Charter Schools

Shenandoah Charter School,

Church in Ione, CA

Today I drove 2.5 hours to a very small school (36 students) and had a class with half of them (15). This charter school is literally next to a regular school, in fact the students take some classes in the regular school. I used to teach in a charter school myself, I taught 4 - 6 grades (20 students) and another teacher had 1-3 (20 students). I can see some advantages to charter schools such as smaller classes and more emphasis on certain aspects of their education, but I don't think it is financially nor educationally sound to have charter schools in most circumstances. Then again, when you go to Oakland and every public school is terrible, it is good to try different ways to get some education included in a school. This charter school was very nice and I could tell that the staff and faculty really cared about their students' education. They had tried to have their school emphasize one thing and found it wasn't really best for their students so they were changing their emphasis. I hope the new idea works, and if it doesn't they identify the problems early and make changes. The biggest problem is we have one shot at a specific child's education and it isn't fair to that child to experiment with him or her for a year. Good luck to this school. I will go to another school on Monday, and a different one on Tuesday. I will tell you about them later. Tomorrow I start a new Oxford Seminars class in San Jose.