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Common Dreams reports
The Seattle Times reports that
The ruling--believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country--overturns the law [I-1240] voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.
Teacher and author Mercedes Schneider offers more on the Act:
As is true of charter schools nationwide, the charters in Washington State (up to the current ruling) were eligible for public funding diverted from traditional public schools. Charter schools were approved via a November 2012 ballot initiative (I-1240, the Charter Schools Act) in which charters were declared to be "common schools" despite their not being subject to local control and local accountability. And also like America's charters in general, Washington's charters are not under the authority of elected school boards.
Thus, Washington voters had approved to give public money to private entities--a one-way street that provided no means for such funds to overseen by the public.
[...] The new ruling (pdf)[1] states that charters, "devoid of local control from their inception to their daily operation", cannot be classified as "common schools," nor have "access to restricted common school funding."
[...] "The Supreme Court has affirmed what we've said all along--charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding," said Kim Mead, president of the [Washington Education Association], in a statement.
"Instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to unaccountable charter schools, it's time for the Legislature to fully fund K-12 public schools so that all of Washington's children get the quality education the Constitution guarantees them," Mead continued.
The Associated Press reports that the state had one charter school last year, and eight more have opened in the past few weeks.
I pity Ms. Schneider's students if she routinely starts sentences with conjunctions--especially consecutive, redundant conjunctions.
[1] I had trouble with the connection.
(Score: 1) by eravnrekaree on Monday September 07 2015, @02:20PM
I for one am all for Charter Schools, and the concept of having smaller, community schools, especially up at the Middle and High School level. Why not give people a choice and alternatives from the factory that is often massive Public schools.
I have seen what goes wrong on the inside of the mega-school model, these massive sprawling prison like complexes with hundreds or thousands of students. There is something about the dynamic that creates a lawless atmosphere within them that propogates bad behaviour and habits throughout them. Its a breeding ground of drug use, riots, violence and all kinds of other behaviour. Do not underestimate how intimidating, and concerning, that these massive schools are on many students and how the shenanigans, the threat to personal security that can occur, interferes with education. Bring on the Charter schools, I say.
I can assure you there is nothing quality about public schools and the monstrosity that they are. It chews up students and spits them out, and treats them like objects, not people. What is behind this I am sure are unions who want to preserve the entrenched public school monopoly, to the detriment of students who have to attend these breeding grounds of bullying, crime and degenerate behaviour.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @02:49PM
You realize there's nothing in your post that's actually about charter schools. It's just the fallacy that since charter schools aren't public schools they must be better.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday September 07 2015, @04:36PM
It's just the fallacy that since charter schools aren't public schools they must be better.
That does seem to get to the heart of the establishment's objections so I'll take it as a starting point to riff off of.
Not exactly. We think several related heretical thoughts. Allow me to bullet point em for you.
1. We hold that the public schools are a objective failure. They are failures by any measurement you choose, they are so obviously failures that nobody even debates this point, although it is THE key to it.
2. The government schools are purely a creature of the unions who rule them for their own benefit. Best summed up by:
"When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."
- Albert Shanker quoted in the Meridian (Miss.) Star in 1985, purged from the official histories after being quoted by Romney in 2012 as An Inconvenient Truth.
3. The problem in the government schools is NOT a lack of money or other resources. Again, this is so instantly measurable that few try to raise a direct objection.
4. We do not believe charter schools must be better. All Charter programs are based more on the idea that if you allow a bunch of ideas to be tried, that SOME will be better. Then by a brutal evolutionary process the herd is thinned and new ones are introduced, hopefully imitating more of the ideas from the successful ones from the last generation and discarding the bad ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @06:49PM
I'm impressed that Albert Shanker is still on the job some 30 years after he was quoted, and he apparently is running things up in Washington now.
OR, pulling a single 30-year-old quote from some guy in Mississippi as a general example is demonstrating gross negligence for extreme cherry-picking. Perhaps I'll pull some juicy Robber Baron quotes from the 19th century about oppression of workers to give a union counter-argument.
I also don't take your first point as fiat because you don't define ANY success criteria. Plenty of children receive excellent educations and go on to higher education, so surely that is not an abject failure. Plenty of children fall through the cracks as well. If you're setting the bar to 100 percent, then it is not an achievable goal, like 100 percent employment.
There is a lot of swirl around your third point, but it is clear that pupil success is strongly correlated with school system funding. In fact, just last week or two yet another study came out that showed that families that were given vouchers and who moved their children to "better" schools turned out more successful. You can argue the point about how well the money and budgets are managed, but the correlation is there nonetheless.
Your description in your last point about brutal evolution and herd thinning of teaching techniques and approaches sounds like a path to abject failure if you are hitting the children with a bunch of crappy ideas to look for the few gems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @10:03PM
See, here's the problem. My public schooling was not an objective failure. I learned a lot in STEM topics such as calculus and biology and chemistry & read and discussed literature among other things. Interestingly, it was a suburb with high property taxes. IOW, they had more money and resources.
Your whole post posits that the crux of your argument is such an established premise, it doesn't need to be supported and instead is just a universal truth, even though it runs completely contrary to my experience. Care to guess which I'm going to give more credence to?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @03:54PM
How do charter schools improve this? This is a human condition. When you have adolescent to teenage kids, you have this, no matter the surroundings. Unless you get down to school sizes of unity, you are going to have this. It is human nature that once you have a group of two or more people, cliques will form whereas the occupants of a clique define themselves at the expense of the people not in the clique.
It sounds like you are projecting your negative experiences onto the whole.