America: Where Students Gamble for an Education

JIMMY TANG
Copy Editor

How would you feel if the fate of your educational quality depended on the roll of a dice? For some students, this roll can serve as the deciding factor between their success or failure as adults.
As a result of the declining credibility of public schools nationwide, many concerned families have turned to charter schools in order to provide their children with a better education. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are tuition-free public schools that are supported by taxpayer funds and bylaw, are required to accept anyone who applies. Charter schools differ from public schools in the way that they have more freedom to make decisions that are in the best interest of their students. In other words, they operate outside of the traditional school district bureaucracy and rules. With only 5,000 charter schools nationwide, families have been forced to compete against one another to enroll in these schools.
Due to high student enrollment, certain charter schools in the United States, such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) in Los Angeles, CA and SEED Charter School in Washington, D.C., have been forced to base their enrollment on a lottery system under a Federal law. A growing number of students are applying to charter schools because they hold higher-performance rates in comparison to the traditional public schools in their respective areas. The only problem with this is that students who are not chosen in the lottery are forced to go to schools with lower performance rates.
For Daisy Esparza, an elementary school student living in East Los Angeles, enrolling at KIPP was her only option of escaping the poor education offered in her school district, where six out of ten students do not graduate from high school. Daisy was only in the fifth grade, but she already knew where she wanted to go to college in order to become a veterinarian. Because of her family’s financial struggles, private school was not an option. Unfortunately, with only ten spots available at KIPP for the 135 students applying, Daisy only had a 14% chance of getting in. She was not chosen.
Critics of charter schools argue that they divert funds away from traditional public schools. A study by the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools revealed that charter schools face similar, if not more, financial barriers than public schools. Despite this, charter schools have shown dramatic student achievement growth, graduation rates and college acceptance rates, particularly in low-income communities, according to the Broad Prize Foundation.
Regardless of a school’s traditional public or charter status, they should all be held accountable for their performance and student achievement. Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools must go through a testing period in which they are evaluated on multiple factors including student achievement. These tests decide whether or not a charter school will remain open. Although closing public schools with low-performance rates is considered unfair by some standards, there comes a point when schools are doing a disservice to the community by providing their students with a poor education.