Unintentionally, I got into a debate this morning with someone convinced that private schools were the answer to fixing our public education system. Their reasoning was that If you have a failed system, go elsewhere. Public or private, same motive.
Respectfully, I disagree.
Here are a few things on my list of why I don't think "experimenting" with for profit schools would bring about the positive change advocates keep promising....
1. Charter Schools Have Not Improved Education
The Charter School experiment has not yielded the kind of results that would suggest a wider application of it would provide better results.
The fraction of charter schools that outperform their local TPS (Traditional Public Schools) alternatives is 25% of charter schools in reading and 29% in math....Despite these improvements, there remain worrying numbers of charter schools whose learning gains are either substantially worse than the local alternative or are insufficient to give their students the academic preparation they need to continue their education or be successful in the workforce.
http://credo.stanford.edu/...
2. The Profit Motive Perverts the Goals of Education
Forbes Magazine notes:
"The charter school movement began as a grassroots attempt to improve public education. It's quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit."
And so, just like the Fast-Food industry where profits for CEO's are high but wages for employees are low, Charter School administrators make a lot more money than their public school counterparts, and their numbers are rapidly increasing, while teachers make less and there is a higher turnover rate.
http://www.freep.com/...
3. Profit-Making Model in Higher Education
At the college level, for-profit schools aggressively market to low-income students and military veterans, who conveniently arrive with public money in the form of federal financial aid. For-profit colleges get up to 90 percent of their revenue from U.S. taxpayers. Less incentive remains for these schools after tuition is received, as evidenced by the fact that more than half of the students enrolled in for-profit colleges in 2008-9 left without a degree or diploma.
The driving need for profit directs students to computer screens rather than skilled teachers. A Columbia University study found that "failure and withdrawal rates were significantly higher for online courses than for face-to-face courses." The University of Phoenix has a 60 percent dropout rate.
http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/...
4. Lower-Performing Children Left Behind
The greatest perversion of educational principles is the threat to equal opportunity. Charter schools can shape their student enrollment through practices that often exclude students with special needs, those with low test scores, English learners, or students in poverty.
In New York City, special-needs students and English-language learners are enrolled at a much lower rate in charter schools than in public schools. Special education students also leave charters at a much higher rate than special education students in traditional New York public schools.
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
I don't presume to have the answers or the solutions of what will fix our educational system here, but I would rather experiment with what works else where than give the the trust of educating ALL of our children in the hands of CEO's and shareholders whose primary purpose is to make a profit.