Re: Charter School Job...Pros/Cons?!?

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Wow, thanks for the wealth of info, TYS. :-)

On 7/17/08, TYS wrote:
> We do have a ton of charter schools in San Diego. I am pretty familiar with
> them as most of them are in the district I was teaching in and they serve
> the students from the neighborhood where I lived (I lived in the ghetto
> because that was all I could afford on a teacher and student salary).
>
> Beware any charter school that opens to teach low performing (poor and
> minority) demographics. Teaching at them is pretty much the same as being
> at a regular low performing public school except that often they do not
> have tenure or a teacher union (at least this is how they operate in San
> Diego).
>
> The principals at these usually blow a lot of hot air about raising
> standards and ending the achievement gap. Blah, blah, blah.
>
> Here are some local examples. Preuss school opened to serve high performing
> poor students. They claim they have done such a great job and their scores
> are better than at schools with similar demographics.
>
> Well, of course their scores are better...They cherry-picked the most
> motivated and highest achieving ghetto kids. But a study came out (this
> year/last year?) showing that when the test scores of the Preuss students
> were compared against the other applicants that were not selected from the
> lottery (Preuss cherry picks qualified students and then has a lottery to
> select from among them), there was NO DIFFERENCE in their achievement. LOL
>
> Now here is the real nasty dirt on Preuss. They made the US News N World
> Report (or Newsweek? whatever) list of best schools because so many of
> their students take the AP exams. Well, not long after that happened, UCSD
> (University of California at San Diego) began investigating the school for
> grade tampering. Turns out the principal was changing students' grades and
> bullying teachers to change students' grades. The principal was given a
> rainbow retirement package as a result. That is where you are a bigwig, you
> do something naughty, and you are rewarded with a fat retirement. Must be
> nice. I think best case scenario for me in my life when I was naughty was a
> spanking. I think worst case scenario I caught an STD once. And maybe
> somebody might have some explicit video footage of me that I didn't agree
> too. Sigh. Oh, and the school was also giving students credit for classes
> they never even took. The teachers who blew the whistle were fired by the
> way. One filed suit. Don't know what happened with that.
>
> Anyway, I also looked up the AP exams they were giving. Most of them are in
> Spanish literature or Spanish language or Spanish this or that. Gee, how
> impressive...A bunch of kids who speak fluent Spanish are taking AP exams
> in Spanish. Laugh. Boy, would I like to take an exam on English when my
> main competition is from people who did not grow up speaking English. I
> would kill an English exam if I took it in Morocco.
>
> Also, guess how many of their students ever took an AP math exam?
>
> Go on. Guess. Give me a number...
>
> One. One male asian student. Gee, do ya think he learned his math at that
> school or in Vietnam or China?
>
> Are you bored or do you want to hear about more local charter schools.
>
> By the way, Preuss is the best of them. LOL. The others are for low
> performing kids. (ie. Don't wear red at some of the charter schools and
> don't wear blue at the others.)

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