Further Light and Knowledge

I know there are quite a few people here who know a great deal about education in the US, public education, private, charter schools, etc.

In general, when a state or city takes over failing schools, does it work? I think someone took over the chicago public schools, and I believe it was good (although I'm still researching). The criteria for evaluating schools is controversial, it ignores the arts, music, sports...things that are important for our culture but can't be evaluated by standard. test. For that matter, I strongly suspect that the wise and successful posters here received varying grades on their stand. tests and it probably has no bearing on how successful they/you are now.

Thanks in advance...

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In what I have seen, up until a few years ago, schools and school districts were only taken over by the state when they were "failing" educationally. Such interventions were relatively rare and often paired with added financial support from the state to execute a turn-around in performance.

Recently the situation in Michigan and elsewhere has nothing to do with school performance. Just this week one of Detroit's nationally renowned schools was closed. Educational success is not a factor. The factor that matters is budget. The Michigan takeovers and those in other states are primarily motivated by a desire to reduce educational spending. Since most (like 75%+) of any educational budget is payroll, this means firing teachers, firing staff, lowering wages, increasing class size, or all of these combined.

I would conjecture that many of the proponents of these takeovers look kindly on home schooling and would like a voucher plan that included private and religious schools, and they do not give much weight to the value of public education to society as a whole.

I have had a little experience teaching and am a product of the public school system from kindergarten through graduate school. I also have family members who have been active in school administration at a variety of levels, so of course I am a biased source.

Jamie

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"Now I troll back to my little cave where we no talk about things we no understand..." Malfalda

"Ummmm. Roadkill."

Here in the Bay Area, Oakland Unified school district mismanaged funds and (NCLB) failed to meet minimum standardized testing requirements of the state, so the state took it over. The state then proceded to mismanage funds commit an unintentional fraud, and further impoverish the school district all while continuing the downward trend on testing.

I'm not saying there aren't cases where takeovers may not be successful or warranted; but our experience here in the Bay Area is that it just made an already really bad situation all the worse.

FWIW I had my kids in a charter school for few years. And we went into it with really high hopes and honestly now I'm really soured on the whole charter school thing. It really turned into a bunch of prima donnas arguing and creating drama all the time. The school has been there 5 years and they've gone through 5 principals. I think three of them were outright fired. At least one of which in my opinion fully deserved it. (The others may have deserved it, but I don't know enough to form an opinion.)

I've heard of some good experiences with charter schools, but it isn't a magic bullet. A couple things that are very important are first the school must have a well written and followed charter. A problem with the charter at the school my kids attended is that the charter lacked a lot of important safeguards, in particular in the Special Education area. Second the state or locale that governs the charter schools must exercise extensive oversight, to keep the charter school board from getting out of control.

Just an FYI, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates notwithstanding, the research shows the Charter schools actually perform about the same as regular public schools overall. And there have been some big scandals here in CA where charter schools were claiming to dramatically out-perform public schools, but it turned out that, because they're chartered, they actually had selective admissions and just rejected applications from poor, brown, or otherwise underperforming students. Specific charter schools may perform better; but so do specific public schools. Overall, there is no demonstrable educational advantage to charters. There is, however, a fiscal advantage: Charter schools notoriously extract a significantly greater amount of work out of faculty and pay them less. Win win!