Chicago to Welcome More Charters

Despite some disappointing test scores, Chicago Public Schools plans to launch 12 new charter schools.

More than two dozen schools in Chicago’s most prominent and largest charter networks, including the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), Chicago International Charter Schools, University of Chicago and LEARN, scored well short of district averages recently on key standardized tests, write Joel Hood and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah at the Chicago Tribune.

But this hasn’t stopped Chicago Public Schools from green lighting proposals for another twelve charters to sprout up across the district, writes Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah at the Chicago Tribune.

This comes as the district battles with the communities, where protestors are fighting to save failing schools from being shut down and keep familiar teachers in their posts during turnarounds.

School closings and turnarounds are always emotionally charged issues, but this year they come tinged with a sense of unfairness, writes the Tribune.

Not one charter came under the knife in the recent closing list, despite state performance data revealing that some of their students had performed badly enough to warrant the closures of other schools in the neighborhood.

School officials have begun the process of revoking two struggling charters’ licenses, the first time in the district’s history. The district also has begun working with another charter network to turn around one of its failing schools

Yet these charters have been granted more charters because “on the whole, their schools outperform the district,” says CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll.

New Schools for Chicago have defended the poor testing scores, claiming that the charters have a “strong track record of delivering,” pointing out that the majority of the network’s campuses have outscored the district.

Along with these charters, the Education board is also set to vote on a charter for Christopher House, which runs a family resource center next door to Northwest Middle School.

Christopher House attempted to launch a charter last year but was prevented by community groups, who said the charter would eventually take students from neighborhood elementary schools and the adjacent middle school.

Yet CPS officials say that the Belmont-Cragin area where the charter will exist is overcrowded with students, and the Christopher House school will eventually run up through 8th grade, providing 1,600 elementary school seats.

Comments

Joe

December 19, 2011 at 2:09 pm

The charter movement has to be the sacred cow of education because it is completely fact-proof. It has been over a decade since the opening of the first charter schools in the U.S. and yet they haven’t shown to produce better education outcomes for students. And yet, because the idea is so appealing, their numbers are not only growing in the U.S. but the Gospel of Charters is now winning converts in the U.K. as well; a country that, on the whole, should really know better.

Reply
Kevin

December 19, 2011 at 3:46 pm

If nothing else, charters are worthwhile in that they are an actualization of an idea that people outside the education establishment have something useful to say about education. Even if it were true that charters, overall, haven’t shown much improvement over public schools over the past ten years, it’s undeniable that public schools have been spectacularly failing in this country for much longer than a decade. If not charters, than what? A few more decades of same old, same old, only to end up exactly where we are now? What is that definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

Reply
Richard Bramer

December 20, 2011 at 12:19 pm

The best that Charters can claim, on the whole, is to do no worse for the average student. Most close examination has indicated that, for a heterogenous population (ESL, Special Ed., Low SES, traditionally underserved groups) Charters don’t do as well.

On the flip side of the argument, is it true that public schools have been failing “spectacularly”? Not at all.

The goals of public schools have been an ever-widening, constantly moving group of ideals with a population that has likewise undergone tremendous changes – namely increased heterogeneity. Even within that milieu, the NAEP scores have consistently gone up. Folks who listen to the Standards movement for their sole source of data will get what they are fed: a doomsday picture. Those who stick to the data that has been collected by the same methodologies over a longer period of time (the NAEP) will get a different picture entirely.

Can we improve? Of course. Are their under-achieving schoools, teachers, and neighborhoods? Of course. Does this mean throw out the only system that has proven effective (at all) for the most mixed population the world has ever seen? Calmer folk think not.

Reply