Jeff Bryant warns parents not to be tempted by the advertisements or lures of charter schools.
He cites the report by the Network for Public Education showing that the shelf life of many charter schools is limited, and their futures are uncertain.
The report crunched nearly two decades of data and discovered that more than one in four charter schools closed after just five years. That’s less than the number of years it takes for a typical kindergartner to complete elementary school.
After 10 years, 40% of charter schools were shuttered; after 15 years, that rate rose to about 50%.
And the number of students impacted by charter school closures is considerable. According to the report, from 1999 to 2017, more than 867,000 students were displaced when their charter school closed. That figure is likely closer to 1 million students, if data from charter school closures between 1995 and 1998, as well as 2017 to 2019, were added to the analysis.
Privately managed charters are a market mechanism, like shoe stores and restaurants. Some succeed, some don’t. Buyer, beware.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And just think about the amount of taxpayers money they swindled in doing so!
or: why the do it
they
I believe it is a very dangerous factor that so many charters which fail the children, manage to enrich those who invested.
same response here s to Bill: or, why they do it
Years ago, when all this testing stuff was all the rage, we kept hearing the statistic about how changing build is was detrimental to children’s test scores. You can measure the delay, we were told. We argued and argued about giving our kids stability. Hmmmm, we thought.
Then the charter philosophy emerged. Students need disruption. Disruption is the lifeblood of economy and advancement. disruption this and disruption that. Hail thou most almighty disruption. Hmmmmm, we thought.
Technology has e power to save us! Every kid needs a laptop. There are schools in Silicon Valley where every kid has a laptop. Would’nt it be great if kids could post their math rules on a website. Children need to be be using the tools of the future. Hmmmmm, we thought.
Someday there will be another idea. It will be all holy and mighty. And those of us who are teaching will think: hmmmmmmm.
cash through chaos
I sometimes wonder if the ed reform “movement” will switch from not supporting public education to supporting public education once it’s privatized.
Will they start lobbying on behalf of kids and families who use public education if it meets their ideological requirements? Because all these providers are going down together if someone doesn’t start advocating on their behalf. They recognize that “government not supporting public schools” will mean “government not supporting charter schools” once public schools are gone, right?
They could reach their ideological goal of handing everyone a voucher and that voucher could be 5k. We all could lose big in this experiment they’re running.
“And the number of students impacted by charter school closures is considerable. According to the report, from 1999 to 2017, more than 867,000 students were displaced when their charter school closed. That figure is likely closer to 1 million students, if data from charter school closures between 1995 and 1998, as well as 2017 to 2019, were added to the analysis.”
It’s actually much more disruptive for families and students than even the analysis indicates, because it’s a national analysis and schools are local. Charters aren’t evenly distributed throughout the US. The disruption is much larger in areas with larger charter market share. There are vast areas of the country with no ed reform-engineered market churn at all. Cleveland students are much more impacted by charter churn than students who live in the suburbs around Cleveland.
The churn doesn’t just “happen” either. Ed reformers designed charter systems. They could have designed them differently to mitigate the impact of the closures but they made a deliberate (and ideological) choice not to do so. They lowered barriers to entry in the market. Since they created the market they could have designed it with higher quality barriers to entry.
This is a cost they priced in. Because they’re wholly enamored with the gimmicky, fashionable theory of “disruption” so the decided the price that families pay for it had to be paid- not by them, but by the people who live in these places.
Frankly, I see a racial component to the whole unstable mess. Charters were sold as the antidote to “curing” poor children in poor zip codes. The systemic instability is built in to market based education in which mostly poor minority students are targeted. For me the message is that these students deserve less. A premise of privatization is the monetization of students and providing them with separate and unequal educational opportunities. Al the consideration goes to the investors, not the students.
cx:All the consideration..
Bingo, retired teacher.
What galls me are those disgusting and humiliating “lotteries,” which are just downright classist, and racist.
I agree that failing charter schools are a problem and that parents should be careful about choosing one. However, at least when a charter school fails, it has to close and the damage stops. Failing traditional schools are allowed to stay open and continue to cause harm.
What do you mean by a “failing public school”? low test scores? Too many kids in poverty? Too many kids who don’t speak English? Too many kids with disabilities?