If you can't be bothered start by watching the Documentary "The Lottery" and then come back and tell me that a schools methods can't make a difference.
If you are still not convinced I can certainly live with that.
You consistently respond by pointing to a single charter school. No one has ever claimed that there aren't some excellent charter schools. But why should I believe that Success Academy Charter Schools is characteristic of charter schools as a whole?
Of course a school's method's can make a difference on the students. There's a entire genre of movies on the topic. I mentioned "Blackboard Jungle". Another example is the turn-around at George Washington Preparatory High School, which was portrayed in the movie 'Hard Lessons'. There's "Dead Poets Society" based in part on the teaching impact of Samuel Pickering, and "Lean on Me" is based on principal Joe Clark and Eastside High School. As a New Yorker, you should well know of NYC's history with alternative schools, which includes public alternative high schools like 'The High School of Performing Arts', which was the basis for the movie 'Fame'.
But the choice of pedagogy has very little to do with the the complaints about 1) extra opportunity for graft in charter schools, 2) a general funding preference for charter schools over public schools, and 3) charter schools which are held to lower minimum standards than public schools.
1,198 charter schools in California only 6 of them are LTDs.
And yes I talk about a single charter school exactly because I don't want claim what I have no data to back up with, which is what the OP did.
> Whitmire: 5 Ways to Stop Bad Charters from Derailing Education Reform
> 2. Charter advocates need to name names.
> That’s a sensitive one. Already, charters are under attack from teachers unions and many superintendents. Why pile on by naming the low-performers among you? That probably explains why so few state charter organizers single out charters for closure. But there’s an important exception: California, home to the most robust charter system in the nation.
> “About five years ago we realized we had a quality problem,” said Elizabeth Robitaille, who oversees performance issues at the California Charter Schools Association. By controlling for socioeconomic factors, the group could see that its schools tended to fall on opposite ends of a scatter graph — a disproportionate number of both high- and low-performers.
The critique is that most districts don't hold charters to the same standards as public schools.
You point out the only state where that isn't true.
And it was put into place to address exactly that critique.
So you can't defend charter schools as a whole from that critique by pointing to the one state which took that critique to heart.
> they can simply stop the funding.
How? The school board doesn't have the authority. In many cases the state has removed local democratic control over the process. The only solution is to replace a significant portion of the state legislature, and that is no simple task.
> fundamentally a wrong premise for why public school system is failing
My premise is there's too much state and federal dabbling in what was a working system, and not enough spent on long-term social support systems. As I haven't mentioned it, I'm much more certain that you are projecting views onto me.
After, what, 15 years of testing, charter, education reforms, there's precious little success to come out of a lot of new spending. We saw that most recently in the NEAP scores, at http://edexcellence.net/articles/heartbreak-on-naep .
Out-of-school experiences, like poverty, have a more significant impact than teacher quality. The reform movement calls that an "excuse" for bad teaching. So where is the evidence that this new world of teaching is any more successful ... sorry, less of a failure ... than what we had before?
And before you say that charters have nothing to do with testing, in principle you're right. Except for all those schools with low test scores that were labeled "failing" and were shut down or converted into a privately run charter school. That difference in standards is one of Exelius's valid criticisms.