Wow... a hit piece of Charter Schools from Jeff Bryant, the spokesperson for the NEA Teachers Union. Hardly surprising. He seems to fail to recognize that over 1/2 the schools in the top 100 K-12 schools in the U.S each year are Charter Schools. He also fails to realize that the public school corruption in any single state is much greater than the corruption from all the Charter schools in the nation combined. All I have to do is look locally in North Carolina this year to find public school administrators placing expensive personal purchases on school credit cards, administrators using public school buses for private events, public school transportation offices taking kick-backs on bus repairs, and bribery in school lunch contracts. Bryant has a clear agenda to undermine Charter Schools - it is clear why he does not point out that over 90% of Charter schools are run by local non-profits, and over 90% of Charter Schools outperform local public schools across all racial demographics.
Please attempt to prove that you have a brain and not just a mindless sheep. Please attempt to prove that you do not believe and simply regurgitate everything you read on Salon and other various libtard media. To prove this, post a link to a Salon article in which you completely disagree. If you are incapable of doing this, you are just a mindless fucking sheep.
dbphoenix, You have to be shitting me. You couldn't even come up with one article. Your time is up. YOU FUCKING MINDLESS SHEEP
I have serious doubts that this can be backed up by any reliable study. Can you find a source for the data on which your statement is based, other than another such statement in a book. I would like to see the actual data and its source. Your statement smacks of You Tube nonsense.
The assertion that "non-Hispanic white Americans who are mostly the products of suburban public K-12 schools, are at the very top of global comparison" is pushed by Michael Lind and others from the New America Foundation. Most of Michael Lind's articles are found in Salon. Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation. Here are a couple of his articles that make this assertion and backs it up with test score figures. http://www.salon.com/2012/08/01/school_choice_vs_reality/ http://www.salon.com/2011/01/25/lind_myth_china/ New America Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_America_Foundation New America is an American non-profit, nonpartisan[1] public policy institute and liberal think tank focusing on a wide range of issues, including national security studies, technology, asset building, health, gender, energy, education, and the economy. The organization is based in Washington, D.C., in addition to having a significant presence in New York City.
I thought the Lind article was interesting , and I had previously not heard of the Overton Window concept; also interesting. I did not find, however, direct support for Loyek's very specific statement. I can see that his statement is implied, though a little exaggerated, if one starts breaking the data apart by ethnicity. What is reasonable, and what we can all accept, is self-evident. Combining data from higher performing students with lower performing, will give naturally, a result somewhere in the middle. If the mix of higher and lower performing students included in the PISA studies varies from country to country this will obviously affect country rankings. So we are back to the old problem of making sure when we compare two things we are not trying to compare the incomparable. In this case, however, the comparison is meant to compare educational results between countries; not between cohorts of the same racial, cultural or national origin. The result is valid on a country basis. It is invalid to say we do as well as other countries, unless one is not including minorities as part of the country!!! As the results show, the U.S. does much worse than some other countries. That is the result we must focus on. Breaking the data down will help us understand why we compare poorly and where to focus efforts for improvement. Lind, if he is right, is showing us how politically useful the country to country comparison figures could be, and how useless they might be, unless we break the data down, if we want to learn how to get better K-12 educational results. I have posted here on ET, at length, on the effect of doing away with tracking that came into vogue following LBJ's "Great Society" initiatives. Should we return to tracking? If we were to, in some schools the college prep track would be nearly all white, and the vocational track nearly all minority. That's not likely to be politically acceptable. I would not want to see a return to tracking in any case, however, without returning to the pre-LBJ public school model of substantial curricula in the arts (music, visual, and dance), languages, vocational training and physical education. These latter programs are all examples of areas that have suffered cut-backs post LBJ, and all areas that must receive full support if tracking is to be morally justifiable. Crucially, any return to the prior model would have no chance of succeeding unless there were a simultaneous return to the prior educational paradigm in which responsibility was gradually shifted from the teacher onto the student. Prior to the Great Society, a "failing student" in secondary education meant exactly that. Today it means a failing School or Teacher! There are, in the U.S., secondary and high schools that haven't changed one whit for a century or more. These are our elite private schools. There emission standards accomplish what tracking in U.S. public schools used to accomplish. And their insistence on making students responsible for their own education and behavior used to be a feature of U.S. public schools. Do some Charter Schools represent de facto tracking, I wonder? Do charter schools place more responsibility on the student? If this is true, it may explain, in part, why some charter schools are successful in comparison with public school alternatives, where students are lumped together regardless of their abilities, and the teachers are made responsible for both a students academic progress and therefore, by extension, their behavior in class as well. It seems political correctness has created a monster that defies logic.
You make some good points and your commentary is well thought out. Good stuff. I agree with some of your items and disagree with others. One thing to keep in mind is that Lind and his organization are trying to assert that the U.S. public school system is not broken. Many schools are just as good... or better than other countries schools. According to Lind we only need more tax dollars to pull up the under-performing urban schools, and the U.S. would shine in K-12 education. There is not need (according to Lind) for vouchers, charters, private schools, etc. because the U.S. K-12 school system is not broken (as stated by some conservatives - who also have facts & figures that back their points).