Shawgi Tell: Seventy Percent of North Carolina’s Charter Schools Earned a “C” or Lower
Shawgi Tell took a look at the evaluation of North Carolina’s charter schools. They aren’t looking good.
Privately-operated charter schools in the United States have a long record of failure. They have been over-promising and under-delivering for decades. Over the years, many people, especially low-income minority parents living in urban settings, have been led to believe that outsourced schools operated by unelected private persons or large for-profit corporations are vastly superior to the “dreadful” public schools they currently attend—public schools which, for decades, have been methodically starved of funds, over-tested, vilified, punished, and set up to fail so as to be privatized by neoliberals obsessed with maximizing profit as fast as possible. Neoliberals have never stopped trying to conceal their direct role in setting up public schools to fail so as to be privatized. But No Matter What the Charter School Movement Says, Parents Like Their Public Schools (October 5, 2022).
Some of the most recent data on charter school performance shows that 70% of charter schools in North Carolina earned a “C” or lower. Specifically:
65 – earned a C
59 – earned a D
19 – earned an F
TOTAL: 143
This new information is from the state’s school accountability data from 2020-21 and is provided by NC Policy Watch.
NC Policy Watch also points out that 76 privately-operated charter schools (38%) in North Carolina “did not meet academic growth goals.” In addition, there are 35 “low-performing charter schools that are considered continually low-performing.”
See more details about the failure of a sector that enrolls more than 130,000 students at the full post here.