Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Charters are basically just magnet schools that skim taxpayer money for corporations and treat teachers like garbage. A right-winger's dream, basically.
To some, Charter School obviously means "for-profit, run by a large corporation".
In my experience, Charter School has meant "run by poor black or Hispanic people from and for their own community". Administrators, teachers, and parents tend to come from the community served by the school.
Hardly a right-winger's dream and hardly skimming off the "best and brightest" from public schools; these kids are headed for community college at best, but at least they are looking forward to a diploma.
You say everyone has a choice, yet you don't think Charter schools should be one of those choices? Am I reading that correctly?
You're reading it correctly. If one is willing to pay for a private school (which is what a charter is), then go for it. I don't think the taxpayer should fund someone's choice to go to a school the taxpayer cannot oversee or vote on.
And there's never fraud and waste at public schools, right?
Bloated administration salaries, teachers that can't be fired, decisions made about your kids' education 3000 miles away by bureaucrats. That's the reality of public schools.
Get yourself down to the BOE meetings, Board of Finance Meetings, and vote. Any waste is something you can try and do something about. Where have you seen fraud in a traditional public school?
The real shame is that people confuse comedians and entertainment with journalism and news. (Not necessarily directed at the OP, although the opening statement does imply such confusion).
That's not to say this comedy routine doesn't raise any good points or isn't effective in raising public awareness of an issue. Just that it is an agenda-driven, one-sided COMEDY act and very likely less well researched than a genuine news outlet. The script is written by _comedy_ writers and designed to get a laugh. The bias is certainly very clear - they are not presenting a "news" story; they are presenting information to support a pre-determined position. Any flaws in truth or logic are camouflaged by cute one-liners.
The poor quality of news reporting in recent years is partly at fault. It is still very troubling that most people cannot differentiate between reality and entertainment.
Bread and circuses.
I said it's a shame media outlets don't research like that. You are awfully naive if you believe journalists research the way they used to. Plus if you look into charter backers, you'll see a ton of puff pieces by charter advocates masquerading as editorial writers and articles omitting tons of valuable information. Eli Broad contributed tons of money to the LA Times which saw an upsurge in charter support on its pages all of a sudden.
Most people can differentiate between comedy and news. What you should be troubled by is comedians making more sense and being more honest than the press.
Thanks for posting the link to the article. The issue is far more complex than what a liberal comedian's TV audience wants to hear about.
The author starts out by admitting there are good charter schools, and for me this sums the issue up: << To me the important question is not, “are there good charter schools?” but rather, “how do we make sure that all students, and not just a select few, are getting these benefits?” >>
Except that charters only became good by cherry picking their students aaaaaannnnd we don't know if their idea of "good" truly is good or not. Success Academies in NYC have been heralded here. But few kids get into the specialty schools while "failing" neighborhood schools consistently get kids there, the attrition rate is 35%, and the tactics have been questionable.
How do you make sure all kids get the benefits and not the select few? Poor the necessary resources into each school that currently are going to charters.
Actually in Nevada the charter school thing is different than suggested. We appear to have three different types of charter school.
We have the ones in middle class whitish neighborhoods that are actually private schools run with public money. Work very well.
We have a couple of Agassi Academies type places who actually take selected low end minority children and educate them very well. They work quite well though they are economically much better supported than a standard charter school.
We have the standard commercial charter school which performs at best equivalent to the neighborhood public school and mostly worse.
All three of course skim the better students from the public schools leaving them with the dregs.
More good or harm? Probably harm to the low end kid good for the kid who is not the low end.
^^^There is some big truth to this. I went to college with a host of kids from Chicago "charter schools" or "magnet schools" or whatever you want to call them.
Especially funny since most of the European education system works by skimming off students into the trades etc. as they progress in education. Much of their education system is a charter school style affair.
Magnet schools are NOT charter schools, not even close, especially not when it comes to the funding/management which is what the John Oliver piece was about. Magnet schools are public schools, they are usually part of the district, they are not for profit. None of that is true for charter schools.
Additionally, please keep in mind that kids who are in the bad charter schools are less likely to get into college so you are referring to a skewed sample at best.
