Again you've proven you do not know much about the US Education System. Our inner city schools are well funded, but for some reason the students aren't doing well. That is why people are taking their kids out of public schools and putting them in charter schools.
Price Per Pupil
Boston $18K+
Westwood $15k+
Westwood students are doing far better.
Top Ranked School in Massachusetts... Sturgis Charter
Looking at your opening comment above you know nothing about price per student and charter schools.
They're not properly funded... Elected officials are taking bribes.... lmao, how foolish.
Interestingly, although I don't live in the US I seem to know more about the discrepancies in your school system than you do. I think this is a more accurate picture of educational spending in the US. I do have one question - if charter schools work so well why does the US rank so poorly in basic education? You might also try explaining the problems listed in the two articles below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...quality-of-public-school-spending-in-america/
The dramatic inequality of public-school spending in America
By
Emily Badger May 23, 2014
An Apple Inc. iPad sits on a desk used in a second-grade classroom at Park Lane Elementary school, in the Canyons School District, in Sandy, Utah, U.S. on Monday, May 20, 2013 (George Frey/Bloomberg)
During fiscal 2012, New York City's school district, the largest in the country with nearly a million students, spent more money on each one of them than any other large public school system in the country. New York spent $20,226 per pupil, according to
updated Census data released Thursday on the finances of the country's public schools.
That's twice as much as was spent on children in the Prince William County public elementary and secondary schools outside of D.C. ($10,090, below the national average of $10,608). Among school districts with more than 40,000 students, New York's total even farther surpasses what's spent on children in El Paso, Tex. ($8,209), Brevard County, Fla. ($,7801) and the biggest school districts in Utah (all below $6,200).
Per-pupil spending alone doesn't tell us everything about the quality of education in any given school district, although a shortage of money certainly says a lot. Underfunded districts, as The Post's Valerie Strauss
wrote this week, inevitably struggle to afford special-education staff, smaller classes, better computers and teacher development, among many other things.
But this latest Census snapshot underscores the reality that a public education may imply vastly different resources depending on where you get it (and what local tax revenues look like). These numbers -- note that they're not adjusted for differences in cost of living -- do not include spending on capital outlays or paying down long-term debt. They do include money spent on teacher salaries, instruction and support services. By state and region, the variation is broad:
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In this latest accounting, the nine states in the Northeast all rank among the top 15 states by per-pupil spending. Of the 20 states spending the least, 18 are in either the South or West.
To drill down to the school district-level, these are the per-pupil rates in the highest-spending school systems with more than 40,000 students. Seven of the top 18 are in Maryland:
Denver ($10,075), San Francisco ($9,842) and Fulton County around Atlanta ($9,304) don't even crack that list. Meanwhile, much smaller school districts in the Northeast far outspend even New York City. Two dozen smaller districts in New York State spend in the range of $30,000 or more.
Families don't generally shop around for education by this metric; knowing that Baltimore spends slightly more than nearby Howard County probably won't lure a parent to move there. But when we think about the consequences of funding public education as we do in America — a system heavily reliant on local revenue that produces wide variation both across the country and within individual states — these numbers make plain the reality that where children live matters for how much we invest in them.
And this is closer to the truth about charter schools, the fact that many are for profit institutions that skim off school funds in the name of profits.
Charter Schools Are Frequently Dogged by Corruption Scandals - Why Is It So Hard to Hold Them Accountable? | Alternet
Education
Charter Schools Are Frequently Dogged by Corruption Scandals - Why Is It So Hard to Hold Them Accountable?
The finances of charter schools receive less oversight than the average public school bake sale.
By Bobbi Murray /
Capital and Main
June 27, 2016
Print
31 COMMENTS
Photo Credit: calicospanish.com
The original concept of charter schools emerged nationally more than two decades ago and was intended to support community efforts to open up education. Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers union,
lauded the charter idea in 1988 as way to propel social mobility for working class kids and to give teachers more decision-making power.
“There was a sense from the start that they would develop models for the broader system,” John Rogers tells
Capital & Main. Rogers, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is director of UCLA’s
Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. He adds that charter schools were to be laboratories where parents and educators would work together to craft the best possible learning environment and to serve as engines of innovation and social equity.
