Charter School Can Be Defined

Charter School can be defined as a school that is affiliated with any school district, but which cannot be subject to the same school rules and regulations as a traditional high school would be. This would apply to many matters and issues of the school, including the hiring of its faculty, the designing of its curriculum, and its numerous courses that the children would study. A charter school would in essence offer a basic individuality and a good opportunity to its students for whom it would be better if they were to pursue their studies in a non-traditional environment. (Definitions of Charter Schools on the Web) Charter schools can also be defined as being public institutions, which are run on and supported by public funds. They differ from traditional public schools in one important aspect, which is that they are relatively free from rules and regulations than their counterparts.

Charter schools are given free rein to hire personnel and staff, and to design their very own specialized curriculum, and also to implement any special or different values that they may want to inculcate into the school curriculum. A charter school must negotiate a 'charter' so that it becomes recognized as a charter school, and this charter will be signed with either a local school district, or with a 'charter organizer' who has been appointed by the state. However, it must be remembered that not all charter schools are the same; in fact, each and every charter school may be different form each other, and the reason for this is that in general, charter school are given free rein in choosing their own curriculum, and are therefore quite different and unique in their focus or in their student clientele. At the same time, one must note the fact that the charter contract will describe the various goals of the charter school in detail, and it also details how the school must be run, what funds will be used by the school, and so on and so forth. (Charter Schools: Ncspe Publications)

It cannot be denied that charter schools are one of the most important inventions of the past few years, and this may be one of the reasons that the idea has spread across the length and the breadth of the country, and it is also accompanied by fervent and strong assurances that the concept would be able to effectively solve all the various problems that school bureaucrats had been supporting. Charter schools are more often than not, small, and are started by some individual with a strong vision and a mission. The teaching staff of charter schools is supposed to be free of the general air of cynicism and pessimism that are found in the ageing teachers of certain high poverty schools. The idea of a chartered school has been embraced by political parties, and can be funded from state, local, as well as from federal budgets, and has also been readily approved by most state legislatures. (Charter Schools and Race, a lost opportunity for integrated education)

It has been hailed as one of the best ideas to have been conceived of recently, and one which is termed as the 'potential antidote' to everything that was considered to be pathological in the weaker public schools. This was because of the fact that a charter school would be able to effectively combine the independence and the autonomy of private schools, and at the same time, offer students the free tuitions that public schools would give. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the school year of 2001 to 2002 alone, there were about 2,348 charter schools formed in the United States of America, with many communities showing a willingness to try it out as well. All of this means that the numbers of students that charter school serve is increasing daily, and this has given rise to rising doubt about whether or not these schools are capable of offering a less segregated experience to its children.

At the front of these issues is that of racial segregation, and there have been protests from quite a few minority parents who feel that although charter schools are a very good alternative to the public school system, it does not mean that minorities would once again be isolated. It must be remembered that all public schools have been constantly struggling with the issue of racial segregation for the past fifty years and more, and now, all the schools of the United States of America are in the midst of a process of re-segregation that began about fifteen years ago. It is however an undeniable fact that today, black children and Latinos are today more segregated and isolated than they have ever been before, in the past three decades. Why are these children isolated from the rest of the children? The reasons may be either that of language, poverty, and of racial discrimination. (Charter Schools and Race, a lost opportunity for integrated education)

According to national segregation trends, almost nine tenths of racially segregated Latino or black schools have a large body of poor students belonging to them. These children suffer from bad health care, from frequent moves from one place to another, from uneducated parents, form lack of sufficient nutrition, from a lack of basic language skills, and also from a very limited knowledge of the spoken form of the English language. The result is that the teachers are also quite lesser experienced and also les credentialed than the teachers of other schools. All this means that these children would be an isolated group, and this would have serious consequences for them as they grow up.

How does all this pertain to charter schools? As stated earlier, charter schools do tend to be more segregated than other public schools, and this segregation may be worse for black and for Latino children. However, in a few states, the segregation of white children as they are minorities is also very high in charter schools. The reasons for such flaws may more often than not be attributed not to the teacher and to other faculty of the charter schools, but to a flaw in the state policies, or to a flaw in the enforcement of rules, or due to a flaw in the methods that were used to approve of these schools. (Charter Schools and Race, a lost opportunity for integrated education)

The emergence of charter schools across the United States reveals that there is today an increasingly popular trend of enhancing and improving the capacity of public institutions with various outside resources. Since it is a fact that charter schools have to develop their own form of expertise, they have succeeded in using their basic autonomy to develop partnerships with several different types of social agencies, church groups, and communities, whereby such partnerships would provide certain essential and important goods and services that are required by the charter schools. (Charter school laws and partnerships, expanding opportunities and resources)

The American federation of Teachers submitted a report on their findings about the advantages and the disadvantages of charter schools in 2004, which was published in the New York Times. According to this report, it had been discovered that the students of charter schools did have a lower achievement level in both reading and in mathematics as compared to the students from traditional public schools. The differences were evident both when seen from the view point of overall performances, as well as from the view of those children for whom charter schools were supposedly infinitely more beneficial than public schools, like for example, low income group of children who were eligible for either rebated or for free lunches, and those students in central cities. However, the same report also noted that the overall performances of children in charter schools were not significantly different from those children from traditional public schools. However, Professor Hoxby argued that the charges were fatally flawed, because of the fact that a very small population of students had been researched for the project, and these numbers would not be able to give the right answers. (Advantage none, re-examining Hoxby's findings of Charter School Benefits)

There is a general opinion today that charter schools as such are in effect nothing but public schools that find themselves exempt from the many rules and regulations that effectively govern public schools all over the United States. The concept of charter schools has also been taken variously as being widespread, while at the same time, a poorly studied and researched form of educational reform. Today, there are more than 2,700 charter schools that are responsible for the education of more than 684,000 children all over the United States of America, and this means that research must indeed be conducted about the various advantages and the disadvantages of charter schools, so that parents may be able to make an educated choice for their children. However, it must be noted that an accurate and real assessment of the performance of the students of charter schools is very difficult, due to several reasons. One of them is that these schools are not aimed at average children, but at specifically high risk children, who may either be disabled, or may be juvenile delinquents. This means that researchers would not be able to draw fair conclusions form their studies, because the performance levels of these children would be significantly lower than that of other children. (Apples to Apples: An Evaluation of Charter Schools Serving General Student Populations)

However, one method can be used to solve this problem, and this is that of using as a comparison base the test scores of students from a similar background from both the schools. Therefore, in a study conducted to measure the performance levels of students from both public as well as from charter schools, while taking similar populations of students for the study, it was found that, over a one year period form the time of the implementation of the charter school system, charter schools that were serving the general population were exhibiting better and higher performance levels of students from their schools, as compared to those from public schools. For example, on math tests, the charter school students outperformed their counterparts by a test score of 0.08 of standard deviation, and this was the equal to a benefit of 3 percentile points for a student who begins at the 50th percentile.