Charter School Culture

The education system which we grow up in and learn through is a crucial part of our development as adults. We go through school for years of our lives, during an extremely impressionable part of our development as thinkers. Our teachers and schools shape how we view the world because they are the ones who teach us how the world works. In this way, the setting in which we grow up learning is crucial to how we inevitably view the world. One very key part of my educational experience before college was attending two separate charter schools for both middle school and high school. The experiences I had and is an essential aspect of the culture I grew up in that is not well understood by many people, especially in cultures like France where charter

Because each school is technically its own district, each school is run with only that school and those particular students in mind. This independence of the school can mean a multitude of things, but one specific example that I personally experienced was the school being able to have their own calendar and we were able to have a year-round program as opposed to a more traditional schedule. The independence of how the school was run also meant that we, as students, had more access and visibility to our school’s government. We, as students, could go to board meetings and bring up concerns we had with the system in place and were actually listened to. The type of change we could make as students in a charter school was a considerable amount more than that we could have made as students in a public school with a larger district, and our voices were able to be heard

The ability to make change easily meant that things often did change, so there was sometimes a lack of consistency in policies within our school, such as dress code, school hours, and even rules about technology use. There was also a lot of change in power, such as principals or counselors who shifted around within our school’s system. A source I would use to fully explain this aspect of charter school culture would be the experience of attending both a charter school board meeting as well as a more institutionalized school board setting, to fully exemplify the differences between these two cultures.

The independence of the charter school system leads directly to another very important part of that culture which is the flexibility allowed in their system. In charter schools, teachers are able to develop and change their own curriculum, and this allows them to fit the material that they feel is best into the classes that they are teaching. Of course, charter schools still need to meet state standards, but there are more options as to how the teachers achieve these