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Hypothetical, all that's left in 2035 is charters, so explain...
HumorAs was intended.
In another thread, teachers were saying that after years of teaching they learned there really were such things as bad parents. If so, then whats wrong with letting the gold parents make their kids successful?
Parents with money and access aren’t necessarily always “good.”
Hmmm.. that's not what I said at all.
I said, what's wrong with letting highly motivated parents congregate at one school to put their kids ahead?
It’s fundamentally un-American, for one. The whole idea of public school is that we are providing a service to children, not to their parents. Each child has the right to an education, no matter who their parents are.
I mean the way you phrased it is exactly what voucher proponents say. Every child has a right to an education that best suits them, not a one size fits all public one.
Why should one kid deserve a better education than any other kid just because they have "highly motivated" (i.e. wealthy) parents?
It’s not that one kid deserves a better education than others, it’s that kids that have potential shouldn’t be forced to stay at a low performing school bc of their zip code or family’s inability to afford privates. A school where most parents actually care their kid is doing their homework means the class average is higher. For a student who is academically inclined that is a better learning for them, esp if their local school is one where the teacher is teaching at a slower pace bc the rest of the class is not doing well bc their parents don’t even bother to check if their kid has homework so those kids don’t do it. Parents that care also like being around other parent that care. I know public school teachers who have their own kids attend privates and charters bc it’s a better learning environment. We can’t ensure every single kid receives the exact same top tier education bc we don’t have every student that can handle that. So for the students who would benefit from a more advanced learning environment and has the resources to attend a private or charter, policies that restrict such a thing hinders their potential, it doesn’t improve the other students’.
The trees will be kept equal by hatchet, axe and saw ...
So you see the graphic for the equity argument which the size of the stools over a fence ate inversely proportional to kids’ heights, and now use a cartoon as the basis of your argument? Well life isn’t a controlled imagine. There are students that are being disadvantaged bc public schools have succumbed to catering to some of the lowest performing students. I’d rather the students that are able to get out do such, bc they deserve to live out their full potential, and if it’s a charter school that provides such then so be it. Ironically while everyone downvotes me and uses arguments that were spoon fed to them, no one counters why teachers of public schools choose to send their own students to privates and charters or how some of these social justice policies have gone on to harm the the most disadvantaged students. What you replied to me was so subpar of an argument I hope you weren’t expecting to change my mind with it. Forcing teachers to cater to students who check of multiplied boxes for disadvantaged has turned teachers far beyond educators and into pseudo parents instead, which is inappropriate at best and has not shown student success outcomes.
Sorry if it wasn't clear I was being sarcastic. Take my upvote!
Because we deserve highly educated citizens capable of running society.
So that means we should prioritize educating the wealthy? A poor student can't become highly educated?
Not at all. My mom was a teacher. There are many poor parents who care and many rich who don't.
This is not as stratified along economic lines as you think.
Aren't they going to get that anyways? Like they can and will move to a new school which provides even less mixed opportunities compared to the limited number of strivers you get in prestigious charters. You get highly motivated lower class people in even the most prestigious charters you don't in public means of segregating by class by housing price and legal fights.
Sure, wealthy parents who think their kids are entitled to a better education than the peasants will always find a way. Your original question was "what's wrong with letting highly motivated parents congregate at one school to put their kids ahead?"
My answers to that are:
1) They're wealthy, so they're already "ahead" by default. How much further ahead is enough?
2) Doing this just creates the next generation of entitled, privileged people who have no understanding of the world the majority live in.
I don't know how to fix this, I don't have a solution, I just know that class segregation doesn't help anyone but the wealthy.
There are working class people who get into top charter schools who won’t get into top public’s because a highly motivated poor person still can fill out all the paperwork and get in the lottery it just may mean a lot of work.
You can’t buy a house in a wealthy neighborhood through any amount of go get em. You can and do get into the best charter schools this way.
There are a lot of highly motivated parents who are the very parents people on this sub complain about though. In theory, it all makes some sort of sense, but the reality is definitely different.
Nothing, honestly. The problem has been moving slow and in the past few years has increased its speed and, honestly, being a public school teacher is like standing on a sinking ship. It’s only going to keep getting worse. A few years ago I would’ve argued that keeping those “good” parents and kids in education was good for all kids but I genuinely feel like the line has finally been crossed and good parents should be moving their kids. The “bad” parents and kids are ruining it for everyone and there is too many of them anymore.
Its part of why I left this past year
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13d
After Katrina devastated NOLA and the public schools were closed and the charters opened by the state.
“State authorities and school reformers saw an opportunity born of necessity. Even before the storm, Louisiana officials had set up a special state authority to take over the worst schools in a school system where only half the students earned diplomas. After Katrina, the Louisiana legislature turned over 80 percent of New Orleans' 126 schools to the Louisiana Recovery School District with a mandate to recreate them as charter schools.”
