However, a new study of what parents from the nation’s sixth largest metropolitan area want for their children’s education tilts favorably to a growing national preference for private and charter schools.
And charter schools win the horse race for school choice, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative.
“This trend has developed in the face of evidence that many charters perform no better than district schools and of a constant drumbeat of news reports and investigations regarding alleged and proven improprieties in the way charters operate,” the report’s authors say.
So why are an estimated 420 million students on waiting lists for charter schools?
Frustration with the struggling direction and results of traditional public schools is a leading cause.
A comprehensive new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative finds that K-12 education in Philadelphia is undergoing a sweeping transformation that has given parents a new array of choices about where to send their children to school but has left families thinking they still do not have enough quality options.
The study, “Philadelphia’s Changing Schools and What Parents Want from Them,” finds that the three largest educational systems in the city–traditional public schools, charter schools and Catholic schools–have changed dramatically in size and composition during the past decade. Only one of them, the charter schools, has been growing. Indeed, charters, which have been in existence for only 13 years, now have more students than the Catholic school system.