But critics of today’s market-based charter movement say monied interests have turned those learning labs into models for capital capture in the Golden State and beyond–“the charter school gravy train,” as
Forbes describes it. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed and, like most privately run businesses, the schools prefer to avoid transparency in their operations. This often has brought negative publicity to the schools – last month the
Los Angeles Daily Newsreported that the principal of El Camino Real Charter High School charged more than $100,000 in expenses to his school-issued credit card, many of them for personal use.
“Information belongs to the public,” says
Daniel Losen, who conducts law and policy research on education equality issues. “To the extent that you think choice should benefit parents—good choices are made with good information.” Losen co-authored a March, 2016 report about charter schools’ disciplinary policies, produced by the
Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
Billions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into expanding America’s privately-run charter school system over the past two decades, including
$3.3 billion in federal funds alone, reports an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy. California has the nation’s largest number of charter schools, with most of them located in Los Angeles County. But in an age when words like “accountability” and “transparency” dominate political discourse, the financial mechanics of charters receive less oversight and scrutiny than the average public school bake sale.
The
National Alliancefor PublicCharter Schoolscandidly spells out the Golden State’s
laissez faire rules of the game on its website: “California law provides that charter schools are automatically exempt from most laws governing school districts.”
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has
explicitly opposed state legislation that would clearly define the existing transparency laws and codes for charter schools — standards charters
can now avoid despite their use of public funds.
“Charters don’t have to disclose budgets,” says Jackie Goldberg, a long-time Los Angeles school teacher and former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board president, who also served in the California State Assembly. “Once a charter is written, it’s not subject to the Brown or the Public Records acts.”
The CCSA opposes several bills currently progressing through the state legislature that would bring charter school transparency requirements into line with those expected of public schools. One measure spells out the expectation that charters would follow the same standards as public schools when it comes to the Public Records Act that guarantees access to public records; CCSA argues that
most charter schools already voluntarily comply—so the law is therefore unnecessary.
Below are several of areas of concern often cited by charter school critics.
Open Meetings
California public schools are required to follow the Ralph M. Brown Act that requires regular meetings with notices posted in advance, along with public testimony and the availability of agendas and minutes. Open meetings guarantee the right of local parents, teachers and taxpayers to participate in discussions about policy, funding, disciplinary standards—all the heated issues that arise in local schools or that go before school boards.
But a group called the
Charter Schools Development Center provides advice and wiggle room to attorneys representing charter schools on Brown Act requirements. Charters are frequently run by a nonprofit whose board members are chosen and named by previous board members. The CSDC’s
Guide to the Brown Act pointedly raises the question of whether governing structures fit the profile of “local legislative bodies” required to comply with the Brown Act and recommends charter school boards “cover their bases” and follow at least the spirit, if not the precise requirements, of the Brown Act.
Disciplinary Protocols and “Counseling Out”
The California Education Code stipulates that a public school student undergoing the drastic disciplinary measure of expulsion is entitled to a due process hearing that includes district administrators and the principal, and allows the student and parents to present arguments and information.
That
doesn’t apply to California charter schools, according to a 2013 state Court of Appeals ruling that holds charters can “dismiss” a student without due process. The ruling differentiates between expulsion and dismissal. Following a dismissal, a student is then sent back to the public school system. (The UCLA report that Daniel Losen co-authored found national suspension rates at charter schools were 16 percent higher than those of public schools.)
Charter schools depend on their reputations for teaching students who hit high test-score marks. The practice known as “counseling out” is used to winnow out difficult students, and extends beyond California—the New York Times has
detailed incidents in a high-achieving charter school in Brooklyn.
Counseling out can happen for a variety of reasons, not just disciplinary. Jackie Goldberg says she personally witnessed a counseling out session at a South Los Angeles charter, where a student’s mother was simply told by a school staff member that her son was better off finding “a school that meets his needs.”
Public schools, on the other hand, cannot “counsel out” challenging students.
Conflicts of interest
Public school governments are required to follow California Government Code 1090, which states that officials can’t vote on issues or contracts wherein they have a vested interest. Charter decision-makers are not subject to the conflict-of-interest code.
Veteran educators and administrators interviewed by Capital & Main have expressed deep concern about the disparities between transparency requirements for public schools and publicly funded charter schools.
Most California charters are run by educational management organizations (EMOs), which are
described by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado as “private entities [that] may not be subject to the same financial or other document/records disclosure laws that apply to state-operated entities and public officials.”
Steve Zimmer, the current LAUSD school board president and a former high school teacher and counselor, has been critical of the lack of oversight of charter funding.
