[...] and consultants are hoping the answer is no. First, the Obama Administration unrolled an ambitious plan to completely remake the country’s worst schools. And now eight states are offering new [...]

New York City (where I live) has many charter schools. Some are good, some are terrible. The good ones end up with 100s of kids competing for each slot. To enroll your kid in a charter school you must research the schools, go on tours, figure out when the lotteries are and a million more steps. It doesn’t surprise me at all that parents who jump through all these hoops (regardless of income) also make sure their kids are clean and do their homework. If you make every school a charter school, charter schools no longer have that advantage.

I teach high school, and it is true, the really active parents fill out the form and find transportation to the better school. Then the already “failing” school is left with only the kids whose parents did not have the means or desire to fill out the form. Competition works really well for cell phone companies because they are allowed to reject customers. Imagine the government giving everyone who gets rejected by the other companies a cell phone and then being suprised when said customers don’t pay their bills. Hey, it must be the manager of the stores fault, because ATT works fine!

I’d like to clarify a few points. Mastery is not a corporation. It is a non-profit that believes in modern-day management style of running an operation efficiently and effectively (attending to data and numbers to guide results) but with a great deal of love and attention to students. Our curriculum is very rigorous, there is a tremendous amount of extra support provided to students, and measured to see if it is effective, and when it isn’t, it’s changed. Also, our expectations for students are very high, and our behavioral model (progressive discipline model) is very structured. Our school model is to convert neighborhood schools (if possible), to support children “in situ”, so that children do not have to compete for slots nor travel long distances to school, nor have parents work so hard to get children into a good school. But Charter law in PA requires that children apply for slots via a lottery so to some extent, we must comply with the law, even as we are required to recruit for them for their own neighborhood school. There are some strange hoops to jump through due to charter law. We do not suggest that we are representative of all charter schools; indeed, some are very poor. But Mastery does not measure its success solely by test scores or the wearing of uniforms. How about having over 90% of our students graduate from high school, reducing violence by 80%, reducing attrition for any reason by between 25%- 75% depending on school, and having over 70% who graduate go on to higher education? We also believe strongly in educating ALL children who are cognitively able and deal with a special ed population of that can exceed 20% in a year in a given school. We have special programs for students with emotional and behavioral problems, severe learning disabilities, as well as ELL. It is a school with a set of systems, and does require both teachers and administrators willing to work within a fast-paced but structured, environment that is willing to try new things, and test them out, and then give them up if they don’t work. But the results speak for themselves. And our parents and students also are supporting us as well.
Judy Tschirgi, Board Chair, Mastery Charter Schools