Well said.

Untold charter story

The Eagle featured a rather disturbing commentary touting charter schools (“State’s educational system lacks choice,” Feb. 19 Opinion) by Robert Litan, a former Brookings Institution economist who recently resigned his affiliation with the think tank after a violation of a policy rule. Litan mentioned paying more to highly effective teachers, the need for school choice and catering to low-income students with low-attainment records. He also stated that there are “award-winning nonprofit charter groups – such as KIPP, Success Academy and Uncommon Schools, to name a few – that give largely minority students from low-income backgrounds much better educations than traditional public schools.”
What lies untold is that those “award-winning” charter schools have had attrition rates of (overwhelmingly low achievers) as high as 60 percent (KIPP), and losses of as high as 74 percent of their teachers in a single year at some of their schools (Success Academy).
As a retired Wichita public school teacher, I can’t imagine how removing funding from public education – be it by cutting state budgets, transferring funding from public to private or charter schools, or by cutting taxes on business investments into private education – could possibly be “for the sake of our kids.”
ROGER G. NEUGENT, HAYSVILLE

http://www.kansas.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article62802392.html