Will charter schools be the schools of the future?
Charter schools have been popping up all across the country and recently in my hometown there has been a hearing about a STEAM academy charter school which was slammed by the Bethlehem school district because it did not receive sufficient community support and poor academic programming.
Charter schools have mixed opinions
If you ask a parent not every parent will agree, but some parents typically feel that children that go to charter schools have better academics and teacher to student ratio.
But some also feel that the selection system is unfair as students are forced to compete with other applicants in a lottery system.
Charter schools are technically for profit
Even though the majority of states have some kind of law prohibiting charter schools to run as a for profit,many of them that have this law in place are heavily flawed.
As in order to get federal,state and local funding, the charter appears not to be for profit, but could possibly be run as a for profit.
And there is not a lot of transparency as to where the taxpayer’s money is going towards when funding the charter school and this could lead to a potential misuse of schools funds.
As there is a lot of gray area of what is happening behind the scenes with these charter schools.
The biggest worry with more charter schools popping up across the country is that they will take away money from the regular public schools and or the public schools lose funding all together and charter schools will take all of the taxpayer’s money for school fundings.
In my personal opinion the charter schools are rapidly popping up and if they are more of them opening up then that can spell for a disaster as they can could try to bypass the rules and regulations set in place for for normal schools to get the go ahead to start processing the pupil applications until it is too late to do anything about it as they are already established school in the district and their is hundreds of students now attending these schools.
There also needs to be more transparency for the average taxpayer to be able to make a decision on whether to agree to send their children to these schools.
I don’t think charter schools are a fad and I feel they are here to stay and could be the future of what most schools in the US could look like.
The worry of the unknown for the charter schools should worry people as you might not be attending, but future generations including children and grandchildren could attend one and you want them to have a better education and prosper hopefully they do.
Do you think charter schools will eventually takeover the US and be the future of education or do you think they will die like a fad?