Public education is one of the best examples of how liberals are ready to sacrifice those who are responsible in order to cater to the dysfunctional. The latest obsession is supposed discrimination in suspension rates. It turns out that black "youths" tend to be suspended more. What a surprise, right? Well to Obama and the liberals in his administration, it smacks of discrimination. So what if they beat up some white kid or raped a couple of girls. Kicking them out of school might harm them. The interests of the other students, th eones actually trying to get an education, do not particularly interest Obama.
And having spent time in classrooms the last 13 years .. in high poverty schools, where 90+% are black kids, they do act out more, cause more trouble. And what adversely impacts the kids who want to learn is that a lot of teaching time is lost when a teacher has to discipline a kid, call the office to get the school interventionist to the classroom to take the kid out or worst case is when multiple kids jump on the bandwagon and join in the disruption, all but causing a melee where multiple staff are summoned to the class. After all teachers have to be very careful about laying their hands on kids ... although any unruly kid should be handled firmly. But that would cause a lawsuit of Sharpton coming to town.
exactly, teachers need to be graded and they need to attend real schools... not the for profit mc schools owned by cronies who feed at the govt trough. Those Mc Schools are just bilking billions out of the federal govt. Govt money distorts the markets everywhere... from housing prices to schooling. Far fewer underqualified people would be spending their own money on that crap. the schools would have to show real jobs with real pay to get students to pay their tuition. If these schools were not eligible for govt loans. if we are to take education seriously we have to start to take our teacher education qualifications seriously.
By RUTH CONNIFF ProfitShip Learning A top rightwing think tank has devoted more than $30 million to spread the message that public education is failing. According to a report by One Wisconsin Now, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is a major underwriter of this propaganda effort. Bradley spent millions on shoddy research, media punditry, and a lobbying campaign to promote the idea that public schools have failed and to push school vouchers and other privatization schemes as the “solution”. Large, national charter-school chains have been major of the beneficiaries of the campaign to fix “failing” public schools. Among them, Rocketship––“a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty,” according to a report by economist Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute. Not all charter schools are bad. Some offer high-quality, alternative models classrooms that are enriching for kids. But over the last decade, the charter school movement has morphed from a small, community-based effort to foster alternative education into a vehicle for privatizing public education, pushed by free-market foundations, big education-management companies, and profit-seekers looking for a way to cash in on public-education funds.
So what? Why is the profit motive so suspect among libs? Private universities are ok, so why not private k-12? Every rich liberal I know sends their kids to a private school. It's ok for the rich apparently, just not for the middle class. The profit motive has an effect on behavior that cannot be matched by all the well-meaning government directives in the world.
Correctamundo! Charter schools! Let educators compete for funds by their ability and the performance of the kids they teach. Good schools and teachers deserve to prosper. Bad ones deserve to fall by the wayside and die. Just like they should. (And BTW... FUCK THE GOVERNMENT, FUCK THE PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONS... including those in public education... but don't get me started.)
There are a number of things in this article that I disagree with. The first being “a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty,” - the reason Charter Schools hire younger teachers is because most Charters are focused on using technology in the classroom as a teaching tool - including concepts such as flipping the classroom. Most veteran teachers are very uncomfortable with technology and would fail miserably as a teacher in a technology driven charter school. Younger teachers directly out of college are very comfortable with technology (tablets, laptops, whiteboards, creating videos, etc.) and have been trained in recent techniques such as "flipping the classroom". In the same way that most programmers right out of school are familiar with all the most recent programming languages and are far more likely to be hired than a software engineer 30 years into their career. Are these hiring companies "relying on young and inexperience programmers rather than more veteran and expensive engineers" -- or is it simply companies hiring the people that know the languages and meet their immediate needs. The article attempts to portray most charters as for-profit national Charter schools such as "Rocketship". The reality is that over 95% of charter schools are non-profit and locally run. It should also be noted that Charter schools make up over half of the top 100 schools in the nation, and most outperform the local public schools across comparative racial demographics. I will agree with the author that these national for-profit Charter schools driven by "big education-management companies, and profit-seekers looking for a way to cash in on public-education funds" are not a good thing. They are on-par with the for-profit colleges. Charter schools should be limited to non-profit organizations and have strict guidelines in place outlining the educational requirements that must be met in each state.
Why are they "not a good thing"? Public employee unions are doing the same thing and producing DIDDLY-SQUAT as far as educating kids. Even worse... they "lock in tax-payer funded, perpetual support (benefits, absurd retirement packages)" for themselves after having produced disturbingly poor results. We all already know... PUBLIC EDUCATION SUCKS! Let's get rid of "government in education" and turn the task over to motivated, performance oriented private sources.
Let's start with the fact that only 32 states have teacher unions. 23 states strictly do not allow teacher unions. All the companies I have worked for have a strict policy that they do not hire graduates from for-profit colleges (e.g. Strayer University, University of Phoenix, ITT) The degrees from these institutions are viewed effectively as fake and useless. As noted in the press, many students view these for for-profit universities as a scam and feel they have been cheated. Of course, all of this is funded with federal education loans and the students are still stuck paying back the debt with no realistic employment prospects. I will note that many of the for-profit schools have been sued by the federal government for their recruiting tactics, and most spend more money on marketing than education. The last thing we want to see is these type of scam artist for-profit national companies invade public K-12 education. Non-profit local charter schools are good and excel. Every single one of the charter schools put forward by for-profit national level companies has been an educational disaster (without a single exception) - all they managed to do is to rake in lots of dollars to the owners.
I think public schools were a great institution back in the 1940's and 50's, even 60's. Then the courts and the federal government got involved and basically ruined them. Local control was taken away, even the neighborhood school concept was sacrificed to obtain mandated racial balance. Now the public schools are characterized by disturbing levels of liberal indoctrination, violence and bullying which is tolerated to avoid the racial grievance industry and absurd levels of administrative staffing,etc. It would be one thing if government schools were producing great results for anyone other than teachers and administrators with lavish contracts. Clearly they are not. The public school model is badly broken and needs replacing. It's not at all clear to me why I should have to pay for educating hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants either.