Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Kudos for the Princeton Charter School
There are more than 4,000 charter schools in the United States. According to the Center for Education Reform the Princeton Charter School is one of the 53 best. It is well deserved recognition. Our son is an alumnus and our daughter is a rising 7th grader there, and we think that PCS has been wonderful for both of them. Many people share the credit for the school's excellence, but Mrs. TigerHawk is certainly one of them. She has been very active since 1999, having chaired the school's capital campaign for a stint and presently serving on the school's board of trustees.
While I have not written about charter schools in a long time, this ancient post on the subject was my first to be linked by a major blog (Winds of Change, actually, to whom I am indebted). Among other things, I noted that most people did not understand that charter schools were every bit as public as the "monopoly schools" administered by the local school board, and suggested that charter schools describe themselves as "public charter schools." I was therefore interested to see that the charter school on Martha's Vineyard calls itself the "Public Charter School."
Something tells me that they got the idea elsewhere, though.
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Aug 23, 11:23:00 AM:
For each child there is a school, I guess. In our own case, PCS wasn't a very good choice. But I congratulate the very fine people at PCS on this recognition, and applaud them for their tireless work making the school into the local institution it is rapidly becoming.
Andrew
By 
Christopher Chambers, at
Fri Aug 24, 11:47:00 AM:
Why have they not taken off in the burbs as much as in cities? Indeed, in Maryland, outside of Baltimore and DC, some are not hitting those dastardly No Child Left Behind standards two years running.
The programs were being underfunded as well...the product of forcing the same folks who oppose the schools to oversee them. The bizarre thing is that the pushback has come not from local teachers unions, etc. but from the superintendents and other administrators.
By , at
Fri Aug 24, 03:27:00 PM:
I'll take your post seriously, and take a crack at your first question and your final point.
The genesis of a charter school involves lengthy effort by a group of dedicated parents, who are motivated by dissatisfaction with existing school choices in their community.
At a guess, in suburban areas, filled as they are with people who often moved to the community specifically for better schools, you probably won't find that very necessary fodder as often as you will in urban schools.
There, caring parents disgusted with the education the school monopoly has dictated to their children would probably be willing to move heaven and earth to improve their children's opportunities.
Vouchers would be more efficient, but the union starts laying eggs whenever that subject is raised (as they have in DC several times).
But if a charter school arises, school district administrators argue it "drains" money (as it were) otherwise available to the administrators of the monopoly system off to a parent run school. If ever the monopoly runs into sticky issues in budget negotiations with the board or the population at large, the charter school is an obvious punching bag. Historically, it's been a well used punching bag here in Princeton too, when, inevitably, the administration blames the existence of the charter school for all of it's problems.
Andrew
By Christopher Chambers, at
Fri Aug 24, 08:28:00 PM:
"The Baltimore school system could be forced to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars - and eventually millions - to its charter schools under a ruling issued yesterday by the state's highest court.
In a 7-2 decision, the Court of Appeals affirmed the right of charter schools to receive as much money per pupil as regular public schools spend on their students. When the new academic year begins next month, Baltimore will have 22 charter schools serving about 5,400 children, more than in the rest of the state combined."
That was from a local Maryland paper and that's why some stuff you and TH said stuck in my head. The ruling was August 1, 2007. I'm presuming there are showdowns looming in NJ?
By , at
Sat Aug 25, 12:39:00 PM:
Not being an expert in the evolution of the funding issue here, I can only say that in the time I've been paying attention to the issue I believe Princeton's charter school has been consistently funded on that basis.
Andrew
