Education policy debates in the U.S.
can get heated.
We begin with that wild fight in Glastonbury that ended up getting a
school official punched.
You're having a close meeting.
It's illegal. It's breaking the.
Law. We're going to make sure the school system crumbles.
I am your master.
You are the servant.
One contentious issue: Charter schools.
The idea was that teachers and parents could get together and they could
provide a model of schooling that was a little bit different than what existed
in the district.
And then they would share ideas with the district.
The charter school movement gained steam in the U.S.
in the early 1990s.
Public school education is under fire, accused of bloated.
Bureaucracies and failure to adequately teach America's youngsters.
A charter school is a public school that is funded through tax dollars but is
governed by a private board.
We have more autonomy to be able to have a more flexible budget and make
different academic decisions.
I'm opposed to charters.
I'm opposed to publicly funded charter schools that are run privately.
Don't tell me you're a public school if you're not governed by the public.
One of the things that folks don't seem to realize about charter schools is that
like a business, many of them fail.
Right now we're operating parallel school systems.
At some point, it's going to break.
Many proponents say charter schools improve lives.
41% of students enrolled in charter schools in the U.S.
are eligible for free or reduced lunch.
KIPP has changed my life immensely.
My family was lower income, but I know that's not what they saw me as.
They saw me as a person who cared about his education, cared about his future,
and wanted the best for himself and the people around him.
That's what KIPP is about.
So do charter schools work and are they here to stay?
A charter school is a publicly funded school that is established by a private
group. The charter school creates a contract with the state and local
government. That contract lays out specific accountability requirements for
the school, and the government has the ability to shut the school down if it
doesn't meet those standards.
Charter schools are exempt from certain state laws and regulations that
traditional public schools must follow.
There are about 7,700 charter schools in campuses in the US, with about 3.4
million students enrolled.
KIPP is the largest charter management organization in the U.S.
as of September 2022.
KIPP stands for the Knowledge is Power Program.
KIPP's approaches that together with families.
We create joyful schools with academically rigorous content at our
schools to prepare students for college, career and beyond.
More than 2,700 students attend KIPP Philadelphia Schools and mission is
determined through a lottery system.
97% of the students identify as black or African American, and 76% qualify for
free or reduced lunch.
At fifth grade I started at KIPP Philadelphia Charter School.
My brother, he was first enrolled.
He went through the lottery and I was able to go because I was his sibling.
I decided to come back to KIPP as a teacher because that love I felt in
fifth grade all the way to KDCA, I still felt as I came into my interview
to become a teacher at KIPP.
Proponents of charter schools say they improve public education standards
through competition by giving parents a choice of where to educate their
children without the burden of paying for private school tuition.
We knew that there were a whole lot of schools me and my brother could go to,
but we chose specifically KIPP because we knew that they were a school that
would care about us. Being a black male in education is extremely important to
me because it brings diversification, it brings passions, it brings
connections.
And I want our teachers making sure our students identities are present in
anything that we are putting in front of our students.
And so that means a book that we are reading our students connecting to that
book in a way that connects to their cultures and their identities.
Charter schools do work.
Nationwide, KIPP students graduate at a rate of 34% with their bachelor's.
This is three times the rate of their peers coming from similar socioeconomic
backgrounds.
But just like with traditional public schools, charter schools can show mixed
results. A 2019 study of Pennsylvania schools found that charter schools in
rural areas either perform the same or worse than their traditional public
school peers in math and reading.
Suburban charter school students showed less growth overall in both subjects
than those in district run schools.
Urban charter school students outperformed in reading, but performed
about the same as their peers in math.
Quite frankly, there are some great charter schools and there are some not
so great charter schools.
The same way that we have some amazing traditional public district schools and
some not so amazing ones.