Fall Research Expo 2020
The Matchmaking Process: Charter School Funding and the Role of Charter Management Organizations
Dr. Rand Quinn and Amanda Lynn Jones-Layman have been working to determine how resources get allocated to different programs in the education sector, and the decision making behind how people decide to support certain initiatives. Dr. Quinn’s work has specifically focused on Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), and philanthropy’s role in the education landscape. They sought to fulfill these interests through interviewing both grantmakers, or funders, and grantseekers in the education sector. My role in the project was to write a literature review outlining the current framework of standardized testing and school quality in the United States, and to go through and code the interviews that they did.
PRESENTED BY
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
College of Arts & Sciences 2021
Advised By
Dr. Rand Quinn
PRESENTED BY
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
College of Arts & Sciences 2021
Advised By
Dr. Rand Quinn
Comments
Great topic! I went to a…
Great topic! I went to a charter school in Philadelphia for grade school! This made me realize about how serious we were told to take the PSSA's (the standardized tests that we took). We had specific workbooks for them and also dedicated 45 minutes at the end of everyday to do work in the workbook. While a student, I don't think that my fellow classmates and I ever took those tests as seriously as we should have. Do you think it would be more beneficial to the schools if they told their students all of the positive things that would come from receiving higher test scores?
The Role of Philanthropy in Inequity
This is a really interesting process and I think that the systematic coding of the interviews is an important role in order to understand trends in the presently evolving understanding of the balance between privatization of public education. Do you have any opinions about how we can combat the role of philanthropy in perpetuating existing inequalities based on your literature search and interview analyses?