In (Modest) Praise of Charter Schools and Microsoft

by David Safier

The link between charter schools and Microsoft is tenuous at best, but this is a grab bag post, so I decided to throw them in together.

1. Tucson’s BASIS Charter School called best public school in the nation. You read that right. Newsweek has put the Tucson charter school in the top ten for a few years, but this year, BASIS moved to number one. These school ranking lists shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but regularly making the top ten is a genuine accomplishment. The school and its students have every right to crow. This demonstrates the value of the charter school concept when it is applied well. (This year’s graduating class is a whopping 18 seniors, I should note, so this isn’t a school that’s having a huge impact on Tucson’s children. Nonetheless . . .)
2. Chicago study shows charter schools edge out traditional public schools. This is a serious study conducted by the RAND Corporation that works hard at controlling for variables, and it concluded that “attending a charter high school in that city boosts a student’s chance of graduating from high school by 7 percentage points and increases the likelihood that a student will enroll in college by 11 percentage points.” Because the RAND folks are very careful, they make a point of saying no one should make too much of this one study. Actually, for me the most interesting finding is that the most successful charter schools had the same students from grades 6 through 12, and the study said this continuity, rather than the charter/traditional school difference, might have been the determining factor.
3. Microsoft joins the “One Laptop Per Child” program. The nonprofit education project, One Laptop Per Child, has created a small, sturdy, versatile laptop it sells for $200, but it believes it can bring the cost down to $100 soon. The computers are designed to be used in developing nations, with the countries’ children in mind. The hitch has been, the computers run the Linux free operating system, which means that Microsoft wouldn’t get on board. But the Micro-Softies have seen the light and will supply Windows for $3 a machine. Countries that were wary of buying computers running an OS they didn’t know will now have a choice of either or both systems.