re: Why are charter schools so polarizing?

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Here's a good article on one in Breaux Bridge 

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According to the article, they did not receive state of federal funding so I believe they are not an actual charter school.

If they are all charter then none are charter.

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And while they're taking funds, they're also taking the better students which drags down the public school further.

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It is very possible to pick 12 charter schools at random and find that each school is very different in the type of students they service and their mission.

In my experience, for every charter school that is “taking the better students”, there are 3 that are trying to help the students that come from rough homes that public schools were too stifled by the system to help.

Make no mistake, there are bad Boards that do bad jobs but it would be inaccurate to generalize charter schools in a negative light. There’s a lot of good people trying to help kids that need it.

Charters are able to think out of the box where public schools don’t have the option to.

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Considering the results of some of the publics in BR like Istrouma, Capitol, and the old Lee HS, I’m not sure charters can be much worse.

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Fun fact, Capitol is now a charter school. Friendship Capitol is the name now

I just remember at one point several years ago there was a big news push about how it had been split into two single sex schools. I’m guessing GM 8-10 years ago, so they were probably recombined at some point.

I could write a multipage response to this thread and still not even scratch the surface of the whole Charter School movement. I will not do that but I will preface my response by saying that I have been a Louisiana public school educator for 20 years and a principal for 10 of that time.

The original idea for a "charter" school was to allow a school to set up,and use experimental teaching methods or ideas to perform research that would ultimately benefit all of public education. The advent of whole failing school crisis nationwide, the charter movement really started to take off and did a lot of good for kids around the country.

The debate really took off when the No Child Left Behind Act,or as I like to call it the No Child Goes Untested. This act started showing schools around the country were failing and students were leaving school without even basic and math skills. This data came out, and the media got into the debate and put their spin on it. Then the teacher's unions, politicians and anyone else with a stake in education began using this "crisis" to push their individual agendas and the whole topic became wildly politicized. To the parents of school age kids it became a real, but hyped, concern about their own children's education and they began to raise hell to their local boards, politicians and anyone else that would listen. What you see happening today is the response to all of this.
I won't get into the whole racism, funding etc. on this post but I will say that charters in general are nothing like they were intended to be, but they have done a lot of good things around the country. Many kids, who would otherwise have to attend a shithole school, were able to get a good and safe education and escape their circumstances. Like any human endeavor, there is a ton of room for corruption, ignorance, stupidity, and out right evil intent with the whole charter structure today. In my view, this is no reason to just throw out a blanket statement that charters are good or charters are bad, when the real answer is that it is very complicated.

WTL:DR
Charters can be good or bad so the whole debate is very complicated and depends on a ton of factors.

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Public dollars ran by non elected officials in most cases.

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Overall I'm not a huge favor of them for this reason...

I will say this.. I love public education and believe it to be necessary for a civilized society, however, iron sharpens iron and there really isn't anything to push public education besides shite arse tests that we basically do nothing but teach to.

Competition is good for a lot of things. Education as it stands now could stand to have some competition.

They take money from the local school board and pay it as profit to the private owners of the charter. It is a money making scam. If things don’t go well they take the money and close. And most are no better, typically worse, than the other public schools.

I got nothing other than 99% of the teachers at the charter schools in Orleans Parish are SJW’s.