The Pros And Cons Of Our Independent Study Charter School

Many of the students enrolled in our independent study charter school come from a low socioeconomic background and are academic underperformers, especially in mathematics. Most students lack the time and resources to be able to attend school multiple days a week or to spend extra time working with their teachers to improve their lagging mathematics scores. At the same time, many teachers are asked to deliver classroom instruction on mathematics topics that they likely have no specific training or credential in. In addition, these teachers often only have a very limited amount of time to work with each individual student before they must move onto the next. These obstacles make it more difficult for these students to complete the required course load.
More problematic is that the basic forms of these problems are structurally tied to the nature of independent study and are therefore resistant to change at the administrative levels that are most easily
manipulated.