The Republican state legislature which controls schools.
There is a reason Red states are the way they are while Blue states aren’t, and you trying to pigeonhole it on local politics makes you look like an idiot.
OPSB is starting to take the cheaters back over, creating traditional public schools again
OPSB has one school that has not even opened yet. They are doing nothing about the money being funneled to private pockets that should be going to the kids.
The system we have is insane and one small school is not going to fix it.
I know that, teach in a neighboring parish, hope they add more
It's just frustrating... I have friends whose kids had long term subs for multiple years of school.
I know a teacher who was left as the only person in their grade and taught everyone for a temporary pay bump.....50 kids
Happens in JP too, before I left my previous school we were getting kids who had subs in the same subject for 3 years of middle school
The goal is to get rid of unions.
Yes, but also grift.
The former enables the latter.
Women’s public sector unions. Cops unions are just fine.
In my city, police and fire never stand with teachers. Never. 👎🏻
Man firefighters hate cops around here lol.
I mean, they tried getting rid of cops and crime rates went up before going down again. They got rid of school and people found their kids didn't know how to read.
COVID was enlightening and game changing to many people I think.
No one tried to get rid of cops. They wanted to reform them.
Kids know how to read.
Conservatives like cops and hate teachers. It fits with their authoritarian philosophy. It’s why they want to give military weapons to the cops and kill public education.
Those that think they benefit from authoritarian rule support this. I hope they are unpleasantly surprised soon.
One of the most infuriating things about Covid education-wise is that people quickly forgot how important public schools were once attention to it died down.
The reasons people argued for schools to stay open were the reasons we should support public schools. They don't just supply education. They are a cornerstone of a community. It's where kids can get food, get away from and report abusive home situations, have access to internet and technology, etc.
One of the most infuriating things about Covid education-wise is that people quickly forgot how important public schools were once attention to it died down.
The reasons people argued for schools to stay open were the reasons we should support public schools. They don't just supply education. They are a cornerstone of a community. It's where kids can get food, get away from and report abusive home situations, have access to internet and technology, etc.
The goal is that it is public money going to private, for profit businesses
Except Charter Schools are largely (possibly 100% now, but even when "for profit" was true, it was 1%) non-profit, public schools.
Most charter schools are run my managemwnt companies that require all finances to go through the management company. The management company 1) is 100% FOR profit, and 2) has "coincedentally" the same executive leadership as the charter schools.
Charter schools, no matter what your claim, are profit driven
Do you have an example of a for-profit CMO? Legitimate question.
edit:
Found my own answer!
https://data.publiccharters.org/digest/charter-school-data-digest/who-manages-charter-schools/
4,591 freestanding (single-site) non-profit charter public schools
2,531 CMO (multi-site) nonprofit charter public schools
874 EMO (multi-site) for profit charter public schools
For-profit EMOs make up about 11% of charter public schools and about 16% of enrollment.
No, that's the union propaganda. What you're discussing is illegal and doesn't happen.
Sources, please.
Lolol. So charter school propaganda from 5 years ago is totally ok.
Uh, I mean, the the unioneers are posting links from random YouTubers and fox news. At least mine cites a knowledgeable source.
Yours are from a charter advocacy group and they absolutely bend the truth. I provided example after example, and I can keep going, of for-profit charter management groups which is what we were talking about.
They totally bend the truth!
Just like the unions, who lie.
You provided one example. It is about non profit charter schools in unfortunate circumstances. Did you want me to start sharing links of district schools in similar situations?
1) they're still not for profit
2) if shitty fiscal management is the enemy, you don't want me to Google for a single instance of a district school failing for decades or generation and never having the plug pulled, right?
This is laughably false.
Actually, factually true.
We found the charter school CEO in here everyone
You can tell by the expensive steak dinners and fine wines.
Nope.
Actually... No.
I said what I said.
Me too! Omg twinsies!
Like I feel like there's more discomfort with capitalism here than an actual argument about why this is per se bad. Like I've taught in charters and publics in Florida and they have different dysfunctions but it wasn't the case that people were like trying to screw students over with poor learning.
The problems with capitalism are exactly why they are bad. They will provide the least amount of resources they possibly can get away with. The more moral schools will get outcompeted by the more mercenary schools. And there is absolutely no fucking reason they should ever exist.
They will provide the least amount of resources they possibly can get away with.
Absolutely, many charters already do this and it will only get worse if they expand or voucher programs become the norm. My first teaching job was at a charter. They advertised themselves as a "back to basics" school but it was all a guise to be as cheap as fucking possible. This was in 2012, and they still had only those overhead lightbulb projectors in classrooms, absolutely no other way to project material for students, and forget about displaying your computer screen for kids. They didn't have locker rooms for kids to change into their gym uniforms. The only technology that existed in the school were the PCs at teacher desks, and those were awful, underpowered garbage.
