Seattle Schools Community Forum

Melissa wrote a piece for the Washington Post about how Washington State has resisted a number of the more conventional elements of Education Reform, including charter schools. Liv Finne wrote a response for the Washington Policy Center blog and Melissa has responded in turn. My thinking on this continues to evolve. Right now I'm at a place where I have no interest in the question. The discussion follows predictable patterns: I argue against charter schools saying: "There nothing that a charter school can do for students that a public school cannot do. Whatever wonderful thing that a charter school does could also be done in a public school." The charter school advocate responds: "Perhaps. But the public schools don't do those things." And I come right back with: "And neither do most charters. The vast majority of them operate no differently from traditional public schools." Instead of looking for disagreement, we could look for common g...

The Times never runs out of space for people to advocate for charter schools. " If voters favor charter schools, why can't state lawmakers? " by Robert Enlow and Jonathan Bechtle. Robert Enlow is president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the legacy foundation of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman headquartered in Indianapolis. Jonathan Bechtle is CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a free-market think tank based in Olympia. Lots of comments follow, nearly all pointing out how the authors are wrong. Let's remember, however, that the people who make decisions in Seattle read the print edition, not the online edition, and they certainly don't read the comments from the riff-raff. If you only read the print edition you would think that everyone loves the idea of charter schools - except for the teachers' union lobbyists who control the Democrats in the legislature and obstruct any kind of reasonable and necessary education reform to pr...

Today, the Seattle Times ran an editorial by Lynne Varner (" Adding color to the education reform debate ") which is, without a doubt, the worst statement in support of charters yet to appear. Ms Varner proudly quotes a study which reports: "60% of the charter schools performed with similar or better success than the traditional public schools in reading and 53 percnet (sic) of charter schools performed with similar or better success in math compared to traditional schools." Those of us with math skills instantly recognize that this means that 40% of charters had WORSE results than traditional public schools in reading and 47% of them had WORSE results than traditional public schools in math. Rather than using this data to support the creation of charter schools, I would use these results to oppose them. Note that we don't know what share of the charter schools showed performance that was similar to that of traditional public schools, but, if this study...

This is probably the most difficult piece of the charter puzzle because (1) there are 41 charter laws and (2) the mission and goals of those laws vary greatly (although the language might be similar).