Office Hours: Macke Raymond Answers Your Questions On Charter Schools

Hoover Institution Distinguished Research Fellow Macke Raymond responds to your questions about charter schools, how they operate, and how they compare to traditional public schools.

Margaret "Macke" Raymond has served as director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University since she founded it in 1999.

0:21 - How do charter schools operate and what makes them different from traditional public schools?
1:25 - How do charter schools perform compared to traditional public schools?
3:05 - What proportion of charter schools are for profit? How do their educational outcomes compare to non-profit charter schools?
4:25 - Do charter schools pick and choose their students in order to boost their test scores?
5:51 - How should we think about regulating authorizers of charter schools?
7:49 - Isn't it a problem that charter schools divert money away from traditional public schools? Why support them if they take away money from existing schools?

Charter schools are thriving in areas underserved by traditional public schools due to their framework of flexibility for accountability. They are granted flexibility to design and run schools in order maximize student achievement in exchange for being held accountable
for their students' performance. Charter schools have to improve in order to survive. Those that do not perform well need to be removed in order to expand high-performing schools.

[hunterhusar]

You have obviously never really spent time inside of a charter school - good talk though.