Some Washington, D.C., charter schools expel or suspend large numbers of students.
This teaches them a lesson. If they misbehave, if they break school rules, they are out, perhaps permanently.
If they are expelled, they go back to the public schools.
If they have low test scores and they are expelled, the charter school gets higher test scores, and the public school gets lower scores. If they are troublemakers, the public school gets the troublemakers. The charter school keeps the students who obey and get good test scores.
This is what George Lakoff of Berkeley describes as the “strict father” philosophy now so popular among conservatives. There are rules, the rules are always right. Obey or be banished.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What I’ve heard anecdotally is that the rules are mostly a cover for the test scores. If you perform well on the tests, well, we don’t need to be inflexible, do we? But if you’re not performing well on the tests, they’ll find some rules for you to break somehow. Although I disagree with it, I could respect the “strict father” philosophy if they were genuine about it, but, like nearly everything else they spout, it’s just another cheap ploy that sounds good to appeal to the “values” crowd.
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Suspensions and expulsions are just part of the problem. Perhaps we could coin a new phrase…….SEA(suspension, expulsions, attrition). After all, it’s just as important to know how many students quit in order to avoid all these punishments, before they become part of their permanent record.
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This is another area where charter schools and public are unequal. There is a campaign to end suspensions
http://www.teachsafeschools.org/alternatives-to-suspension.html
Which I would support if it weren’t that parents likely would pull their kids from school if they thought alternatives to suspensions made the school less safe. So we have charters even more empowered to “clean up” their schools and put students on contracts, while public schools become the place where administrators have no power over discipline. Which direction should schools go? No suspensions, no expulsions? Should schools be able to hold students accountable for their grades?
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Another example of the drive to lower the suspension rate.
http://theadvocate.com/news/3954343-123/ebr-seeksto-improveplans-forspecial-ed
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So what will the policy be once all schools are privatized?? They cannot go back to the public schools. So will politicians change the rules and force all charters to comply with the same rules as public schools? And as more charters form, so do teachers demanding union representation which is happening in many charters.
Most likely government will find a way not to reimburse these schools in the future. These schools will fold like a cheap suit, and someone will come up with an idea to form public schools. You see if all charters had to follow the rules of public schools, there would be not students left and cheating scandals will rise in order to keep the profits. Teachers will leave after 2 years because of burn out, and most likely no one will want to be a teacher under these conditions. We will see a major decline in the teaching force in this country even under relaxed certification rules. Maybe parents will demand a law to turn their charter back into a public school!
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Only 12% of charters have unionized teachers. The charters like it that way.
Diane
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The leader of a charter school union in Chicago spoke at the CTU rally in the park on Saturday (Sept. 15th). He said the union is quite small so far (about 300 people), but it’s growing and they’re fighting to organize more and more charter schools because, by and large, charter school teachers are miserable with the working conditions and the kind of “education” they are expected to provide.
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It will be hard to organize charter teachers because a large number are TFA, who don’t see teaching as a career. Also, turnover is high.
Diane
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The majority of veteran inner-city teachers would strongly support school reform focused on improving student behavior. If you walk through a high-SES-area suburban school and then walk through a low-SES-area inner-city school, one of the first differences you notice (after the obvious racial composition differences) is that the suburban classes experience much less disruption due to student misbehavior than the inner-city classes. Indeed, a major (probably the major) reason that inner-city parents enroll their children in charter schools is to escape the minor but endemic classroom misbehavior that not only disrupts instruction but places strong peer pressure on the otherwise well-behaved students to join in the misbehavior.
Certainly, it’s wrong to allow charters to expel misbehaving students while preventing public neighborhood schools from expelling misbehaving students. If the charters are public schools, then the charters should operate under the same expulsion rules as the neighborhood schools. At a minimum, if charters are allowed to have broader expulsion policies than neighborhood schools, a large asterisk must be added to any comparison of charter and neighborhood school test scores.
Moreover, school reforms focused on creating appropriate student behavior in the low-SES-area inner-city schools need not be cruel or mean to the students — there is no need for draconian or abusive methods and probably little need for large numbers of out-of-school suspensions or expulsions (particularly if the school system is willing to fund an adequate in-school-suspension program). Indeed, what is cruel and mean to the students — in the long run — is allowing the current endemic misbehavior to continue in the low-SES-area inner-city schools..
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The charters are actually not supposed to be operating under different rules, but it’s easy to tell parents that they won’t pursue penalties as long as the parents send the child back to the regular public schools, as in one situation that I know of. On the other end, enrollment, it’s easy to tell parents of students with special needs that they don’t discriminate but don’t provide particular services. . .
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Of course the rules are also meant to break one down into conformity. Those familiar with history can conjure up all sorts of ugly pictures with that.
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