It’s National Charter Schools Week, and that means lots of chatter in Washington, D.C., about whether charter schools hurt or improve public education. … The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which favors the expansion of charter schools, conducted a March poll of 800 registered voters and found a majority of them want more public school options. Interestingly, nearly half of those polled said they are “unsure” about charter schools. After learning from the folks conducting the poll that charter schools are public schools, a majority of the respondents said they had an interest in enrolling their children in one.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it? The more that parents find out about the public schools that their children attend and the alternatives (including charter schools) that are available, parents are increasingly choosing the alternatives. The above quote taken from a US News and World Report story, Sizing up the Charter School Movement, just last week.
Under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship, the number of charter schools in California has increased by more than 50 percent. Nation-wide there are 1.2 million students who attend charter schools. Most of them are in California, Arizona Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas. The majority are minority students and low income. How’s this for a suprise - New Orleans is the city with the highest concentration of charter schools.
From World on the Web:
New Orleans has become a proving ground for charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. According to the campaign, it has the highest percentage of students in charter schools among U.S. Cities. Most of the city’s students now attend charter schools. Last year, students in New Orleans charter schools out-scored their peers in traditional public schools on a standardized test.
President Bush has championed a proposal called the Pell Grants for Kids Act that would allow families to send their children to nearby public or private schools, giving parents the much looked-for choices to benefit their children. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have indicated a willingness to expand the reach and availability of charter schools (although as with most politicians, I’ll believe it when I see it), so the potential for educational opportunities seems to be growing exponentially.
UPDATE: NY Times article here on New Orleans charter schools is a good read on the subject.
On one level the transformation has already been total. Even without concurrent transformations in the city’s minimal economy and fragmentary social structure, the schools are being administered with a vigor that would have been unrecognizable here before the storm.
If this experiment succeeds, it will have accomplished something rare in the annals of American schools; academic experts cannot recall any campaign this “radical,” in the words of one. An educational superstructure, assembled in large part from outside brains and muscle, has brought itself in to remake a group of students years behind, overwhelmingly impoverished and often from broken homes. By next year, this will be the largest Teach for America district in the nation, administrators say.
