"“EVERYONE’S pencil should be on the apple in the tally-mark chart!”
shouts a teacher to a class of pupils at Harvest Preparatory School in
Minneapolis. Papers and feet are shuffled; a test is coming. Each class
is examined every six or seven weeks. The teachers are monitored too. As
a result, Harvest Prep outperformed every city school district in
Minnesota in maths last year. It is also a “charter” school; and all the
children are black.
Twenty years ago Minnesota became the first American state to pass
charter-school laws. (Charter schools are publicly funded but
independently managed.) The idea was born of frustration with
traditional publicly funded schools and the persistent achievement gap
between poor minority pupils and those from middle-income homes.
Charters enroll more poor, black and Latino pupils, and more pupils who
at first do less well at standardised tests, than their traditional
counterparts.
Today there are 5,600 charter schools, and they serve more than 2m
pupils in 41 of America’s 50 states. This number has grown annually by
7.5% since 2006 (see chart), but is still tiny: charters enroll less
than 4% of the country’s public-school students. Some places have taken
to charter schools particularly enthusiastically: in Washington, DC, 44%
of public-school students attend a charter school.
That figure is dwarfed by New Orleans. There two-thirds of students
are in charters, thanks to an overhaul of the city’s disastrous schools
after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Today half of charter schools in the
city are improving reading or maths at a significantly faster rate than
competing public schools; and across the state as a whole charters are
performing better.
Parents like charter schools, and waiting-lists for them are growing
faster than new places. Nina Rees, the new head of the National Alliance
for Public Charter Schools, says more than 600,000 children are on
waiting lists. Oversubscribed schools choose pupils by lottery,
something poignantly illustrated in the documentary film “Waiting for
Superman”.
Although charter schools have won support from across the political
spectrum, they have always attracted controversy. Much of the unease has
been stirred up by teachers’ unions; charter schools do not usually
employ unionised teachers. As recounted in a new book, “Zero Chance of
Passage”, by Ember Reichgott Junge, a former Minnesota legislator who
wrote the original charter legislation, unions have from the outset
pushed the misleading idea that charters drain resources from
traditional schools. They also maintain that politicians who support
them are against public education. That is not true.
Critics of charter schools derive more ammunition from the fact that
their performance varies widely. For example, earlier this year the
University of Minnesota found that charters in the twin cities of
Minneapolis-St Paul lagged behind public elementary schools, ranking
7.5% lower for maths and 4.4% lower for reading.
Hundreds of other studies have been done on charters; but most are of
dubious quality. One recent analysis had to discard 75% of its research
because it had failed to account for differences between the
backgrounds and academic histories of pupils attending the schools. Much
political capital has been made of a 2009 study of 16 states that found
that only 17% of charter schools were better than public schools, 37%
were worse and the rest were about the same. The work was done by the
Centre for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo) at Stanford
University."
para continuar a ler... in su situ... aqui.
já por aqui [em entradas anteriores] deixei alguma literatura para abordar esta temática...!
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