The public education system of large cities and urban areas in America are riddled with problems from funding and overcrowding.  Growing up in New York, and planning to return there possibly as a teacher, the state of urban education is important to me.  Education is the root from which so many problems in America can be traced back to.  The two New York towns I call home to, Bronxville and Mount Vernon have very different educational landscapes, and because of that, very different landscapes all together.  Bronxville has some of the best in the state, and reports one of the lowest crime rates in the state.  Mount Vernon on the other hand has a educational system that struggles to stay afloat, and the ninth highest crime in the state.  Charter schools have seen much success in the past few years in certin parts of the city.  In my lifetime, under Mayor Bloomberg, NYC saw charter schools grow to accommodate hundreds of thousands of students.  As someone who cares deeply about New York, I would like to know the rational behind the implementation of charter schools in urban areas like NYC, New Orleans, and Washington D.C.

The first piece I am using for research is an article published in Economics of Education Review entitled "Measuring The Effect of Charter Schools on Public School Student Achievement in an Urban Environment: Evidence from New York City".  A popular stance on charter schools is that they become detrimental to the local traditional public school that they draw from.  This study looks at the progress of these local traditional public schools after the opening of a charter school.  The author finds that the opening of a large charter school has either no affect or a slight positive affect on the growth of these public schools.  The value at stake here are the New York City public school students that could be going to a charter school, but are not because the local teacher's union or politicians are claiming that charter schools negatively affect public schools in the area.  The author is credible on the source, being a professor as well as a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a NYC based policy think tank.  He has published several articles on the topic of urban education.

The second source I will use to begin my research is a journal article from the journal Qualitative Inquiry entitled "The Color of Reform: Race, Education Reform, and Charter Schools in Post-Katrina New Orleans".  The report examines the racial affect of New Orleans' charter school policy.  After Katrina, the city implemented a public education system consisting of only charter schools.  The authors of this article argue that this, regardless of its affect on performance, has lead to a re-emergence of segregation and white supremacy in the New Orleans public school system.  The value of this is that New Orleans is a city with more than half of the population being black.  If a system was in place in the school system that worked to create racial inequality in education, it would mean that a huge part of the cities population is not receiving the education they could be and deserve.  

The third source I will be using for this paper is a journal article from Policy Studies Journal called "Examining the Impact of Charter Schools on Performance in Traditional Public Schools".  The article examines if the creation of charter schools in an area create a hyper-capitalistic educational ecosystem in an area with both public schools and charter schools.  The author argues that charter schools actually stimulate growth in the surrounding public schools, a sort of trickle down education system.  It finds that charter schools contribute to modest overall performance improvements for traditional public schools.  It also finds that charter schools can financially affect public schools in their area.  The value of this is that despite many people arguing how charter schools bring the performance of other schools down, they can actually help to raise the scores of schools around it.  This means that even students not enrolled in charter schools can benefit from their existence.  

I believe that the debate surrounding the feasibility of charter schools in urban areas is very valid.  The question is arguable because there is so much nuance involved with education issues.  It is not something that can be boiled down to simple statistics, proper education requires a personal connection.  Schools have to be able to have the resources to give each student a human connection to what they are doing in schools, that is not debatable.  What is debatable however is what is the best way to facilitate this connection, especially in areas of this country that struggle to accommodate all of the students they have.  I have found sources on both sides of the issue on performance of schools, and on both sides of the issue on whether or not these schools can put persons of color at a disadvantage.  These sources affect my own opinion because I do not support charter schools necessarily, I support them if I believe they are the best way to help urban communities properly educate their children.  

