Charter School Teachers Talk

Grad student Katie over at A Constrained Vision links to and comments on a survey of preferences by teachers who work in charter schools. Here's a teaser:

In describing their past jobs and what job they would be doing if they were not in their current job, charter school teachers described a much broader array of occupations than did public school teachers. Many have held jobs in business, public service organizations, or colleges. Charter school administrators described an even wider array of occupations than charter school teachers did.

Charter, public, and private school teachers are all about equally likely to say that they plan to continue teaching. This result is surprising because one would expect charter school teachers to be more likely to stop teaching, given that they are trying out an experimental type of school. One does not expect veteran public school teachers, whose jobs contain few surprises and who are vested in their district's benefit plans to behave like teachers testing new waters....

Finally, autonomy was by far the most prominent theme in charter school teachers' open-ended responses [to the question "What would you like us to know about your experience as a charter school teacher?"]. More than half of the teachers who chose to answer the open-ended question wrote about their greater autonomy in charter schools. No other theme was discussed by more than 20 percent of writers.

Read the whole post and follow the link.

I've always thought the idea of working in a charter school to be a somewhat intriguing one, (Get a charter school primer here.) as they are freed from much of the red-tape and constraints imposed by the local EduCracy.

However, our district's superintendent, Dr. Evil, has indicated that as long as He is owner superintendent of this district, there will be no charter schools in his this town. ------------------------------See our latest EduPosts here and this date's Extra Credit Reading there.