Charter schools and funding
In the Public Interest has published a new report (pdf) on the impact of charter schools and public school funding in CA:
In a first-of-its-kind analysis, this report reveals that
neighborhood public school students in three California school
districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of
privately managed charter schools. In 2016-17, charter schools
cost the Oakland Unified School District $57.3 million, the San
Diego Unified School District $65.9 million, and Santa Clara
County’s East Side Union High School District $19.3 million. The
California Charter School Act currently doesn’t allow school
boards to consider how a proposed charter school may impact
a district’s educational programs or fiscal health when weighing
new charter applications. However, when a student leaves a
neighborhood school for a charter school, all the funding for
that student leaves with them, while all the costs do not.
I’M AFRAID OF GETTING BLAMED FOR GOING OFF TOPIC — BUT I WANTED TO MAKE A CASE FOR WHAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE CAPABLE OF — WHICH IS A LOT (MOST?) OF WHAT THIS TOPIC IS ABOUT:
[cut-and-paste]
Did Chicago public school teachers crack the ghetto code?!
Chicago public schools may have uniquely cracked what I call the ghetto code: that ghetto schools fail because students (and teachers!) don’t seen anything remunerative enough waiting for them in the labor market post graduation to make it worth putting out the extra effort. This down and discouraged vicious circle was revealed by Berkeley political scientist Martín Sánchez-Jankowski in his book Cracks in the Pavement. The professor spent nine years on the ground in five NYC and LA impoverished neighborhoods. He spent the previous ten years with street gangs.
“U.S. News and World Report just released its annual rankings of the nation’s best high schools: Six of the top 10 in Illinois are in CPS and another three in the top 20.”
“ … from 2003 to 2013 and found Chicago students grew 11 points on the 8th grade math test and 7 points on the 4th grade reading test. The state grew just 7 points and 3 points, respectively.”
“ … between 2006 and 2014, the percentage of CPS students earning a bachelor’s degree within 6 years of high school graduation jumped from 8 percent to 14 percent. The national rate is 18 percent. … They found that Latino students enrolled in CPS are more likely to graduate high school than their counterparts in many suburban districts, including Maine Township High Schools and Evanston Township High School.”
http://www.wbez.org/series/curious-city/were-chicagos-public-schools-ever-good-112025?utm_campaign=E-Update%205-14-15&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua
Headline: High-Poverty, All-Black School Beats Odds, Earns Top CPS Ranking
CHATHAM — Students and parents from Arthur Dixon Elementary school said they were ecstatic this week to learn their school had earned the highest ranking on the 2015 CPS School Quality Rating Report for the first time.
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20151106/chatham/high-poverty-all-black-school-beats-odds-earns-top-cps-ranking
“Salary figures provided by the Chicago Public Schools show teachers here have the highest average salary of any city in the nation. But, according to the Chicago Teachers Union’s calculations, Chicago teachers would rank second behind New York City.”
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/how-much-do-chicago-public-school-teachers-make/
On Wisconsin; to nearby states with your children where they can still get a first-class education without you reaching into your pockets to waste 300 million tax payer dollars.
ADDENDUM — AH-EMDUM 🙂
“Chicago’s progress is extraordinary. A 30 percent gain in graduation rates in 15 years is almost unimaginable, but it happened.”
http://l.e.crainalerts.com/rts/go2.aspx?h=54890&tp=i-H43-Dw-vd-4JSnj-1n-1CUf-1c-4JLrN-1w9Yki
“In the Chicago Public Schools system, enrollment has been declining, the budget is seldom enough, and three in four children come from low-income homes, a profile that would seemingly consign the district to low expectations. But students here appear to be learning faster than those in almost every other school system in the country, according to new data from researchers at Stanford.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/upshot/a-better-way-to-compare-public-schools.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fupshot&action=click&contentCollection=upshot®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Denis:
You will still get blamed for being off topic; but, you are discussing schools, funding, and high school education.
If you look at the pictures in this article “Were Chicago’s Public Schools Ever Good?” You will find they mention Lane Technical High School. I also mentioned it in my article on the last Sears store closing in Chicago at Six Corners. Supposedly more Doctorates went to high school and graduated from Lane Tech than any other high school.
It was a well kept secret in the middle sixties. It did suffer from funding issues then. Chicago was starting to hurt back then and the school system had many critics including my eastern relatives. An aside, the stadium pictured in Goldie Hawn’s movie Wildcats was Lane Tech’s football stadium. We were close to 5000 all boys during my tenure there.
The pictures in the article are from the automotive shop. There was also electric, wood working, framing, machine shops as well as others too. You could work on cars too. When I left there I had two years of Algebra, one year of Geometry, and a semester of Trig., 4 years of English, 2 years of History, 4 years of drafting (won at the IIT contest), etc. You took the basics or you did not graduate. It was a magnet school then and pulled from all over the city. Our football team won also.
We were integrated; but, we did not have women on campus then. They made an appearance after I graduated.
It is no surprise to me, Lane Tech is still highly rated in the city, in Illinois, and in the nation. I was lucky to be there and that my 8th grade teacher recommended myself and several others to be admitted.
Now if someone started an article on what architecture exists in Chicago, I can tell you which ones I worked on with my dad.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk on public education in Chicago.
I started reading the California report on Charter schools. This reads like the story of outsourcing Manufacturing and Labor. The instruction can be done with similar results and at less cost at private schools as opposed to public schools. That is the rationalization.
What the effort does not address is the students left behind, the cost of the Overhead which is not optimized and left for the public side to pay. The policy encourages more outsourcing as with each public school closed to rationalize the student population and cut the Overhead, a private school can be opened further disrupting the rationalization of the student population and Overhead.
I stumbled upon “The View from Room 205”. All the time I was listening, I was thinking that it is the report that give the lie to the charter school movement.
I highly encourage you to spend the hour listening: http://interactive.wbez.org/room205/