Certainly, schools have been closed; administrators and teachers have been fired, but evidence of change? Only in the landscape, not of the results. As more schools are closed, they are replaced with Charter Schools…entities that are all-but private schools existing in the public sector. It is my belief that the undue push for Charter Schools nationally is a plot to privatize public education and to break the backs of strong Teacher’s Unions across the country.
Some people attribute this theory to a bad experience I had while working in a Charter School where I was verbally berated, abused, threatened, and eventually forced out “amicably” mid-year. The truth is that that single bad experience only illustrated for me the possibility of my theory—breaking the backs of the unions—to be completely possible; I had held the theory previous to taking the job. I look back at my short time of employment (tenure is not at all the accurate word) and remember saying to others that I had to “hang my philosophies on a hook” because teaching work is scarce these days. I learned a lesson that compromising one’s philosophies is a karmic mistake, and I learned it the hard way. However, my experience did lead me to start looking into some of the facts about the performance of Charter Schools to see if they were all they were cracked up to be. As it turns out, they are not.
According to studies conducted by the Center for Public Education, charters are closed at the same rate as traditional Public Schools…only when a Charter School is closed it gets replaced with another Charter School. Public Schools don’t have that advantage. So even if that number of effective schools starts to grow, it is only because of the speed and aggression with which they are being opened and closed. Certainly, Public Schools have had the time, but never the aggressive push to “get it right” and certainly have not received as many mulligans (if one was to make two teams “Public and Charter”).
The Truth Be Told.