Re charter school vs public schools in TX (colleges, scholarships, computers)
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Saw this on FB page of someone who works in public education
Accurately critical of charter schools in TX for most part
Charter schools in many ways are another level of for-profit colleges—
Except instead of draining students w/loans they can’t pay back for courses that are worthless, they drain the public education funding in states and aren’t held accountable on a par with public schools...
Nor are their owners/administrators...
Diane Ravitch is a good source. My granddaughter is a senior in a high school in 2 suburb of Houston and the school performs well. We don't have any charters on the high school level in my suburb though. I don't think we have any charters at all here. The public schools are very good here though there are some campuses that are not as good as others.
What a person needs to know is that Charter Schools are Publicly Funded "For Profit" Private Schools. The profits return back to the owner of the school organization, who is often already a Billionaire.
The schools typically pay the lowest wages, the skimpiest benefits (if any), and positions are filled by those who haven't yet been able to find a better position. Draw your own conclusion how this may affect education quality.
Most schools are Elementary level as those grades are the least costly to operate. Sports are non-existent - unless the Charter School has filed suit to force the local Public School to accept the Charter students with no pay-to-play fees. Same extortion racket for Advanced Placement Classes.
The one advantage is that trouble-makers are soon expelled back to the Public Schools - with no recognizable due process.
Charter Schools are just a scam to fill the pockets of the mega-wealthy with educational tax dollars.
Maybe . . However, in NYC these charter schools are the only way for students to escape failing public schools.
My adult child worked at Success Academy for a short time. His school was located in building that shared space with a public middle school. The public school had a 40% graduation rate. Success Academy had a 90% graduation rate with top students recruited by private high school with scholarships. Success Academy is a pressured school environment.
If I was a parent in the Bronx with limited means, I definitely use Success Academy. Can't imagine, it is any different in Texas. Parents would not use these schools if public schools worked.
Maybe . . However, in NYC these charter schools are the only way for students to escape failing public schools.
My adult child worked at Success Academy for a short time. His school was located in building that shared space with a public middle school. The public school had a 40% graduation rate. Success Academy had a 90% graduation rate with top students recruited by private high school with scholarships. Success Academy is a pressured school environment.
If I was a parent in the Bronx with limited means, I definitely use Success Academy. Can't imagine, it is any different in Texas. Parents would not use these schools if public schools worked.
Success Academy is a pressure cooker and the children end up with lower self-esteem. I would not put my child through that. I think that for a few kids, the atmosphere works, but I don't think most children will thrive in such a place.
Success Academy is a pressure cooker and the children end up with lower self-esteem. I would not put my child through that. I think that for a few kids, the atmosphere works, but I don't think most children will thrive in such a place.
I agree, but kids don't thrive in the public schools either.
If the teachers' union was less powerful, teachers could be fired. Then the public school students might have a chance. As it stands now, forget about it.
Again, parents would not send their children Success Academy if public schools worked. At least out of Success Academy these kids can get scholarships into private high schools.
I agree, but kids don't thrive in the public schools either.
If the teachers' union was less powerful, teachers could be fired. Then the public school students might have a chance. As it stands now, forget about it.
Again, parents would not send their children Success Academy if public schools worked. At least out of Success Academy these kids can get scholarships into private high schools.
Guess what, my kids and my grandkids all thrive in the public schools (not in NYC). My children went to school in Evanston, IL and my grandchildren are currently in high school in Pearland, Texas (suburb of Houston).
I have a friend who teaches in the public schools in NYC whose children are thriving in their local public school in Brooklyn.
Note, btw, if the principal does his or her job any teacher can be fired including those in NYC. It is a matter of documenting what the teachers are doing incorrectly.
You cannot generalize that all public schools even in NYC are bad.
In all the Academy schools, there is a high rate of teacher turnover because the workload is outrageously difficult for the teachers. The charter schools pay no rent - they get space in public buildings free. The approach to students in punitive. Students often cannot use the restroom, so they wet their pants during the practice tests. They have a very high suspension rate. The success rate is skewed because the more difficult students leave.
Note, btw, if the principal does his or her job any teacher can be fired including those in NYC. It is a matter of documenting what the teachers are doing incorrectly.
Not really.
n a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”
The United Federation of Teachers, the U.F.T., was founded in 1960. Before that, teachers endured meagre salaries, tyrannical principals, witch hunts for Communists, and gender discrimination against a mostly female workforce (at one point, there was a rule requiring any woman who got pregnant to take a two-year unpaid leave). Drawing its members from a number of smaller and ineffective teachers’ groups, the U.F.T. coalesced into a tough trade union that used strikes and political organizing to fight back. By the time Bloomberg took office, forty-two years later, many education reformers believed that the U.F.T. and its political allies had gained so much clout that it had become impossible for the city’s Board of Education, which already shared a lot of power with local boards, to maintain effective school oversight. In 2002, with the city’s public schools clearly failing, the State Legislature granted control of a new Department of Education to the new mayor, who had become a billionaire by building an immense media company, Bloomberg L.P., that is renowned for firing employees at will and not giving contracts even to senior executives.
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Our Texas school district delivers a pathetic education for the $20k we 'contribute' every yr. (Homeschooled our own)
Texas is VERY ripe for a reasonable k-12 OVERHAUL, (as in DESTROY what they have now... and start from scratch (First with NEW administrators), as is most of USA). Including USA higher education 'pig troughs'. (I recently did another masters program as a late adult and the quality of edu is about as bad as the quality of public schooled student being pushed forward to 'college' level (?).
I would challenge you to go hire 4-5 Texas k-12 grads and entrust them with your business customers and assets! That is a very good test!
All of the TX charter schools I've had contact with are pitiful.
As an example, students who failed in the public HS where I taught would enroll in a nearby charter because it was effortless for them to get credit there for the courses they flunked. When I asked one of my students about how that worked, he was very honest about it.
"They just have rooms full of computers and they bring up the program for your course and you just answer some easy multiple choice questions. If you get enough correct, they give you credit for that course. There's supposed to be a teacher monitoring the room, but they have to watch over several rooms at the same time, so we can cheat like crazy."
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), as is most of USA). Including USA higher education 'pig troughs'. (I recently did another masters program as a late adult and the quality of edu is about as bad as the quality of public schooled student being pushed forward to 'college' level (?). 
