Charter Schools Focus Paper

So, as an assignment for class, we all had to read on the focus papers that the second years wrote last year and write a response to it in our blogs.

I read a paper written by a fellow Eph and math teacher about the efficacy of charter schools and vouchers. While the paper succeeds in illustrating many of the important positive results that have come about through the use of vouchers and especially through charter schools, it leaves out many of the prominent concerns with such programs.

The paper follows the basic economic idea that competition and market forces are the only way to efficiently produce improvements, and that both charter schools and vouchers provide such competition. One often ignored point that the paper makes clear is that the competition benefits not only those in the charter schools or using the vouchers, but it benefits those who remain in traditional public schools as well, since these schools, after the introduction of competition, are faced with new incentives to improve.

The paper also says that there are questions involving the constitutionality of voucher programs, but never mentions the source of these concerns or the ways in which vouchers might be unconstitutional. I would speculate that these questions arise from problems with the separation of church and state when government funding is used to pay for religious education, but that isn’t really clear from the paper.

Overall, however, the paper gives the impression that these two programs put public education on the verge of big changes, and I have to agree with that sentiment, and can only be happy about it. Public schools have failed too many of our children for far too long, and if these programs are as beneficial as the paper suggests, then they are certainly worth trying. However, the negative aspects of these programs, specifically the loss of funding to schools that need it the most, cannot be ignored.