A story on NPR this morning covered some voucher-supported schools in Milwaukee that have shut down. I'm not going to talk much about private versus public schools here. I just wanted to raise one simple point.
The article gives the impression that it's so horrible that some voucher-supported schools are failing! That must mean the voucher program is bad, right?
Not quite. Public schools are not allowed to fail. Perhaps a purely commercial market mechanism for determining which schools survive and which fail is not the best mechanism for schools, but it can easily be argued that it's better than the current mechanism (which is based primarily on city and state budgets and the total number of students available in a school system).
Posted by Tom Nugent at June 13, 2005 01:02 PMNot that its been solicited....
Under the current legislation, public schools can have their administration and entire staff fired for poor performance. Of course that means that no one will want to work there except for teachers that can't get hired anywhere else, which means nothing is going to change.
The question is: who goes to charter schools, who works there, and who establishes their "curriculum". Based on stories I have read about attendance, these schools do not necessarily bleed off the top students from failing public schools. Rather, they bleed off the kids whose parents are constantly complaining because the kid is doing poorly, and the public school isn't doing enough. Well, guess what, despite what many people think, it isn't necessarily always the school's fault: sometimes the kid really needs a lot of help, and I wuold guess that most charter schools don't have the facilities and faculty to grant that help. In addition, since charter schools pay far less than the public schools, they tend to hire inexperienced or poor teachers. That isn't to say that all charter schools are bad, but it certainly doesn't mean they are the great panacea that everyone made them out to be.
Posted by: Tom at June 15, 2005 02:17 PMNote that the story was NOT about charter schools - it was about voucher-supported schools. Many of those schools were Catholic schools, for example.
Posted by: Tom Nugent at June 15, 2005 05:20 PMI'm not sure the difference is wholly germane for this point. The fact is: private and charter schools are not required under most states' laws to test and determine if they are failing. A private school could be the worst school in existance, but as long as people put down the money in the form of tuition or donations, the school will remain open. Under NCLB, a school could technically not be failing...over 50% of its students (heck, 90% of its students) could be meeting every single standaard established for it, but still be labeled failing, and have its staff removed.
The real issue is: who is going to replace them? There is a mistaken belief that every public school teacher is a greedy, underperforming jerk, and that thousands of high quality teachers walk the earth waiting for that opening to come up. That simply isn't true. In our world, as a whole, education is looked at as a right, and not a priviledge, and people treat it like a corporate transaction, thus reducing teachers to fast food workers in the mentality of the populace. When I entered teaching, there was still a glut of teachers. That is no longer the case.
As a rule, private charter schools have a higher turn over in staff than public schools, which means that no one sticks around to share their experience with students and new teachers. This means the overall quality of an average private school is not as good as the best public schools.