best educators.
But a few of these schools have also received negative and sometimes discriminatory press coverage for high student dropout rates, poor academic performance, and general failures in student achievement. There have been studies that claim a large percentage of black and Latino children are in private school, which doesn't necessarily translate into any significant difference in quality of education. When the majority of America's schools are failing, this disparity hardly matters.The first question is: Are these failing schools actually failing? In general, we can probably assume that schools that have high student dropout rates and underachievement would be failing. But can we really tell which schools really are failing? I don't think so. To test for school failure, you would need a randomized sampling of students from a representative sample of schools. Then you could look at the difference in academic performance for students at schools that have high and low failure rates. A more reliable test would examine the achievement gaps for various racial/ethnic groups, since the schools that are failing tend to be the most segregated schools in America. The real problem is that, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has done this yet. There are two problems with the assumption that "most" schools in America are failing: first, that's not necessarily true, and second, even if it were, it wouldn't necessarily imply that we're doing a good job. The school-leaving rate in America is higher than most other developed countries and higher than it's been for over thirty years, and our schools continue to be a problem.The National Charter School Study In 2001, the U.S. Department of Education launched the Charter Schools Study, a massive national survey of charter school students. They sent questionnaires to over fifty-five thousand students at eight hundred charter schools (about two-thirds of all public charter schools in America). More than forty thousand questionnaires were returned. The results of this study were reported in 2006. Their findings included the following: Charter schools:** Charter schools that are nonprofit schools that charge tuition, are authorized by a public body, and meet state or local criteria for being nonsectarian (but don't have to be religious)
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