I applaud the motivation, but the United States public school system is as dysfunctional as your average third world government. Pouring more money into this broken system simply does not help.
As an example, consider the Washington D.C. public school system, which spends more per capita than almost any other city in the nation, yet consistently scores among the lowest in all performance metrics. There is something wrong with the existing culture of American public education. Introducing more funding might temporarily alleviate some of the symptoms, but it cannot cure the underlying disease.
A $100 million dollar fund to found charter schools in the Newark area would most likely be more effective, and would certainly be more interesting.
My take on charter schools vs. public schools is quite simple really. I firmly believe that all the hype surrounding better test scores (better outcomes) can be solely attributed to the fact that the population is self selecting. As it turns out, public schools are the lowest common denominator when it comes to education. In order to attend a charter school the parent must do something. The fact that the parent must do something in and of itself is testament to the fact that the parent is involved. Any educator, anywhere in the world, will tell you that an involved parent makes all the difference.
It says that often, things that look like overall trends can be split into sub-groups, in which the effect is gone. For example, take the "Public Schools perform worse than Private Schools" idea. If you split both school populations into the children from wealthy parents vs children without wealthy parents (ending up with 4 groups), you'll find that the test scores are the same for the "wealthy" kids, whether they go to private or public schools.
In other words, it doesn't matter whether kids are going to private or public schools, what matters is whether they have wealthy parents or not. It just so happens that more kids with wealthy parents go to private schools.
More details about the paradox, and a link to a study on private vs public schools, can be found in the Wikipedia article.
You underestimate researchers. Recent research on charter schools uses randomized assignment, induced by oversubscribed schools. They often find large positive effects:
Okay. But charter schools can induce involvement among the parents. I have seen no evidence about this effect so I'll just put it out there. Really, the argument of whether charter schools are effective or not should not be important. The environment the child spends his time in is more important than the number of facts crammed into his head. The idea that parents should have their children forcibly relocated and locked inside a building and just pray that it's competently enough run so as not to be filled with poorly supervised violent hoodlums with no alternative cost-effective choices, is evil.
Charter schools can induce nothing. If the parent wasn't already interested enough to take time out of their day to sign their child up there is nothing the charter school can do about it.
On the other hand, if you have a kid and he isn't registered somewhere in the school district (public, private, or home) someone from DCW knocks on your door and "induces" you to send your child to school.
Founding charter schools is only part of the solution. You still have to get parents to send their kids to the schools, and you have to get the kids to want to go, and those are tough hurdles to overcome in a place like Newark.
Like it or not, the public school system is what many kids in Newark are stuck with, and it's hard to see how something like this will not help considerably.
And I'm not sure if I agree with your blanket statement re: our public school system, as much of it is functioning just fine. Parts of it are broken and corrupt, yes, but I don't think I'd go as far as comparing them to third world governments.
In case you haven't noticed, charter schools have far more interest from parents than there are spots open, that's why they have lotteries to get in. In fact there is a documentary specifically about this, called simply [1] The Lottery.
Also New Jersey schools are some of the most corrupt in the nation, which there is also a documentary about called [2] The Cartel. In The Cartel they actually have a scene from one of the charter lotteries, which is one of the saddest scenes I've ever seen in a film as it literally brought tears to my eyes watching parents and kids celebrate when they were chosen, and brought to tears of anguish when they were not.
Also it would be nice if you could show us where the public school system is supposedly "functioning just fine," as I'd love to see the evidence for that. In fact, there is a movie being released this Friday called [3] Waiting for "Superman" that argues the opposite, along with former NY state educator of the year [4] John Taylor Gatto that argues in his books that the entire system should be abolished and started over from scratch. Sure, there are the very rare few teachers that are actually doing good work, but the system is flawed from the top down starting with the goals (essentially to produce factory workers with no individual thought [5,6]).
I'm aware of the Superman movie & I mostly agree with your criticisms, and again, my objection was that I thought you overstated your criticism of the "United States public school system." Obviously, not all public schools are bad.
For example, my hometown of Montville, NJ has a wonderful public school system which has very good outcomes. As does Bergen County, NJ. And many of my friends and family have attended Rutgers University and received outstanding educations. These are public schools, functioning just fine. Rutgers is arguably better than most private universities, and our high school arguably better than most private schools.
Again, I agree that our public schools aren't great for the most part, but I think this is a complex problem and that we should try to remove ideological arguments and drastic, unrealistic solutions (like taking a hatchet to our entire public school system). And again, yes, charter schools are great and more are necessary to meet demand, but I don't think that necessarily means we should ignore efforts to attempt to improve the public school system which many kids are stuck with.
tl;dr: Yes, charter schools are fantastic, and we need more, but we should also try to improve our public education, especially in the poorest of our communities.
For example, my hometown of Montville, NJ has a wonderful public school system which has very good outcomes. As does Bergen County, NJ. And many of my friends and family have attended Rutgers University and received outstanding educations. These are public schools, functioning just fine. Rutgers is arguably better than most private universities, and our high school arguably better than most private schools.
I thought even the best public school is highly inefficient, especially with the high school I go to. They have pep rally and sport team. It cost money to train coaches, build stadium, and other items. Heck, my educational field trip got canceled even though sport teams get to go.
I mean, a true autodidact, not a shallow self-educated learner like me who happens to learn little bit there and there, would probably own the students at my highschool with terrifying efficiency.
Now, bringing athletics into the discussion is a wholly different beast. Having interacted with a lot of fans and alums and faculty, and having attended panels back at RU, there will be quite some opposition against athletic spending and it will be labelled as unnecessary but more often then not, the benefits of athletics to an institution outweigh the cons by a whole lot (if run properly that is) and the arguments against it are often misguided.. that conversation is for a different time, diff place.
1) NJ is very notorious when it comes to unions. this extends to public schools. not many people care about actually teaching as much as they care about the 3 month vacation and a very steady paycheck + a very healthy pension.
2) Up until this point, the NJ state controlled Newark public schools. Now, the gov has agreed to hand over the control of the public schools in Newark to the mayor, Corey Booker (who's the best thing to happen to Newark in recent history).
Recently, Gov. Christie cut higher ed funding to divert it to the public school systems. Now this doesn't help public universities like Rutgers in the state. Being a recent alum, I know the first hand effect of the state's constant budget cuts to the university since 2006-07 (about 61 million $ then through about 20 mill in 2010) ..
You forgot that the Mayor of D.C. and his School Czar, after spending years actually making progress in improving D.C.'s school and cutting costs, just lost the election to a new guy who swears he's going to fire the school Czar because she's mean.
As an example, consider the Washington D.C. public school system, which spends more per capita than almost any other city in the nation, yet consistently scores among the lowest in all performance metrics. There is something wrong with the existing culture of American public education. Introducing more funding might temporarily alleviate some of the symptoms, but it cannot cure the underlying disease.
A $100 million dollar fund to found charter schools in the Newark area would most likely be more effective, and would certainly be more interesting.