Making Charter School Promises: What's Wrong with Home and Hope?

Abstract

In 2002 I began a study of a charter school aimed at ‘Push-Out Recovery’ for high school students in Central Texas. The ethnographic study focused on an alterriative education setting, a Charter School, called Edge Works (pseudonym). The study was conducted over approximately 12–18 months at the Charter School. The Charter School provided educational services for young people 16–20 who wanted to get their GED and/or their high school certificate and there were 4 administrators, 16 teachers, and between 250–300 students. When I began this study I had hoped to hear the stories of the students regarding their experiences in the public school system. In short, I went looking for stories of exclusion. Instead, I found stories of success and redemption (Cary, 2001, Popkewitz, 1998).