[MUSIC] Today we're going to continue with our discussion of School Choice, and to start, i'm going to go back and remind you of where we are in the kind of unit overview of the School Choice unit. You'll recall that the last set of segments was focused on a summary of the school choice issues. Today, we're going to be talking more specifically about charter schools. And learning more both about the theory of action of charter schools, the kind of history behind them, and some of the controversy or disagreement about the ways in which charter schools are improving schools experiences and improving outcomes for students or not. So to start with, I've picked out a couple of quotes that I think illustrate the divergent opinions about charter schools, and these are two well known leaders expressing their viewpoints on what charter schools accomplish and in some ways I think gives a high level flavor of what some of the disagreement of what charter schools are and what they're accomplishing, or not. And so in the first quote, really highlighting this idea of charter schools being kind of centers of innovation, of kind of giving schools more space to innovate without the kind of restrictions that come along with the typical kind of public school setting, or typical school system setting. And also emphasizing the need for a set of strong accountability factors to ensure that only high quality charter schools persist in the education space. And then the second quote focusing on one of the kind of critiques of charter schools, of whether or not this actually leads to increased segregation, or kind of separating haves and have nots in the school system. And so you see in this both the issues, the underlying issues around charter schools, but also the kind of strength of the emotion and the emotional aspects of this debate which I think are really strong. So in this segment I'm just going to provide a high level overview of what charter schools are, and then we'll move into the different lenses and digging deeper into each aspect of the historical lens, the summary lens, and the analytical lens. I think the important thing to understand about charter schools is that they are public schools. I think there's a common misconception. You often hear people say charter schools and public schools, but it's important to understand that charter schools are public schools. And they are public schools because they receive public money. So the same kind of stream of per pupil expenditures that come along with each individual student that we discussed in the foundational tenets lectures, go to charter schools, as well as to traditional public schools. What differentiates charter schools Is a set of autonomies or what I'm calling autonomies. Meaning, charter schools have control or are autonomous from a set of requirements that traditional public schools have about how they spend their money, about how they select their professionals and about how they organize themselves relative to the accountability systems that occur at the district and the state level. So, these autonomies are what characterize and kind of define what a charter school is. We're going to go into more detail on this but, overall in the United States charter schools only educate about 5% of the overall student population and so in some respects the lenses on this, there is a perception that charter schools have educate a very large proportion of students. And while that is the case in some states and localities, overall It's just 5% of students that are a part of charter schools. The theory of action behind charter schools is this idea of removing some of the constraints and removing some of the requirements that traditional public schools have in order to increase innovation, in order to promote competition between schools and in order to give students and parents more options in terms of the educational settings that they have available to them. We're going to talk in more detail about all of these summary pieces. The types of autonomies that charter schools have, about how we understand the prevalence of charter schools over time. And also digging into these perceptions of the theory of action and whether or not charter schools actually kind of live up to that theory of action. So we'll move into next into the historical lens and then that will be followed by the summary lens, and the analytical lens on charter schools. [MUSIC]