You're still talking to well-off white people. Inner city Single Moms and inner city grandparents raising at-risk kids while Single Mom is dealing with the legal and/or mental health systems can't "just move", can't "just pay for private", and can't "just homeschool".
I don't think charter schools are a panacea, but I've seen plenty of at-risk poor kids who have stayed in school because of charter schools. They won't go to Harvard but they may take a few courses at community college, and will probably get steady jobs as medical techs or office assistants.
Right, use that money to reach at-risk kids. If it's so easy to do in the traditional public school setting, why didn't they just do it? Why is that only brought up when charter schools present competition?
But this begs the question, why not fix the public schools, bring back voc, etc? Public schools can and do work, especially magnet schools which serve the same function without being for profit.
I see your claim and raise you the Chicago Public School system.
Can you back-up your claim that there is "more" with anything solid?
We are talking about all over the country, not just one big city system. Also note - Chicago has a lot of
Charters. Now, the interesting thing in terms of the fraud was that it involved only 2 Chicago High Schools out of 517 total schools. There are also 130 charter schools. The public schools amounted to $900,000, but the Charter schools Brilliance Academy, Inc. and Babbage Net School, Inc. and their executives for defrauding school districts in 19 states, including Illinois, of more than $33 million.
The former head of a Chicago charter-school organization settled federal regulatory charges that he misled investors in a $37.5 million bond issue to build three facilities.
Juan Rangel, the ex-president of UNO Charter School Network Inc. and a former chief executive officer of United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago, approved an offering statement in 2011 that failed to disclose the schools’ $13 million contracts with two brothers of the organization’s chief operating officer, which "could have threatened UNO’s ability to repay bond investors," the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said.
Think about Arne Duncan (who started in education in Chicago). He is a master of the scam and began it in the 1990s.
His Ariel Academy was supposed to teach the kids about the stock market by having them invest.
Quote:
Each of 40 selected inner city First Graders at the Ariel School was given a $20,000 grant to invest in the stock market through the 8th Grade. The profit from the child's investment fund was evenly divided between the school and a college fund for the child. The plan was that after 8 years, the money would double – returning the original $20,000 to the school and creating a college fund of $20,000 for the child. Back in 1990, thanks to State support for higher education, $20,000 would actually pay for a higher education.
But what really happened?
The money was invested in the companies that ran the school.
The class of 2007's portfolio shows most of their money was invested in the Ariel Fund and Nuveen Rittenhouse Growth Fund ($30,000 of the $33,000) (4). It is safe to say that most classes have their portfolio filled with Ariel or Nuveen Funds (after all, their representatives decide where the money goes until the children reach seventh grade), money used to teach children about investing in the stock market and provide a modest sum for the children's' future education. On December 31st, 2008, the Ariel Fund closed at $22.93, down from around $40.00 at the beginning of the school year in September. Nuveen Rittenhouse Growth Fund closed at $16.10, down from around $22.00 four months ago.
By 2012, Chicago Public Schools had closed over one hundred schools and simultaneously opened almost one hundred privately run charter schools. In 2012, Mayor Emanuel proposed closing up to 120 more schools by fall 2013.
If you look at the totality of public schools vs the totality of charters, the charters have more fraud - it stands to reason because charters only want to make money. They mostly have very little stake in the kids.
The biggest problem haqs been a lack of score keeping. The Milwaukee implementation should have given us a broad look at how charters do but no one kept score and that is still the pattern in many charter situations. Here in Nevada we do score the charters and can already see that most do not appear to offer any advantage over an equivalent public school.
There are exceptions. The Agassi Academy appears to work well and a couple of others but most of the low end charter schools are the same or worse than an equivalent public school. There are a few successful charters but they are located in middle class areas with very few poor students. In some of the cases the neighborhood has successfully started a private school without the expense.
If the Nevada voucher plan is upheld in the courts it will really get interesting. Now it becomes possible for any area to establish private schools with the bulk of the cost paid by the state. One would suggest that may well happen widely.. One of the major problems the voucher program has is old anti-catholic provisions in the state constitution banning any aid to sectarian schools.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
