Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
Charter schools in the shadow of the Silicon Valley: response to ‘from bake sales to million-dollar school fundraising campaigns: the new inequity’
Journal of Educational Administration and History Pub Date : 2020-01-02 , DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2020.1724396
Christina Wong

Having taught in charter schools for the past five years in the California Bay Area, I have definitely witnessed different iterations of the public-private partnerships mentioned in the article. First and most obviously, the abundance of charter schools in the Bay Area points to the neoliberal shift of privatising education while absolving public responsibility for the success of all students. While charter schools are public schools in the sense that students do not have to pay to enroll, they also solicit donations from private donors to supplement our budget. Therefore, though charter schools are measured against the same standardised criteria as traditional public schools, they often have more funding (or at the very least more flexibility with budget allocations) to obtain resources or hire teachers. California has one of the highest populations in the USA yet spends one of the lowest amounts of money per student, thereby relegating large numbers of students to sub-par education environments—creating a ‘perfect’ environment for the charter school movement to gain popularity. Charter schools and charter management organisations can then easily obtain charters to provide ‘solutions’ to the ‘broken’ public school system. For example, the charter schools I have worked at recruit students by pointing out the low graduation rates of the local district public schools (particularly for students of colour). Our data is not false, but we also fail to disclose the reasons why the gaps exist and the fact that our often data looks better because most students who cannot succeed at our schools choose to leave. As a product of the California public education system myself, I cannot help but wonder if I am contributing positively or negatively to the status quo by teaching at charter schools rather than at a traditional district school. In reality, I could not afford to live in San Francisco on the district school’s pay scale. Also, I do not think charter schools are inherently better or worse than district schools at educating individual children—for any type of school, school-by-school differences are explained by many soft and hard factors such as school leadership, teacher expertise, community engagement, etc. Similar to an outcome of school fundraising identified by Yoon, Young and Livingstone, the founding stories of many charter schools promote ‘our students’ and ‘our community’ mindsets that fundamentally undermine the public responsibility that everyone should feel towards funding education. For example, the charter network I previously worked at was founded by a community of local, Latina mothers who believed that their students would not be adequately served by the local middle schools. They based their beliefs on low standardised test scores and personal experiences; many watched

中文翻译:

硅谷阴影下的特许学校:对“从烘焙销售到百万美元学校筹款活动的回应:新的不平等”

过去五年在加州湾区的特许学校任教,我确实目睹了文章中提到的公私合作伙伴关系的不同迭代。首先也是最明显的是,湾区大量特许学校表明教育私有化的新自由主义转变,同时免除了所有学生成功的公共责任。虽然特许学校是公立学校,因为学生不必付费就可以入学,但他们也从私人捐助者那里寻求捐款以补充我们的预算。因此,尽管特许学校的衡量标准与传统公立学校相同,但它们通常有更多资金(或至少在预算分配方面具有更大的灵活性)来获取资源或聘请教师。加利福尼亚州是美国人口最多的地区之一,但却是每个学生花费最少的地区之一,因此将大量学生置于低于标准的教育环境中——为特许学校运动的普及创造了“完美”的环境。特许学校和特许管理组织可以轻松获得特许,为“破碎的”公立学校系统提供“解决方案”。例如,我工作过的特许学校通过指出当地公立学校(特别是有色人种学生)的低毕业率来招收学生。我们的数据不是假的,但我们也没有透露存在差距的原因以及我们的数据看起来更好的事实,因为大多数无法在我们学校取得成功的学生选择离开。作为加州公共教育系统的产物,我不禁怀疑我在特许学校而不是传统的地区学校任教是对现状做出积极还是消极的贡献。实际上,按照学区学校的工资标准,我负担不起住在旧金山的费用。此外,我不认为特许学校在教育个别儿童方面本质上比学区学校更好或更差——对于任何类型的学校,学校之间的差异可以通过许多软性和硬性因素来解释,例如学校领导力、教师专业知识、社区参与等。类似于 Yoon、Young 和 Livingstone 确定的学校筹款结果,许多特许学校的创始故事促进了“我们的学生”和“我们的社区”的心态,这从根本上削弱了每个人都应该对资助教育的公共责任感。例如,我之前工作的特许网络是由当地拉丁裔母亲社区创立的,她们认为当地中学无法为学生提供足够的服务。他们的信念基于低标准化考试成绩和个人经历;许多人观看
更新日期:2020-01-02
down
wechat
bug