What is your opinion of charter schools?

[battleknight24]

?

[longship]

1. Underpaid teachers do a poor job...

Administrative staff on the take.

Students may pass, but they end up failing.

That's what I think of charters.

[funflower]

2. A thousand charters; a thousand different approaches and results.

There is a huge need for experimentation and innovation in our education system. Private educators fill some of this need, but charters make it available to families who can't afford private education. There will be some failures, and the overall "outcomes" might or might not be better than the average "outcomes" of public schools, but we need to create space for experimentation and charters create that space in the public sector.

That being said, there must be some standards for evaluating the use of public funds.

[CaliTeacher]

3. It depends...

...on the charter school. The great thing about them is that each one can be totally unique. I'm an elementary school teacher, and my goal is to start a charter school some day. They provide the same flexibility and opportunity for innovation as a private school, but they are accessible to all members of the community.

Basically the idea is that each school has its own charter, which outlines the educational philosophy and inner workings of the school. They can range from being far more progressive and innovative than the average public school to being far more traditional. Because of that, each charter school needs to be judged on its own merits, and it's hard to generalize about them. Some charter schools are actually run by for profit corporations, which I think is pretty lame, but on the whole I think they provide an amazing opportunity for teachers to work on fixing the problems in our public school system without being handcuffed quite as much by district bureaucracy and legislative mandates.

[punpirate]

4. A few good ones...

... and many bad ones. Google "Edison" and "failure" and you'll get a bunch of links explaining why privatization of education is a boondoggle.

The basic problem of education today is that corporations and the very wealthy don't support it with tax dollars. They don't want to, and evade or avoid taxes because they want to, in part, privatize the public school system, for the sake of profit.

The system isn't failing because it's inherently bad. It's failing because corps and the wealthy now pay so little into the public school system in the form of taxes.

[applegrove]

5. "Combat" will be taught in grade nine.

[bullimiami]

6. mostly a scam to avoid regulations, transfer money from the public

to certain friends and insiders of those in power and a ruse from some to funnel public money to religious schools.

im sure some mean well but the criminal and corrupt far outweigh the honest.