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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (10307)	2/11/2017 10:38:52 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361903

If charter schools were consistently well run and well managed- I think more people would be for them. The problem with charters (as well as their strength) is that they are fairly unregulated but that means that a lot malfeasance can happen before anyone realizes there is a problem. There are some superb charter schools- but there are some really, really terrible ones- and some of the terrible ones are spectacular failures. dianeravitch.net I actually have some experience with a charter than went off the rails. Criminal acts were committed. It solicited foreign students- Chinese (illegally) to make more money off them, and, in the end, lost its WASC accreditation and left students scrambling to find other schools in the middle of the school year. WASC is the Western Association of Schools and Colleges that visits schools to make sure their teaching methods/curriculum/school plan meet a minimum level of competency. In a public school there is tremendous accountability. Teacher salaries are all published. Many different (carefully watched) pots of money exist and there is a trail for each of them. You can't even go over your copying budget on the photocopier without someone noticing (I did this, so I know it's true). Charter schools aren't inherently bad- but they are divisive and they can be a huge waste of money, because the money isn't watched very carefully- especially the for profit schools, because like any profit center, they've got to pay back investors as well as delivering a service. Considering charters self select for active and engaged parents, you'd really expect their results to be stellar. As a public school teacher I can tell you, if I could kick out the kids whose parents don't care (because they tend to be the behavior problems) even my regular kids would look like honors class kids. But Charter results are fairly spotty- which is a little depressing, considering they are cherry picking in many areas, and they often have lower student/staff ratios. Right now the Christian right sees Charters as an end run around a "diverse" public education system- but I expect other minorities to start to utilize the juicy plum of the charter- both for money and for "purity". startribune.com There have been a lot of winging conservatives whining about all sorts of crazy things regarding Muslims (who can forget the glorious footbath uproar of 10 years ago) but this is actually a real problem and it's happening now. I don't think taxpayer money should go to any religious school- that's clearly entanglement. So that's yet another problem with Charters, and like so many problems, not one that has been thought through completely. DeVos is a special case though. She's an ignorant zealot. DeVos is an embarrassment to the charter school movement. There are brilliant people in the charter school game- DeVos isn't one of them. She just happened to be rich, and gave a lot of money to Trump, so she "earned" her position. I guess on the one hand, because she's ignorant she might not do as much damage as someone smart- though she has certainly hurt education in Michigan. washingtonpost.com Now she has every right to be an ignorant zealot, but it's too bad she's in a position of power when she seems to know nothing about education. Seriously. Watch her testimony..