WA State Charter Schools ruled unconstitutional

[BrotherIvan]

23. I hope those who are far more expert than I will chime in here

But my experience after my short tenure at a continuation/remedial high school was this:

Charter schools can be run by the school district. They are often pet projects of an administrator. We had one in our district which was called a "technology" high school. All the kids were given laptops, all the rooms had $15k white boards, everything was supposed to be state of the art.

The outcome was--

1) NO new computers or technology at any other school site that year and very reduced monies the following year. Charter schools are meant to be flashy and impressive and they are huge resource hogs. They siphon badly needed resources from all the other schools. So you have a small percentage of students on top of the line computers and the rest of the schools the children are working on donated computers where the OS is so outdated it can't connect to the internet.

2) Because this school is run so differently than other schools in the district, everything must be specially catered. That means a special staff and extremely expensive "consultants" (which is how the private sector got their foot in the door in the first place.) This was an economically challenged district and six-figure salaries for consultants who basically came in with a lot of power point presentations was another waste of precious monies.

3) School administrator uses this as a stepping to a better job. New administrator comes in, abandons old guy's pet project in favor of a new one to pad his or her resume: charter starts to fall apart without the extra funding.

4) In order to keep the charter looking like the highest achieving school on all the standardized tests, any academic or behavioral problem students are immediately ejected. Now they can't just send them back to the regular high school because the paperwork and system is not that flexible. So where do they end up? Our remedial high school. We were overflowing with students and our class sizes went from 10-15 (because we were working with students where this was their last chance) to close to 40. Now all those students who hoped to get a better education at the state of the art school were just herded into a closet so their test scores didn't effect the charter. They became very dispirited and often depressed because of this major change.

Creating a hierarchy within the school system was just not the answer. And many parents became very disillusioned with the charter school and tried to get their students back into the regular high school. It was an absolute mess.

So no, I'm no fan of charter schools whether run by the school district and even less (far less) if run by a private company. They are NOT the answer to improving education.