Obama said he believes the federal government should help support charter schools and look at new ways to improve performance and pay good teachers more money. He said teacher unions “haven’t been thrilled” about some of his ideas. I have feeling it might be related to this:
Nearly four years after a front-page story in The New York Times sparked a fierce debate by suggesting that charter school students nationally were lagging academically behind their peers in regular public schools, the national testing program that informed the controversy has generated far more data for researchers and advocates to scrutinize.
Yet the more recent findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress have garnered much less attention and analysis than the 2003 results.
The picture that emerges from the growing data set appears mixed for charter schools. While many analysts urge caution in using NAEP to judge the 4,300-school charter sector, the latest data do not bolster the early hopes of charter advocates that the sector as a whole would significantly outperform regular public schools.
The full report is at Education Week. Clinton does support Charter Schools as well but only in areas where public schools are not meeting the requirements of the area; she is against federal funds. Obama wants to fund more aggressively. I am against them because I believe they divert needed resources from public schools. Or perhaps, better put, I have yet to be convinced of their merit.