Competition in the public educational sphere does not have to include profit/loss. As I have said before, the creation of a charter school in my town had all sorts of positive effects on the curriculum and disciplinary environment in the regular public elementary and middle schools.
I think, but don't know, that we may be talking about two different things, Gina. Mike (uw) wanted to talk about vouchers, not charter schools. It's my present understanding that vouchers would, obviously, represent students coming in, the numbers of which would be paid for by the state. Each new student represents additional income. In most school settings a few more students doesn't represent additional costs--add another chair, add another desk, put a computer over in the corner, etc. So they are almost sheer costless.
The incentive to figure out ways to manipulate that gets rather strong if you can find a way to scale it.
As for charter schools, in my experience, they are teacher generated, worked outside of the present bureaucracy, were funded via it and some private money, but were/are deemed, at best, suspicious creatures from the standpoint of the school bureaucracy. Again, in my experience they work well because they generate energy from teacher's convictions, hopes, desires to do better for their students.
Their chief shortcoming, as they age, is teacher burnout. Central Park East is the only one I know that seems, at least for now, to have solved this problem, the re-creation of itself over succeeding generations of teachers.
They also present a problem for public education in that the money used in them comes from those funds. Thus, the hope is they will come up with a way to scale themselves into much more of the system. That's the reason for the Bloomberg innovations and the hope they contain. Who knows. But at least someone is trying to do something.
Is anyone else having problems with a flakky SI? Getting in and out of posting is difficult. I have to save my posts in Word less they get lost on failures to reconnect. |
