JPhurst wrote:
We are going well off topic, but maybe that's a good thing given the prior topic of discussion....

1) Charter schools are supposed to, by law, receive 90% of the per student funding that the district is spending. However, this does not take numerous adjustments into account. The result is that in wealthy non-Abbot districts the 90% is close to or exactly at 90%, where as in Jersey City the amount per school varies greatly.

Some of the "adjustments" follow the student: such as reduced or free school lunch, special ed, etc. So a charter school that has those students will receive additional funding and will be closer to the 90%.

2) The money that goes to the charters comes from the districts.

3) One could say, as I have seen here, that the district should be happy for every student that enrolls in a charter school because it takes the student off their rolls but they don't lose all the money. That makes sense to an extent, but you can't fire 1/10th of a teacher, or 1/8th of an administrator, or 1/7th of a cleaner. Some of the district's costs remain fixed, and others will not be reduced unless the number of charters is so high that you will be actually laying off large amounts of teachers, closing schools, etc.

4) And finally, not every charter school student is removed from the public school. Some students are students that would otherwise be in private school or perhaps move. The Christie administration supports proposals to allow existing private schools to convert to charters.

In one sense, of course, this is a great thing. If the charter schools renew faith in public, or quasi-public, education and encourage families to keep their kids in the schools, and in the city, then that strikes me as a desirable outcome.

But it does mean that those students are now taking up portions of the budget that would otherwise remain in the district schools.

And it can be subject to abuse. There have been several attempts to create Hebrew immersion charter schools. Many of these groups are people who want to send their kid to a Jewish day school but can't afford the high tuition. These families would usually not be sending their kids to public schools. There is also the question as to how "public" these schools are and whether this is a back door attempt to provide a religious education with taxpayer dollars.

brewster wrote:
Quote:

Jay_Res wrote:
I am referring to the favoring of children from families who "may know someone."

It is JC after all. I heard an anecdote about a City Hall insider who was startled when he was informed that the LCCS application wasn't "pro forma" for him, and that he had the same lottery chance as anyone else. That he had an expectation otherwise leads one to believe what you suspect is often the case with the goodies the city has to give out.

brewster wrote:
I heard an anecdote about a City Hall insider who was startled when he was informed that the LCCS application wasn't "pro forma" for him, and that he had the same lottery chance as anyone else.

Jay_Res wrote:
I am referring to the favoring of children from families who "may know someone."

brewster wrote:
All fascinating pieces of the puzzle. Might the fact that the "best" district 5th graders are better prepared but half the 8th grade class of LCCS gets into McNair mean LCCS's success is broader? Any idea how many Cordero or PS16 kids get into McNair? I don't know, but this is the kind of stuff I think the DISTRICT should be studying, rather than simply attacking the charters, starving them of funds, and then pointing to their failures rather than successes. I do know about the quotas at McNair, but that would make the data even more fascinating, no?

JPhurst wrote:

I have a friend who has taught at Academy I. He told me that he found the kids coming from the district schools to be more academically advanced than those coming in from LCCS. The LCCS kids were very nice and well behaved but they generally did not have the scholastic background the other kids had.

I know families who's kids are at Cordero and they are generally satisfied. Will they get into McNair? I don't know.

With respect to McNair's demographics, remember that it is operating under an affirmative action consent decree, so demographics are set by percentages.

brewster wrote:



As I've heard it, LCCS was the largest single group in this years freshmen, and likely next's. But I don't have the numbers for Academy I. It's ironic as we know some kids have left LCCS for Academy I because of their McNair numbers.

JPhurst: I think that's a stretch. Perhaps my kids would be getting a decent education at Cordero, a school which has a rep for functioning well if strictly(though I doubt it would be on par with LCCS's) but for kids of educated "involved" parents in other wards, it stretches the liberal imagination too far to believe that they would be as prepared to apply for elite HS and college as their LCCS peers. Access to the demographics and alma maters of McNair's students would certainly be enlightening.

I guess I just don't accept the argument that all that matters is the kid and not the school. There's plenty of motivated parents in JC, witness the 300 applicants for 30 kindergarten slots at LCCS. But the facts that McNair's SAT scores are not in the range of "real" elite schools, and we don't get a fraction of the National Merit scholars that any midwestern HS does shows to me that our schools are failing the kids from educated motivated families as well as the ones from less advantaged backgrounds.

The article you linked uses a number of assumptions in it's conclusions. As for his contention that charters push out under performing kids to raise their scores, I know for a fact that the charters in Hoboken have a problem of dropping scores in the upper grades because of losing high performing kids to the private schools. One size simply doesn't fit all, and no one claims it does. As K-Lo says "Anyone who thinks ALL this is better than ALL that is an idealogue, not a practitioner".

Brewster wrote:
Access to the demographics and alma maters of McNair's students would certainly be enlightening.

K-Lo wrote:
Anyone who thinks ALL this is better than ALL that is an idealogue, not a practitioner. There certainly are district schools in Jersey City that outperform some charter schools in the state tests.

Quote:

For the 2nd year in a row nearly half the 8th graders [from LCCS] have been admitted into JC's premier High school, McNair, by far the largest group from one school.

K-Lo wrote:
Is that really true? Are you speaking of percentage or raw number? If the latter, I think Academy I may have that honor.

brewster wrote:

I don't know what JPhurst is talking about when he says LCCS's performance is just average. For the 2nd year in a row nearly half the 8th graders have been admitted into JC's premier High school, McNair, by far the largest group from one school. Given that McNair receives applicants not only from JC's elite "test in" middle school, but from private schools as well, I don't see how their performance can be dinged.

K-Lo wrote:
Anyone who thinks ALL this is better than ALL that is an idealogue, not a practitioner. There certainly are district schools in Jersey City that outperform some charter schools in the state tests.

But much of the charter school movement does not like him because he criticizes the claims that charter schools uniformly outperform district schools.

For the 2nd year in a row nearly half the 8th graders [from LCCS] have been admitted into JC's premier High school, McNair, by far the largest group from one school.

jphurst wrote:
Another good response to the study, this time from Bruce Baker, a professor of Education at Rutgers... http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com ... w-jersey-charter-schools/ Baker, for what it's worth, is a supporter of more charter schools. But much of the charter school movement does not like him because he criticizes the claims that charter schools uniformly outperform district schools. He also has been very skeptical of the other "reform" efforts such as abolishing teacher tenure, merit pay, etc.

tern wrote:
Anyone can apply brewster, but anyone doesn't.

Those that do are the involved parents, mostly from Downtown.

Robin.

GrovePath wrote:
Hudson County public schools are being outperformed by their charter school counterparts on standardized tests

Red-Deutsch wrote:
To be honest, it's people like me who are the problem. Those of us who are just starting to pay attention now, in a time of crisis. Had more people (including myself) been paying attention all along, maybe we wouldn't be in the dire straits we find ourselves in now.

Better late than never, but it does feel like trying to close the barn door after the cows already left (whatever that saying is).

brewster wrote:
And what are the "child study teams" they spent $13m on?

Red-Deutsch wrote:
>> "But one thing's for sure: 12.75% of the students in JC that are in charters are getting educated on 5% of the education budget, and that can't continue."

Fair point.

(sorry i don't know how to use the quote feature properly.)

Red-Deutsch wrote:
And as far as being lame, I do agree that the PDF linked is somewhat vague because there are no specific breakdowns nor much in the way of explanations, but that's why the very first line of that post says it's at least a starting point. I didn't write it, so if your comment was an attempt to tweak me, you missed the bullseye. I'm just the one putting it out there.