NAACP members call for ban on privately managed charter schools

I went to a magnet STEM school for half of every day in my last two years of high school. In my rural county, there was no way I was going to get good calculus and physics classes, let alone any programming, modern physics, or advanced math, without the pooling of resources among the several farm town high schools. It undoubtedly increased what my high school education could provide me.

It also would not show up on any testing that would be measured in these studies. I could have watched Netflix instead of taking classes for all of my last two years of high school, and I still would have showed up the same from the perspective of this study: passed every standardized test.

But people fall for these metrics time after time, and school rankings are based on them. My public high school was ranked in the bottom 10% because our pass rates are abysmal, which obviously stems from our huge number of impoverished broken families. The 85-90% AP test pass rate told a different story: show up every day ready to work, and they had some good teachers who would really work with you.

And here is the primary purpose of public school. Why else is there such a push to create younger and younger pre-kindergarten programs? It's simple. Public schooling is not about education, it is about warehousing children during working hours, since the economy has shifted to require two full-time incomes.

The most effective years of education I had involved zero homework, but admittedly a longer school day. Homework that requires aid from an educated adult is the school dodging the responsibility to teach by trying to farm it out to parents. Not to mention even educated parents can struggle with the ways in which concepts are now taught, referring back to their own knowledge/techniques and confusing the student.

There is this alarming trend in our politics which seems to have decided that the poorer and blacker you are, the less you ought to be trusted with your and your own family's livelihood. It's amazing for me to see all of the teachers that I know (I work in the ed. industry) speak often about trying to get into better placements in other schools and whatnot, but at the same time, when it comes to choice and mobility for lower income families, somehow then the "obvious" decision is to force them to be in the system that has systematically underserved them for decades.

If the arguments about needing to put money into public schools is real, and that the exit of certain students to charter schools serves to further undermine the quality of public education, then let's really go all out: Let's forbid charter schools from developing and let's strictly enforce the publicly-funded neighborhood school. But then, let's do the same with administrators, teachers, and staff: Let's have them all be assigned to a school, without any possibility of re-assignment.

See how well teachers/unions/NAACP like that policy...

Charter schools are publicly-funded schools exempted, via the grant of a special charter (hence the name), from some of the generally-applicable rules governing the public school systems of which they are a part (which particular rules exceptions are made for varies from charter to charter.) They may be publicly operated, operated by private for-profit enterprises, or operated by private non-profit enterprises.

> And it's not a situation where only rich people can get their kids into charter schools.

While that may be the case, among the rules that charters are often exempted are ones which prevent them for cherry-picking students on grounds which, while they may not directly relate to wealth, are strongly correlated with it.

> Charter public schools are concentrated neighborhoods with mostly minority populations.

That's actually part of the problem that minority-interest groups have with them; among the problems that this creates is that they often displace schools that are subject to the normal public rules from those areas, forcing children who are not admitted under the charters rules to go to more distant traditional public schools than they would have to if the charter did not exist. (Another is that, for less-selective charters, members of the population may be effectively coerced into attending the charter as opposed to a traditional public school by the lack of access to traditional public school caused by the charter placement.)