PUBLIC VS CHARTER

Why Public Schools Are Chosen More by Parents and Students Rather Than Charter Schools

Why Public Schools Are Chosen More by Parents and Students Rather Than Charter Schools

Introduction

The paper discusses the choice of parents and students for public schools rather than Charter schools. We will discuss the reasons and factors that affect the decision while deciding on a school for the children as well as the positive features of the public schools that include aspects of cost, curricula, and the attitude of teachers and management involved in the public education system.

The idea of school choice has been around for some time, although it had been often described in earlier usages in terms of school vouchers or a voucher plan. In this sense, the basic ideas behind vouchers and school choice are quite similar. Both plans seek to allow parents to apply their individual share of public school funds to the cost of any school, private or public, for their children; that is, the parent or student chooses the school to attend.

Thesis Statement

Parents and students favor public schools over charter schools because public schools provide quality education at a bare minimum cost.

Discussion

Policies that deliberately promote parental choice of schools, the focus of this entry, are only a very small part of the school choice universe. Such policies are playing an increasingly significant role in educational policy debates in the United States, just as they have over many decades in other Western nations. Following the notions advanced earlier by Milton and Rose Friedman, school choice plans institutionalize the essentials of a free market system in education. Public education, when viewed as a monopoly and not truly subject to the laws of supply and demand, permits poor schools to continue operating even if and when they fail their students. At the national level and beginning in the 1980s, presidents Reagan and Bush endorsed a movement for school choice that had the support of some influential academics such as Milton Friedman. The movement gained additional support in the early 1990s when John Chubb and Terry Moe, political scientists with the Brookings Institution, authored Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. Arguing that public schools were too bureaucratic, they advanced the idea that a school choice program was the only viable alternative to the public schools (Chubb & Moe, 1990).

The charter education movement had its beginning in a number of reform ideas, including alternative schools, site-based management, magnet schools, public school choice, privatization, and community-parental empowerment. The idea was publicized, suggesting that local boards could charter an entire school with union and teacher approval. During the middle decades of the 20th century there was an effort, in a number of Western democracies, to extend the undifferentiated elementary school model into secondary education— comprehensive schools in England and the United States, Lécole unique in France, the Gesamtschule in parts of Germany—with what can charitably be called mixed results.

Since 1994, the U.S. Department of Education has provided grants to support states' charter education ...