{"id":2194,"date":"2004-08-17T09:50:29","date_gmt":"2004-08-17T13:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/08\/17\/2194.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:39","slug":"off-the-charters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/08\/17\/off-the-charters\/","title":{"rendered":"Off the charters!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The New York Times reveals<\/a> that, according to AFT<\/a> analysis of NAEP<\/a> data, charter schools are not actually doing a better job at teaching reading and math than non-charter schools.\n

Now, I’m agin charter schools, but I always expected them to have better test results. My complaint wasn’t about the children who were in them, but about the children who weren’t. I want the whole public school system to be good, not to have a few escape pods.\n

And, of course, there’s the problem I didn’t expect, but should have, that the charter schools are a breeding ground for embezzlement and financial incompetence. Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times reported<\/a> that California Charter Academy, which ran dozens of schools and received over a hundred million dollars in state funding over five years, is shutting its doors. No more teachers, no more books. I suspect that founder C. Stephen Cox has done rather well out of it; I wonder how many of those teachers will find classrooms and rent money before Labor Day.\n

And now, the much-vaunted educational success turns out to be, at best, inconsistent. Urban charter schools don’t score better than ordinary urban public schools. By the way, I don’t mean to rely on test scores as a measure of education; I don’t trust ’em but they’re all we’ve got at present.\n

Of course, the whole charter-school shenanigan was a way of failing to address two things. First, that our public school system is on the whole terrific, and the only serious structural problem is the distribution of wealth in our country, also known as concentrated poverty. Second, that elementary education is expensive, and that teaching on the cheap is a bad idea, particularly if you don’t trust the people you’ve hired to do it and therefore want some proof that it’s being done well. If we want to address those issues, fine, but charter schools just let a few people escape from the consequences of not addressing them.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reveals that, according to AFT analysis of NAEP data, charter schools are not actually doing a better job at teaching reading and math than non-charter schools. Now, I\u2019m agin charter schools, but I always expected them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17089,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions\/17089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}