Thoughts, Links, and Questions: Charter School Drama in New York City...

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution weighs in on Harlem state senator Bill Perkins's opposition to charter schools in his area.

The NYT's coverage of the issue is here. 

I tend to support charter schools. They seem to cut through a lot of the red tape of effectively running a school, allow for much needed innovation in teaching, and, most importantly, allow the principals and teachers to create a focused and high-octane school culture. Also, per Tabarrok's analysis above, the fact that many of them are successful at improving student proficiency is not much in question.

But I do wonder about the long-term problems of the charter school solution. The ability for culture-creation and effective systems management are, to my mind, the big plusses of the charter school movement. With that in mind, some questions:

1. What happens when, in say New York City, the educational landscape becomes dominated by charter schools? Part of the advantage of charter schools is that students, and often parents, must buy in to a school's culture and contract in order to attend. Often they can be kicked out for repeatedly failing to do so, which creates a reasonable negative feedback mechanism that has the benefit of mirroring the real life situations at companies, colleges, and so forth that the schools are trying to prepare students for. But what happens when there are no more charter schools for a seriously troubled student to attend? Will non-charters become repositories for such students?

2. On the tail of that last question, with an increasing number of charter schools siphoning off high-risk students that can be successfully assimilated into a rigorous academic program within a certain norm, what will/should the school model for the highest-of-the-high-risk students be? This begins to get into the inclusion vs. isolation debate still quite current in education today. More on that later.

3. Are we looking at an eventual tier-ing of schools? Will these charter schools begin to naturally sort out as some get a reputation for exceptional excellence and the applications to these schools increase? You can imagine that even if administrators try to keep an even spread of students, some students and their parents will begin to self-select schools by only applying to some and not others.  Or will there be measures to prevent this? Will this be such a bad thing?

4. As with any "movement" of its kind, how many of these successful schools are built around the personalities of a few core members? What happens when these people move on?

5. What happens if, 10-15 years down the road, charter schools themselves start to flag and fail? Is there something built-in to the charter school phenomenon in and of itself that long-term is better than traditional schools? Or are they more attractive right now because they fix only immediate (if still pressing) problems?