The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

=> Charter Schools

Posted by parhad (Guest) - Wednesday, December 15 2004, 18:19:25 (CET)
from 63.237.171.122 - 63-237-171-122.calinet.com

Commercial -

Windows 98 -

Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

I always thought the whole privitization thing with public schools was an end run to get God into the mix. Charter schools were initially all about creatively helping students do better and if they succeeded at all...God wouldn't be far behind. The kind of God being peddled in America is the god of the Old Testicles and he's basically a White policeman itching to shoot evil people. We've managed to keep him out of public education and this is seen as a bad thing by god-people.

People are treating education like it exists somewhere apart from their daily lives...that no matter what they do in their homes or communities, education and schools exist on a plane by themselves protected from infection by whatever trends and fads move society. When society fails, schools fail...and then the society fails even more. Add to that all the drugs out there now whose basic assumption is that the lives we lead are perfectly healthy and YOU are the problem...so take this pill or that one and get OVER it....and you have a delightful recipe for disaster not even war and patriotism can lessen.

We have the schools we deserve...no mystery there. There IS no "cure" for them because there is none for us.

Study: Charter Students Test Results Mixed

By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON - Compared with peers in traditional public schools, fourth-graders in charter schools do as well in reading but worse in math, a pilot government study says.

The review released Wednesday also found that white, black and Hispanic children in charter schools did as well in reading and math as other public school students who share their race or ethnicity.

But poor children in charter schools, a key population the schools are intended to help, performed worse in both academic subjects than their counterparts in traditional schools.

The study released by the Education Department is the first with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely respected as the nation's report card.

Charter schools receive public money but operate under their own leadership, a setup designed to free them from local regulations and allow them to get creative to help struggling students.

The popularity of charters has grown fast, with more than 3,300 schools serving close to a million students, according to The Center for Education Reform, which supports charters.

Charters also have the backing of the federal government. Under law, schools that get federal poverty aid and repeatedly fail to make progress can be restructured as a charter.

Yet charter schools also face criticism from those who question whether the schools, given their freedom, are providing academic results and putting public money to the best use.

The 2003 study of 150 schools yields some limited answers, said Darvin Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which requested the study. Mainly, he said, students in charters do about as well as others despite having less experienced teachers.

"That's about as far as you can stretch the data," he said. The national test does not collect data on individual students or how they did in school before enrolling in a charter.

"The real question is, do they do better than they would have done if they had not been in a charter?" Winick said. "And we don't touch that."

Bella Rosenberg, assistant to the president at the American Federation of Teachers, said the key finding is that poor students in charter schools do worse than other poor students. Charters and other public schools have about the same number of poor kids, the study finds.

"The deal was that in return for autonomy, they would do a much better job of educating the at-risk kids," Rosenberg said about charters. "And they are not doing a better job."

The AFT also contends that charter schools do worse in reading — not just in math, as the study says — when special-education children are not included. Eight percent of charter-school students have disabilities, compared to 11 percent in other schools, the study says.

Education Secretary Rod Paige said the study's point was to learn about the characteristics of students who attend charters, not to measure the schools' effectiveness.

"This study cannot and should not be used as a red flag by those who have an agenda of trying to stop the charter schools movement in its tracks," Paige said. "The analysis clearly shows that when you control for race, there are not statistically significant differences between charters and traditional public schools."

Compared to those traditional schools, charter schools tend to enroll more black students, locate more in central cities and hire less certified teachers, the study found.

Another new study, by Harvard University researcher Caroline Hoxby, finds that charter-school students did better than their peers in traditional schools on state reading and math tests. Hoxby found charter schools offered more academic gains the longer they are in operation.

__

---------------------

- BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic:
No replies.

Content-length: 5747
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, application/vnd.ms-po...
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-language: en-us
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf3/rkvsf_core.php?.FMXn.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)