Charter School example essay topic

The topic that I am going to be talking about in this essay is a very big and controversial issue. That is rather it is a good idea or bad to charter our failing public school system. So far it seems the non-chartering path is in the lead, but charting school is catching up fast. In this essay I'm going to summarize one article title The New School, by Chester E. Finn Jr. that supports the charter system. Also I will summarize an article title To Market, To Market, by Phyllis Vine who seem to strongly opposed the charting our public system.

As far as my personal opinion goes, I believe charter schools are still in it's infancy, we should give it more time to develop before we can actually decide rather charter school is a good idea or not. I would go into greater detail later in the essay. The Pro-charter article titled The New School, by Chester E. Finn Jr. who is the former assistant secretary of education believed and I quote "charter schools offer the benefits of both public and private schools and can revitalize urban education". He started the article by stating that currently the charter systems enrolling about 170,000 students, with about twenty-nine school authorizing and allowing charter schools to be built and operated, states such as California, Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts.

What is a charter school? Well, according to the article, it is "a public school with some of the most highly prized features of private schools". The best part is it is offered to anyone who wishes to attend, with no additional cost to the parents, because it is pay for by the tax dollars. Out of all the charter school, many are owned and operated by local community and parents. But there are about two dozen that are operated and owned by the Edison Project and the Educational Alternatives Inc. For some other firms instead of operating and owning the entire school, they target specific area, such as the furnishing, tutoring, and technology to name a few.

According to this article the educational system in the United States is $300 billion enterprise. While Chester states maybe a reason for some firms to try to jump on board the chartering business. From Chester's article he stated that in two years time he visited about sixty schools in fourteen states and interviewed few hundreds of those either worked or attended those schools. The results are, a few schools that if you had a choice you would never send your kids there. And one or two that didn't seem to be running quite well. Comparing to the amount of them that are running efficiently and actually making improve in the students grade, are like saying that all apples on an apple tree are Superb apples, with not a single one rotten.

From Chester's point of view there are two paths that the charter system can follow. First path to sum it up, people will realize charter schools are a success, and thousands more will developed. The second path people realizing that charter school is a failure, and teachers unions and their allies will try to limit and even eliminate this system. All in all, Chester feels that although charter schools are not a cure-all for American education, but in his surveys of the past two years showed him that charter schools are a promising education-reform strategy. The second article titled To Market, To Market... by Phyllis Vine, who is a journalist and historian maintains that charter schools are just another way for entrepreneurial ventures who will eventually sells the children's short. According to Vine the educational systems is a $600 billion market.

From Vine's article there are about twenty-eight state's legislation that supports charter schools. Although there are two federal studies that shows charter schools have improved test score. But there was the famous failure of the Educational Alternative Inc's school in Baltimore and Hartford. Beside these failures, Former President Clinton has called an increased from the current 400-500 to 3000 by the century ends. He goes on by introducing the more active charter school supporters. They are, Lamar Alexander who is the Education Secretary from 1991 to 1993.

Chester Finn Jr. is the Assistant Education Secretary from 1985-1988 also one of the founder of the Edison Project. As well as Diane Ravi tch, Assistant Education Secretary from 1991-1995, and founder of the Educational Excellence Network. He goes on by mentioning many events that are happening during article's published time. One of them I found worth mentioning is the A.P. S and their struggle to get charter laws establish. Finally it was established, and A.P. S promised to improved student performance, but it was backfired, with blames ranging from the new teachers, to the lack of school supplies. After this event was mentioned, it is followed by a few more charter failures, also some event of discrimination against special education kids.

He concludes his article by saying with all poor management, union busting, and discrimination are all eventually going to destroy our educational systems. My opinion of this issue is, although there are several major failure in the charter school system, but yet there are countless cases that shows charter schools are a success, and we should further adopted by our educational systems. I must agree with Chester that although this idea is not a cure-all, but since our public educational systems are not actually in top notch condition, we should try other ideas that much get our educational system back on track. In conclusion, I feel that although there are many failures from the charter systems, we can't just abandon it because it fail a couple times out of the many.

We should learn from those mistakes and improve on it. Since human are not perfect, then we shouldn't expect things we do to be perfect. So we should give this idea a try, before we shut it out, based on these few mistakes.