Why Do We Need Charter Schools?

Newspaper The New York Times published a study on the need for charter schools. Charter schools are those private schools that are not answerable to the authorities but are sponsored by state funding. They are free to choose a model of education in contrast to public schools. Recently, the issue of charter schools has become widely discussed after the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States – the Education Minister is adherent to the charter school model.

According to the material of The New York Times, charter schools were useful primarily for students from insecure “black neighborhoods”. As an example, journalists took the story of one of the residents of Chicago – student Mery Crown, who previously studied in a public school, and then moved to the charter one. She still remembers the stress that she received during her reading lessons in elementary school. When her class read books out loud, Mery was often confused and did not understand what was happening. She did not understand how her classmates could answer the teacher’s questions about the actions in the book so quickly.

The fact is that Mery had a reading disability, and lagged behind her peers. Her mother repeatedly applied to the school for teachers to help her, but this was unsuccessful. As a result, Mery won admission to one of the charter schools. Charter schools are private-public schools that operate outside the state system but receive state funding.

After moving to a charter school, Mery’s life changed considerably – her performance improved dramatically and reading problems were fixed. However, this result does not coincide with the public opinion on charter schools. It is believed that this type of school is a place where criminals are studying, and the learning outcomes in many of them are lower than in public schools. However, research has shown that this statement is not really for all charter schools.

There are many specialists who track thousands of charter schools in order to conduct independent research on the activities of such institutions and come to interesting conclusions. It turned out that many black students enrolled in the 6th grade of the charter school have significantly lower math scores than their white counterparts. However, by the 8th grade, their scores become very similar. But in traditional schools the gap between black and white children remains the same.