Monday, May 03, 2010

More on Charters

The big front-page story in the NY Times about charter schools gets more things right than most stories about charters, but they completely buy in to the idea that a "rigidly structured environment" is the difference between success and failure for inner city schools. However, a more important story may turn out to be the relatively opaque nature of charter school finances. There have been rumblings in various parts of the country this year about extravagantly-paid administrators, trips to resorts for "professional development," and outright fraud. There's good discussion of that problem here.

On the other hand, as I said in a previous post, I know there are some teacher ed. programs that have built productive relationships with charters.

1 comment:

Michael Moore said...

Tomorrow, Friday, the Georgia Commission appointed by the Governor to fast track charter schools in Georgia is facing a constitutional challenge from several school districts. Since, before the commission, school districts could shoot down charters, this commission now fast tracks them and gives the approvals and not the local school boards. In a bit of heavy irony, the law firm arguing against the constitutionality of the commissions is a conservative firm that would normally support charters.
Georgia mirrors the nation in that some of their charters are fine and some are not. By and large, none of them a very innovative. Core knowledge is such a sexy theme for so many charters, but it doesn't manifest in any way new curricula, staff development and so on.