“You don’t have to go through a procurement process, you don’t have to follow labor standards,” he says. “This is playing out on a multiplicity of levels.”
Audits are not routinely required in the California charter system. It was only in 2006—some 14 years after California became the second state in the nation to pass legislation to create charter schools—that the state Charter Schools Act was amended to allow local school officials to request a state audit of a charter school’s financial transactions when they suspect something is amiss.
It took a state audit—triggered by a request from
the Los Angeles County Office of Education—to uncover
$2.6 million in payments that went to Kendra Okonkwo, the founder of Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists charter school, and to her close family members—with no oversight from the governing board of the nonprofit running the South Los Angeles school.
Another audit uncovered an Oakland
charter school founder directing $3.8 million to companies he owned. American Indian Model Schools founder Ben Chavis is presently under IRS and FBI investigations related to his dealings with the school district.
More recently, a
San Jose Mercury News investigation of California Virtual Academies, an online charter school chain run by the Virginia-based, publicly traded company K12 Inc., found that not even half of its enrollees graduated with a high school diploma and even fewer—almost none—were qualified to attend a California state university. The online chain, launched by former Goldman Sachs banker Ronald Packard, with seed money from Larry Ellison, cofounder of tech giant Oracle, and former junk bond purveyor Michael Milken, has collected more than $310 million in state funds over a dozen years. (An
April 12 statement from K12 Inc. criticized the investigation as incomplete.)
A study commissioned by the Center for Popular Democracy calculates the lack of oversight has cost California
$81 million.
Jason Mandell, Director of Advocacy Communications at the California Charter Schools Association, says that charter school opacity is changing. “There’s an increasingly thorough review process. If a charter school isn’t meeting standards, the charter can be shut down. When you know you’re going to be scrutinized and people are watching, you better perform. [Charters] have more autonomy in exchange for greater accountability.”
Last year, however, Governor Jerry Brown, himself a charter school founder, passed on a chance to tighten that accountability. He vetoed
a bill approved by both houses of the legislature that would have
made it explicit that schools should be subject to the Brown and Public Records acts.
David Tokofsky, a former member of the LAUSD Board of Education who has also worked for a charter school operator, cautions that the push for charter schools has been framed in terms of “education reform,” although the movement behind these schools, he says, is really one for deregulation of financial oversight and management.
“Deregulation was supposed to be about curriculum,” Tokofsky says, allowing teachers and parents more freedom to craft education and programs to fit the students. “It has become deregulation about every aspect of the school.”
“We know,” he adds, “when deregulated banks fail; we know when deregulated airplane doors fail. Do we know when deregulated schools are hurting your kids?”
Bobbi Murray is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.
Charter schools in my province were given a chance by a previous right wing government - almost all of them failed primarily because they couldn't compete with public schools.
Top Massachusetts High Schools | Best High Schools in Massachusetts | US News
Top Ranked Massachusetts Schools
To be eligible for a state ranking, a school must be awarded a national gold or silver medal.
-
#1
Sturgis Charter Public School 427 Main St, Hyannis, Massachusetts 02601
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#2
Boston Latin School 78 Ave Louis Pasteur, Boston, Massachusetts 02115
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#3
Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School 201 Forest St, Marlborough, Massachusetts 01752
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#4
Medfield Senior High 88r South St, Medfield, Massachusetts 02052
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#5
Hopkinton High 90 Hayden Rowe St, Hopkinton, Massachusetts 01748
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#6
Boston Collegiate Charter School 11 Mayhew St, Dorchester, Massachusetts 02125
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#7
Mystic Valley Regional Charter School 770 Salem St, Malden, Massachusetts 02148
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#8
Belmont High 221 Concord Ave, Belmont, Massachusetts 02478
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#9
Lexington High 251 Waltham St, Lexington, Massachusetts 02421
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#10
Dover-Sherborn Regional High 9 Junction St, Dover, Massachusetts 02030
Outside of the charter schools in the top 10 the rest are the lily white liberal towns. To get into Boston Latin a difficult test is required for entry and that is not sitting well these days within the Boston Community.
Horrifying. lol
Just for the hell of it I Googled funding for the number one ranked school, and guess what? It receives funding that the average school does not get, enabling it to provide superior services to its students at the expense of students in other jurisdictions. It really is not hard to provide quality education with superior funding. The real trick in public education is to provide the same level of service to all students.
Dennis selectmen challenge charter school funding - News - capecodtimes.com - Hyannis, MA
