Journal Community


Explore Group

Should more charter schools be built in troubled school districts?


Backed by Wall Street bankers, Hollywood moguls, philanthropists and the Obama administration, the charter-school movement is booming as an alternative to underperforming public schools. The publicly funded, independently run charter schools are open to any student, often through a lottery. About 5,000 charter schools now serve more than 1.5 million children across the country. Advocates champion the potential for charter schools, which control their own budget, personnel and curriculum, to narrow the achievement gap between poor and wealthy students. Critics point to studies that suggest many charter schools aren't producing better educational outcomes than traditional public schools, based on standardized test scores, and that some are performing very poorly.

What do you think? Are charter schools the answer when traditional public school education is failing?

(See more polls, discussions and hot topics.)

Recommend a comment by clicking the recommendation icon
  • “Get more money”, “involve business”, “walk around schools”, “set up a liaison, " "involve parents” and “start early reading classes.” As they address the condition of public schools, most diagnoses and prescriptions coming from political candidates remind me of the fable about the group of blind men trying to describe an elephant they happen upon. Each touches a different area of its body and attempts to describe the whole in terms of the anatomical part they feel, (tusk, tail, trunk, leg and so on). None can, in their own mind’s eye, behold the whole, massive, lumbering animal. 

    The truth is, even with full vision, the task is daunting. If you examine five pairs of parts that make up the “education animal”; 1) students and families, 2) teachers and administrators, 3) subject content and curricula, 4) school facilities and equipment, and 5) funding and budgets, the elephant that emerges is very different than the animal described by candidate’s speeches. While the shape, size and condition of each part will differ from school to school, usually, the “parts” don’t fit together very well anywhere. 

    1) System clients To start with, the students and families, the system’s users, are generally in bad shape. The current number of Seniors still trying to pass their state requirements, after 5 attempts, graduation rates and attendance problems will tell you that. Many families, often dysfunctional or nonexistent, care little and do nothing to help. There are no or few books in their home and little stimulating conversation, if any. Ask any teacher, there is less attention paid, respect shown, civility observed or concern expressed. Students that once were obedient, respectful, cooperative and even diligent, today are none of the above and care little about their present performance or their future prospects.

    2) Service Providers Next, we have those who operate and run the system. Politicians will never offend the unions and say that quality teachers and administrators have been declining for many years, but it's a demonstrable fact. The demands of technology have increased and the salaries in the market place have escalated far above the teacher’s salary level and, regrettably, this has left many of the the less talented to the classroom and administrators offices. 

    While it must be said that there are many qualified, hard working teachers, it is equally evident that with the liberation of women, our original source of cheap talent, there are now many other attractive opportunities. Talented women, once the underemployed Pullman porters in schools are gone to other venues; our old Math teacher’s running a mortgage department, the English teacher is a journalist, our former History teacher’s now a lawyer and the former Biology teacher is a doctor. 

    And to adapt an old saying, “those who can’t teach, become administrators.”. Indebted to and balancing between unions and politicians, increasingly, those who run our schools are out of touch with both a rapidly changing technological world and the day to day realities of the classroom. The students and their families often place a poor third.

    3) Content and curricula Let me make a radical assumption about this third element; the purpose of education was historically and still should be to learn how to live, not how to make a living. Also, we should be able to distinguish between educating and training. Contrary to the thinking of some candidates, we should not want a school system to make children into good employees (read ‘taxpayers’). Children should be knowledgeable and able, schooled in the arts, literature, history, philosophy and the sciences. They should be taught, not trained. Armed with the knowledge and skills of a good education, what they may later train for is up to them, not government. 

    Today’s content is a chaotic collection of competing notions, old and new, good and bad, serious and bizarre. The Department of Education, our modern Tower of Babel, cannot return us to a country of common values, morality and purpose, when content was uniformly agreed upon. We read Hamlet (or Silas Marner or Moby Dick or Huck Finn) and generally took the same lessons , we studied the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and knew the good guys from the bad guys. Today, deconstructed, valueless, and dissonant, we can’t agree on what we should teach and why we should teach it. While few have lost conviction, many have lost commonality.

    4) Equipment and materials Why is it that educators insist that every student is different, learns at different times in different ways and should receive individual attention? Yet, every new school must be the same Taj Mahal with fields, gyms, media labs and countless money devouring components that most of these “different” students don’t really need. Save extreme conditions, school building facilities really don't matter; students in old schools can learn, many in new ones don't. 

    Just as every hospital doesn’t need every technological breakthrough, every school doesn't need to have every field, stadium, pool, lab, book and technological wizardry. More realistic space requirements and the sharing of facilities and services would go a long way to relieve both capital and maintenance costs. Eliminate the excesses on one end, correct some abuses at the other and adopt a moderate level of tolerance for some dysfunction and a problem is greatly lessened.

    5) Paying for it all I may seem old fashioned but I don't think that schools should be teaching how to put on a condom, why we should read the Koran or even how to drive a car. The mandated programs and administrative burdens piled on by state and federal laws, special interest projects and p. c. schemes have swollen budgets but done little to increase the educational effectiveness or improve its product; our prison population and our test scores gives evidence to that. A quick comparison of the ratio between amounts spent on the traditional classroom subjects(salaries and teaching materials) versus administration and cultural add on is appalling and now, with new class size requirements, it will only be worse.

