
California now has more than 1,300 charter schools – Alt.Ed gone bad - jelliclesfarm
https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-charter-schools-20190327-htmlstory.html
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AceyMan
Mods— why is the title completely rewritten? The source article is titled,
"How a couple worked charter school regulations to make millions."

My son is having a great experience at a well-run LA charter school and the
current headline seems in violation of HN rules. [edit; now flagged tfa]

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jelliclesfarm
I changed the title because the title seemed to be click baity and a personal
attack.

I didn’t want the discussion to be about the couple but about charter schools.

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TimTheTinker
"Alt.Ed gone bad"? That's far more of an attack (and clickbait) than the
article's title. As for discussion, nothing wrong with posting your opinion in
the comments -- we all can discuss.

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jelliclesfarm
Hi...So, if you read the article, it does talk about how charter schools in CA
are managed and how extensive govt involvement is and how there is no
oversight. So I still stand by my title. Maybe I could add ‘California’ (if I
have enough words left) but otherwise I am comfortable with my choice of words
for change in title.

Eta: looks like I can’t edit it now.

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AceyMan
I read the article (well, 75% so far). It's primarily how this couple gamed
the system; I don't see that it casts the LAUSD policy or leaders in a bad
light.

We all know any sufficiently byzantine bureaucracy can be gamed by motivated
players. Such is the case here, it seems.

Contrast with my son's school: it's well-run, has strong leadership and
wonderful teachers ... and they still have to work hard, year over year, to
stay right with the LAUSD policies.

Tl;dr This story isn't about charter schools so much as it is a public outing
of the weirdo couple who runs (and profits from) one specific charter in the
LA system.

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jelliclesfarm
[..]Twenty-seven years ago, when California became just the second state to
enact a law establishing charter schools, state leaders framed the experiment
as a modest one that would allow only 100 schools at first. Free-market
advocates saw charters as a way to empower all students to choose from a
variety of schools. Other supporters envisioned them as laboratories for
testing new teaching methods and then bringing successes back to traditional
public schools.

The new, privately operated schools would be government-funded and tuition-
free. They would unleash creativity by liberating schools from many of the
state education code’s rules. But to ensure that they lived up to their
promises and spent public money properly, they would have to be vetted and
overseen by governmental bodies, beginning with the school districts in which
they were located.

That was sufficient check and balance for the civic-minded individuals who ran
many charter schools. But as the number of charters in the state grew, the
same law that allowed many founders to try new ideas with great success
created opportunities for others.

The law allowed for a multitude of different bodies to serve as “authorizers,”
watching over the new schools. It gave oversight power not just to the state
board, but also to each of the state’s many school districts and county boards
of education — regardless of whether they had the ability or inclination to
properly police the independently run schools.[..]

[..]About 330 government entities have the authority to authorize and
supervise charters in California. By contrast, Texas, the state with the
second-largest number of charter schools, has 18, according to its state
education agency. New York has two active authorizers.

Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district, has an
entire division devoted to overseeing the charters it authorizes and is
considered one of the state’s most robust monitors. But the roster of charter
authorizers also includes school districts with colorful histories of
corruption and financial mismanagement. Some are so small that they have fewer
than a dozen employees in all, with insufficient resources to be effective
watchdogs.[..]

<<<<<\- Gone bad.

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TimTheTinker
The article makes no such blanket conclusion.

“problems exist” != “gone bad”

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duxup
There doesn't seem to be a real market type motivator to encourage charter
schools to operate legitimately. I'm sure many do operate legitimately, but
just hoping the proprietors do so and then expecting local school districts to
dedicate resources to police them (something that is far outside their core
competency) seems like a recipe for things going sideways.

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nostrademons
The check on charter schools is that if they provide a bad education, the
students will leave. If they create a bad working environment for teachers,
the teachers will leave. The latter actually seems to have checked the subject
of the article effectively: teacher turnover was high, and the teachers
profiled here both ultimately did leave.

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ThrustVectoring
Students aren't the customers, they don't write the checks and make the
decisions. A charter school can provide a bad education and convince parents
to fund them anyways - touting religious stuff seems like the easiest path for
this.

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nostrademons
There's a principal-agent problem with all parenting: you're making decisions
on behalf of another human being and hoping that those decisions line up with
the best interests and wishes of the person in question.

Obviously this isn't _always_ the case, but both common sense and Western
legal traditions assume that the parent's interests will be _most closely
aligned_ with their child, and that they're better suited to make those
decisions than a bureaucrat, a CEO, or even a teacher. Societies that assume
the state is better qualified to make decisions on behalf of children than the
parents are have gone to dark places.

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ArtDev
Charter schools are vastly superior with only one exception: school districts
like to keep them underfunded. Which is absurd considering how much better
they are in every way.

Both my kids go to charter schools.

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excitom
Oh, where do I start. Let's trade anecdotes. One of my children went to a
charter school and my experience is the opposite of yours.

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TimTheTinker
Charter schools live or die on their own merits, which means (a) they're
likely to be more variable in terms of quality than public schools, and (b)
the best charter schools will _far_ exceed public schools in quality. As long
as we're trading anecdotes, the charter schools I know of near me are
extremely high quality. Several kids I know attend some of them, and their
experience has been phenomenal.

Why not institute whatever's necessary to weed out those that are abusing the
system (i.e. embezzling, failing to educate, etc.), and give people the
freedom to decide on the rest?

I suspect a lot of the attacks on charter schools are coming from folks who
view education primarily as a means of propagating their political viewpoints.

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excitom
I don't necessarily agree with your (b) but I'll concede it if you agree to a
(c) the worst charter schools can fall _far_ short of public schools on
quality ... in agreement with your point (a).

Just read the linked LA Times article to see what I mean.

