arts and Math).
But the counter to the "Montessori problem" is for an entrepreneurial educator to create a school especially for high needs kids, which has happened in our city too. We have three schools for students with special education requirements, learning disabilities or/and ADHD and one that would accept children with autism on a case-by-case basis if they can accommodate their needs.
I fully support students with high needs being in a school that specializes in helping them, and can provide the much more developed and intensive support they need. Those schools have teachers, teacher aides, speech therapists, occupational therapists, counsellors and social workers all working as a team who are all familiar with the accommodations, modifications, and remediations each student will need. They are all students who will need carefully constructed Individual Education Programs and that takes a ton of work and experience. Having that amount of labor intensive work for each student is something many public schools can only dream of - they end up leaving ALL those roles to a regular classroom teacher who is understandably overwhelmed.
The idea of just integrating students with high needs into regular public classrooms has been an abject failure in my opinion and its one of the reasons that teachers burn out at such a high rate and why parents prefer to send their kids elsewhere - the public school cannot be all things to all students as much as it wants to make that claim.
I'm gonna jump up on my soapbox and yell a lil bit. Imo, these school choice programs are just union busting. They cut funding to public schools to the point of failure, then clutch their pearls about the poor quality of public education. They create this alternative system where they don't have to negotiate with the teachers union and they get to extract profit from public money.
Thank you for reading my rant.
It doesn’t help matters that a significant portion of teachers will gladly take the pay cut if it means they don’t have to deal with the problem students anymore.