But by another measure, charter schools have succeeded: by allowing educators to experiment in ways that they generally can't inside public-school systems, they have led to the creation of a small but growing corps of schools with new and ambitious methods for educating students facing real academic challenges.
Each year, Global Citizen Year selects a Corps of high school seniors, and supports them through apprenticeships in Asia, Africa and Latin America during a "bridge year" before college.
The Kadetsky Korpus, or Cadet Corps, a string of schools for boys, were closed as a czarist remnant just after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
It featured a cacophony of school drum corps, church bells and booming fireworks at seemingly random times (like just before dawn).
Those qualities are found in each of the 20 New York City students who are this year's winners in The New York Times College Scholarship Program, a corps of college-bound high school seniors selected from a pool of 1,400 applicants.
The schools' Corps of Cadets (or the Corps) is one of the largest uniformed student bodies outside the service academies.
Composed of over 400 men and women from the school's Corps of Cadets, it is the largest military marching band in the world.
Even though she dropped out of school, she went to job corps and found work and wanted to participate in the democratic process.
During a time of upheaval in the school system, a small corps of great teachers were the real anchors in the schools.
Born in 1944, of Sicilian descent, in a working-class suburb on the west side of Chicago, Anthony Pellican dropped out of school and joined the army signal corps.
