Originally Posted by
professorscott
Charter schools are a bit like a suntan. A suntan is a reaction of your body to an injury, and while some may think it looks nice, it is actually potentially harmful.
Charter schools exist for the most part in places where the public schools are, by any objective measure you'd like to use, miserably failing. So, if you like, they are a reaction to school management's injury to children. And while some may think they are better, they are certainly not all better, and some are worse.
I have always felt the problem is the captive-audience system of determining where you go to school simply by where you live. It would be like saying, OK there's a Target store over here and a Wal Mart over there, but if you live closer to Target you can only shop at Target, and if you live closer to Wal Mart you can only shop at Wal Mart. And there are legal penalties if you fake your address so you can shop at the store you like better.
The main difference between real life and my lame analogy is that it is actually critically important to a child's future what kind of education he or she gets, whereas the decision as to which discount store to patronize is a pretty insignificant choice.
A better solution would be the open market to the public schools solution. Every school district must accept students from any other district, subject only to available classroom space. Districts are only responsible for transportation [[if they choose to provide it at all) within their own boundaries; parents are responsible, if coming from another district, to get their children to a bus stop within their district of choice. State funds follow the students.
But the chance of the state even proposing such a thing, in the face of a large, entrenched bureacracy well-served by the existing idiotic situation, is pretty close to zero.
By the way, yes, this absolutely means some schools will fail, and close. And they should. If they aren't providing an education to the point that parents are willing to incur inconvenience and expense to send their children elsewhere, the people in charge of such schools don't deserve to have their phony-baloney jobs.