Charter School Failure?
Report finds ‘no practical difference’ between charter, traditional schools (Star Press). So that is the headline, and the push will go to the legislature next, seeking to freeze any new charter schools.
The opponents will take this report to mean that charter’s have proven to be a flop - no increase in performance. However, this take misses the real point of the charter school experiment.
Charter schools get about 1/2 the money that traditional public schools get. Why? All public schools get the per pupil money (so many dollars per student per day, etc), but Charter schools do not get the “building money” which means they have to provide the education and the infrastructure out of the per pupil money
The question is not “can smaller charter schools improve student performance.” The question is, what happens when you give smaller school groups half the public money, and send them off. The answer, at least under this report, is they can match the fully funded public schools.
