Charter Schools and Standardized Testing

             Over the past week in class, Dr. Glassman has been leading discussions on charter schools. Before talking about them in class, the only thing I knew about charter schools is that there were schools out there called, “charter schools.” I didn’t know many details about charter schools, just like many others in the class, and deciphering between the pros and cons was difficult with a lack of knowledge on the schools themselves. However, we did have a discussion on the use of standardized testing in charter schools and how there is an increased emphasis on student performance on standardized tests in charter schools and how they fall back to effect the teachers. Standardized testing has been a huge topic of discussion in our class, as well as charter schools, and it has interested me in how these two have overlapped. With this interest, I found an article at http://www.wsmv.com/story/22277105/charter-schools-losing-struggling-students-to-zoned-schools talking about how students at charter schools in Nashville, Tennessee are being kicked out and sent back to public schools right before testing time. The article highlights that of the students that are leaving Kipp Academy, the charter school in Nashville, almost all of them are termed troubled students or special needs students. Once these children get sent back to public to schools, the scores on their standardized tests will not count against the charter, but against the public schools they are sent to.

                My question for you is do you think this is right? We as future educators should be slightly offended by this kind of direction in schools. Those of us who are pursuing our degrees to become teachers will most likely end up teaching in a public school. How are we going to feel if a charter school who has had a student most of the school year pawns their children off on our school and classrooms right before testing time because these students are troubled or have special needs? Even though it was not admitted in the article, one could infer that the troubled students and special needs students were taken our of the charter sent to public schools because these students would not have performed well on the tests, and the charter school did not want those results to fall back on them. Although charter schools are given different freedoms than public schools, they should not be allowed to take advantage of other schools. All teachers in public schools are at risk for their job and salaries because of these standardized tests, and the way they teach may or may not have anything to do with how the students score. It may be due to the lack of motivation in the students or due to the fact that a student simply does not care about a test. However, most schools make half of a teacher’s evaluation for the year come from standardized tests. Why should charter schools be allowed to take their troubled students out of their own schools right before testing time and put the teachers in public schools at an even higher risk of losing their jobs or salary? Even though we have talked about how charter schools do not necessarily do better on the tests than public schools, this does not seem like an appropriate thing to do. I understand that there are positives about charter schools as well, but this overlap of our discussions with standardized tests and charter schools has been particularly interesting to me.