What is the difference between a charter school and regular public school in NYC?

Question

I keep hearing about public schools closing and other charter schools popping up in their place. I hate to sound dumb but what exactly is it that makes a charter school a charter school?

Is it that the teachers are not unionized or something along those lines? I really have no idea. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, you've heard from someone telling you one side about charter schools. But there is another side.



Charters tend to have very little, if any supervision on the part of either the NYC Dept. of Education or the State Dept. of Education. Many are very corrupt. Several have been closed down for corruption, including a woman who hired her own husband, paid him a huge salary for doing nothing, and using the school as her personal piggy bank. (She's probably going to jail. This happened in NYC, btw.)



Also, even very good charters tend not to take kids with special needs or kids who are second language learners. This means that public schools get a higher proportion of these kids. Yet, many charters, even without these kids, are only doing about as well (or sometimes worse) than equivalent public schools.



Are there some great charters? Sure. But there are many great public schools as well. And there are many lousy public schools, but there are lousy charters as well. They just have to go really wrong before anyone realizes it, because of a lack of supervision.



My last problem with charters is that often they derail real reform of ordinary public schools. Harlem is a great example. There was real reform going on in Harlem schools in the 1980s and it was starting to make some progress in a few schools. Then the charter movement came in and all of the efforts at reform of the regular public schools died on the vine. So the regular public schools actually got worse as the charters came in. Such a shame!



Bottom line, charters are not the panacea for problems in education. We'd be better off finding what works within the regular public schools.

Answer 2

Not just non-union teachers, but that is the big thing.



Imagine it was not a school, but a local post office. And the post office did so poorly that the government shut them down, now instead of building a new post office the mayor said "hey we are going to let Fedex handle all the mail in the area."



And the reason they would let fedex handle it is because by getting a private contractor they can go around a lot of (but not all of) the normal red tape that goes with an official government building.



So the city writes up a new "Charter" explaining how this post office will work.



This is what is going on in schools in NYC. Charter schools can hire a lot more freely who they want at all levels, can fire A LOT more freely people they feel who don't meet their standards. They have more control over their budget so they can actual pay teachers more in salary in exchange for demanding higher quality, or pay teachers less and put the money in improving the facilities. Their students typically don't have to take the same standardize test which plague BOE NYC.





Charter schools can provide a lot of things public schools don't because they don't have to go through the same level of red tape.



Not that all charter schools are great, some are as bad or worst than the worst public schools in NYC.

Answer 3

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