Introduction

The Controversy of Charter schools

The charter school movement is a very politically controversial issue that lacks a lot of good research. This has resulted in many widespread misconceptions. When I was a kid, I believed many of these common myths. To me, charter schools were just a weird way of saying private schools. I thought they were simply a scheme to give money to rich businessmen and to defund public schools; it was just another "left or right" wing issue. After doing proper research on the topic I realized how much more complicated it is. To first explore this issue we must understand what a charter school is.

What are Charter Schools?

Charter schools are publically funded schools that are operated by independent groups. This is a massive departure from the fundamental principle of publically managed schools. Instead of being controlled by local district bureaucracies and teachers' unions, they are controlled by private groups. These schools are still held accountable for some sort of standard set by the individual state. The idea behind this change is that private management can avoid many of the bureaucratic inefficiencies found in many public schools. More efficiency ideally should result in faster management and more money for students. This is a broad idea of what charter schools are considered in the United States but it isn't 100% true. 

Generalization is BAD!

Around 45 states have authorized charter schools with each state having its own laws on what a charter school is and how they're managed. This means that there is a whole ocean of varying charter schools that have major attributes change from state to state. Each individual charter school has its own goals which may not align with high standardized testing results. A common theme I found in the public analysis of charter schools is that each study usually only focuses on a particular subsection of schools in particular states resulting in varying skewed results. This gives us completely contradictory studies which are technically all correct. There are very few studies that actually attempt to find the average performance of similar charter schools across the whole United States. This usually isn't done maliciously, there are simply too many charter schools to really summarize them all even though they currently only represent a small percentage of actual schools in America. With these blogs, I hope to truly present the actual state of charter schools in the most critical fields.