Charter Schools

Sometimes you see someone doing a job and you think ‘I could do that better’. For example I think I would be better at being President of the United states than Mr. Bush. Many people look at the public school system (I am using US terminology here) and they think they could do better. Sometimes they set up a trial school, with brilliant inspirational teachers and the school does well. The next step is to scale up this system. They then start charter schools. These are schools that take resources from the public school system and use them to run schools. The idea is that without the oversight of the bureaucrats things will work better. Unfortunately having brilliant teachers does not scale as there is a limited supply. And now the results are in: Fourth graders in traditional public schools did significantly better in reading and math than comparable children attending charter schools.