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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Charter Schools:"

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

If the charter model is the ammunition we can most effectively use for killing the NEA, then frankly I don't even care if there turn out to be structural issues with the model that make its most outstanding currently-observed virtues unscaleable. (I'll agree that this is still an open question, although I am more optimistic about the odds than you seem to be.)

Some of the aspects of a charter school's success are vanishingly unlikely to scale badly. And frankly, even the ones that are potentially more subject to scaling problems (such as shortages of top-class teachers and principals) seem hardly likely to do anything other than improve, relative to the current default environment at least.

Frankly, I think your implied standard ("will it, when scaled up to cover every student in America, be as good for those students as it is for its current ones?") is too demanding, not to mention ultimately outside the range of what can be judged accurately in advance. A more reasonable standard would be "will it, when scaled up to cover every student in America, provide a better learning environment for those students and an overall educational structure more capable of learning from its collective mistakes, than the present one?".

In other words, we don't have to get it perfect on the second try either. Just better than we did on the last one. And I don't see any way that the scaling problems with charter schools, to whatever extent they'd emerge in practice as the system expanded, would interfere with meeting that standard.

12/12/06, 12:55 AM

Anonymous William said...

Now that you have comments I just wanted the opportunity to compliment you on how well-written, and well-thought-out some of your reader's comments can be (I refer to the original post on charter schools especially). You're pretty good yourself of course.

Birds of a feather.

12/12/06, 10:16 AM

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