    School administrators who ave no idea how money is made or where it comes from are paying more money for less qualified teachers to teach a bankrupt curriculum and getting poorer results. While most businesses and institutions have modernized and, through technology, increased productivity and profits, too much education is still labor intensive and low in productivity. In the traditional model, supported by today's educational establishment, it will still take so many hours to teach so many students about the same quantity of information but of less quality) than it did a hundred years ago. Technology notwithstanding, without radical innovations in every area, traditional classroom teaching is not going to change in form regardless of substance. While we are increasingly spending too much money on our educational enterprises, it is not what we spend but how we spend it. 

    Conclusion: If we can label cigarettes, food, toys and every physical health product, why can’t we label schools better; their programs, content and personnel. What is more dangerous to our Nations health than bad intellectual products? If we are concerned about the effects of trans fats and obesity, shouldn’t we be more concerned about the effects of failing English and math and dropping out. Shouldn’t there be neon lighted warnings about all the consequences to everyone everywhere?

    You can't skim sour milk, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sows ear, and so on. We are talking about educators, not alchemists. We could get the most talented assemblers around and pay them triple their going rates but if we give them defective materials to work with, we’ll still get defective products. Until society clearly articulates its educational purposes and demands that students cme to school well behaved and prepared to learn, we attempt a fools errand.

    Society has changed, technology advances rapidly, our values are in disarray and, perhaps worst of all, unlike welfare, education has too many voices and too many powerful, competitive lobbies to change it. It is foolish to continue gerryrigging a system to meet every serious or bizarre notion that comes along In fact, no one can describe a workable model in more than slogans. The five parts examined above will not yield to meaningful systemic change.

    Too many good students have already voted with their feet and left our public schools, the system has “tipped” academically. Many of our schools are marginally effective at best and destructive at worst. As we did with our failing welfare system, we must now “end public education as we know it.” Clearly, this will not be as easy as changing welfare because once upon a ...

    6 Recommendations

  • Reading, writing, and arithmetic says it all.

    Center city public schools have left these requirements and foundered on all the problems inherent in the education "model" presented by leading teacher training factories (i.e. colleges).

    1 Recommendation


    Charter schools have been operating in Milwaukee for decades without providing substantially different outcomes from the public school system. What the charter school schools have done is take funding from the public school system and drive it down. What the charter school experiment in Milwaukee has shown is that education is a much more complex function than teachers and money. Unless a community is able to address many of the underling issues (parental involvement, health care, substance abuse, poverty) you can't teach the kids. Taking money from public schools does not address these issues, but raises the question "How does reducing the amount of money spent on public schools help the kids in public schools?"

    1 Recommendation

  • What part of 'the children's positive response to the charter school model' do we, as the 'rational and unbiased adults', responsible for fighting to provide them a chance (at home, school, in our communities and at the ballot box) to succeed in building constructive lives do we not want to recognize and understand? Richard, your comprehensive and coherent yet simple commentary is far more eloquent and informed than I can venture. Thank you.



    Interesting, I have to join this group in order to leave a comment. Wonder how many want to leave a comment and don't because of this selective action.

    Charter Schools are needed in NYC.

    Also needed: serious efforts to eliminate drugs and gangs.

    The equation is simple - kids need to see investing long-term time and effort in education will create a return greater than short-term gain from gang membership and selling drugs - and have a sfe environment to build learning goals.

    Banks that received Tarp financing ought to spearhead efforts with Charter Schools in NYC.

    Companies can create outreach intern projects coupled with volunteer efforts of their staff to offer role model and mentorship to the community. The idea: get fat cats out of the office and into the streets to inspire youth to follow their path. Might make business leaner and more competitive again.

    A kid contemplating a life of dealing drugs and jail, might ponder immense wealth derived from corporate salaries and stock option benefit packages, and understand where true path to power, cash & prizes really lies: not a cold hard cell holding iron bars, but super sized compensation at the top of American business counting bars of gold.



    The equation is simple - kids need to see investing long-term time and effort in education will create a return greater than short-term gain from gang membership and selling drugs - and they need a safe environment to build learning goals. (spelling correction)


  • An excellent assessment by Richard Marren. Also, I see value in competition. Not student competition but competition between schools and teaching methods, whether public, charter, vouchers, etc., with all types available and parents selecting which type their child will attend.



    Kudos to Mr. Marren for his comments, but even he has missed what I perceive as the two most important issues in this game. As a teacher working in a non-union situation I can't even begin to fathom tenure for a public school teacher. In fact, in my recent readings I understand that even higher education is beginning to rethink this notion. I receive a yearly contract. My pay is comfortable. My working conditions are just fine. I strive to do my best for my students as I truly care for them, but I am also driven by the underlying assumption that it I don't do my best for the students I can and, most probably, will be terminated. I also work in a midsize school district where we still function as a community. I graduated from a large suburban school district in the Midwest. Due to the values Mr. Marren now sees lacking in our social system our district functioned reasonably well despite its size. Its the same care and concern we are treated to in local "mom and pop" retail businesses that also translates into the school system. "Big box" schools are just that, too big. Even with all the value issues, social ills, etc. a school district with a sense of community concern and support and with teachers who truly understand the "business" of teaching our schools can and do provide the education our future generations deserve.


To add a comment please
Create an Account

Your real name is required
for commenting.

  • Clear
  • Post
Your Profile Here…

Set up your profile to connect with members of Journal Community.


Your Groups Here…



Most Active Discussions