Save Our Schools And Our Children!

[midnight]

"IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN TRENDS in U.S. education you’ve probably noticed the push, led by politicians and business leaders on the right, to privatize America’s public schools.

The rational for change goes pretty much like this: We have a “school crisis” in America. Based on test scores from the most recent international comparison, U.S. students rank 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math. Clearly, the schools are failing. This, in turn (or so the right-wing theory goes), is wrecking our economy because U.S. kids can’t compete on a world stage with kids in Finland and Japan and South Korea. The underlying problem, according to the right, is that all our teachers belong to evil unions."

Business people are our newest national heroes.

"WELL THEN, LET’S SEE HOW BUSINESS PEOPLE in other fields are doing and try to get some idea where our schools will be heading. Consider the pharmaceutical companies and their methods as a model. No lazy union members here! Just efficiency and innovation and maybe a little tidy profit in the end.

Oh, and a $3 billion dollar fine for corrupt practices. This week, GlaxoSmithKline, plead guilty to criminal charges, related to illegal promotion of a variety of drugs, including Paxil, a best-selling antidepressant. It was prescribed with increasing regularity, in recent years, for teens and younger children."

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/07/03/gop-mantra-let-big-business-save-our-schools-and-our-children/

We can't afford to allow the privateers to continue to steer our private education into a commodities market....

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. "We can't afford to allow the privateers to ..."? How are we going to stop them?

If the entire country is for sale by the politicians, which politicians are going to avoid privatizing public education and rewarding their financial supporters?

[Igel]

2. I look at the kids I know who are in or have gone to charter school--

only in the last year or two.

They fall into two groups, which makes sense because there are two kinds of charter schools. There are the kind that do average or better than average; there are the kind that parents put their kids into because they'll graduate anybody or their kid will stop whining about how unfair the universe is, wanting him to actually wake up by noon.

There are good charter schools. Often the parents want their kids, doing badly in public schools, to do better. This can mean "avoid this bad influence of a friend" to "smaller class or school size" or even "more appropriate class options." One girl was put in charter school so she could study Japanese. Great.

Sometimes the parents move their kids out pre-emptively. You know that the majority of the local elementary school will be going to a problem middle school, why let your kid be carried along towards being a problem? A problem middle school starts at home, and "home" started having effects on classroom performance years before. Avoid the problem of having your kid doing badly in 7th grade in a failing school by taking steps in 3rd grade.

No, parents don't have any social responsibility to sacrifice their own kid's well-being at the altar of the idea of public education. If the pub ed system is failing their kid, their kid is more important than the system.

In one case the parents moved the kid because of language. He was tracked bilingual. The school insisted on it. And the charter school didn't have a bilingual track. It didn't help that most of the older elementary school kids on the bus were black and had this nasty tendency to tell him that he should move back home to Mexico. What can I say, the kids learn it at home.

There are absolutely horrendous charter schools. They warehouse kids until they turn 18 and can drop out. They graduate anybody who's passed their exit level standardized tests. They're GPA fixers: High-fail the first 12 weeks, transfer, get an A the next 12 weeks while doing even less work than the first 12 weeks; transfer back to fail the final 12 weeks and your average is magically passing.

Public schools like the horrendous charter schools. Troubled kids go there; completely unmotivated kids go there. Makes the gen ed classroom a better place. And then there's the graduation rate issue: You get dinged for too many drop-outs and failed students, but if they transfer to a charter school and drop out, woo-hoo!