People forget how quickly shady businesses will cut corners as much as fucking possible to fix their bottom line or make a buck, and they really live in a naive dream world if they think schools won't do the same. Especially if government oversite doesn't exist. Opening up voucher programs and charters is just asking for education to go the same route as meatpacking plants that used to send people cuts of meat with rat shit and maggots in it because of the epic open market. Fuck that noise.
Why shouldn’t they exist? There are at least as many valid ways to structure a school as any other business? The idea of a single vision of what school should look like administered by the state seems positively ridiculous. Some schools should offer strict discipline and others should have lax, some schools a broad curriculum and others a narrow one like basically anything you can imagine should be available.
The very idea of a single idea for what we want in schools is absolutely gross. There should be as vibrant a market of schools as there are restaurants.
See private prison industrial complex.
In what way are these similar? What I want is for us to have much higher education spending but less paternalistic we know what’s best for you and have schools compete down their profit margins.
Like I’m not advocating strictly for the charter system as it is though it’s basically fine. I think education shouldn’t be as bureaucratic and uniform.
Oh you’re one of those. You might as well be an evangelist for the level of faith you have in the invisible hand of the market correcting all.
Have you never heard of regulatory capture? Is the concept of privatizing every pillar of society an infallible strategy in your simple head.
I dont think the free market corrects all. Most of the problems come down to some people are poor and the way we fix those is usually by giving people money not micromanaging their lives.
Like we could run food stamps like this and centrally have one kitchen in a place making black beans and rice in bulk and save the taxpayers a bit of money but we trust that families know how to take care of themselves. Like I wish we gave them more money to help with that.
There’s some people who do need coercive micromanaging but that’s not the poor that’s extreme criminals and addicts and mentally ill. But most people don’t need the paternalism they just need more resources.
Regulatory capture is usually a result of excessive paternalism where the government and business are too cozy and you need people from inside to regulate the system.
Private control is not necessary for variety. Public schools can do specialized schools better and easier. They literally approve and oversee these charters.
Charters offer literally nothing. Choice and specialization can be offered by public schools (though you shouldn’t want those things). All charters do is add a layer of private control to open it up for further waste and abuse.
In concept there are a bunch of ideas for running public schools like this that I would find exciting if you broke down the link between school and home.
But why shouldn’t I want those things? My wife makes enough we will always have school choice regardless of what decisions are being made at a given school but I think everyone should be able to do that even in the school that left literal scars on me.
The goal is segregation. The elite, separated from the poor and challenged. Public education will still exist, but it will only exist for those who have no other options. Public schools will turn into virtual prisons, preparing them for the school to prison pipeline where they will provide exceedingly low cost labor for those elites.
That’s literally the plan.
That's private schools, not charter.
I work at a charter school and quite a few of my students are from low-income households.
Charters are often run for profit. Sure they can say that it's not, but the charter head can just give themselves a massive salary.
They're like private prisons, with the model applied to education. Sure, poor people will go there. But when there are only charters and privates, the best schools will be taken up by the rich.
You don't have to segregate officially by income, but you can choose correlative factors. The charter network in my district has the following requirements:
1) no more than 3 absences PER YEAR, regardless of reason
2) cannot fail any class
3) parent must volunteer 15 hours per semester
4) No children are able to walk home and there are no buses. Every child must be picked up by a parent.
5) They do not supply anything. When science fair comes around the kid has to provide their own supplies, or they will fail science...see rule 2. If they don't have a printer, they better find one, because without turning in that essay they'll fail the class. If you can't afford the uniform that they change every year, your child will be sent home and...see rule 1.
So you need parents who can get all necessary supplies on demand, with little warning, who also have a lot of free time and a schedule that allows them to pick up and drop off their child, as well as students who have no chronic illnesses or other reasons to be absent and who have never failed a class.
Sure you didn't say "no poors allowed' but you didn't have to.
They're also an absolute nightmare for teachers, usually. I will never teach in a charter school, ever. I've heard horror story after horror story of abusive, incompetent administrators at charter schools. Plus, I'm passionate about providing quality education to ALL students, not just the privileged ones.
Same here. I naively taught at a charter school fresh out of college because I was stupid and didn't know any better. Eight teachers were fired before winter break that year, for extremely nebulous reasons. (One woman was let go because of "test scores", but we hadn't even had state standardized testing yet, so...) Another was a veteran teacher of 25+ years and one bratty teenage girl didn't like her, so she got her influential parents to yell at admin, and poof, she was gone.
Never again. I'd sooner leave education than work at a charter school.
Often the admin can be good, but they don’t control the school. I’ve seen a principal’s decision be overridden by the board who have never taught anyone anything.
I interviewed at a charter my first year teaching when it was very hard to find a position. The guy was incredibly rude to me during an interview, I cannot imagine what it would have been like working for that asshole.
I work in a charter, and I wish we had hard lines with attendance like that. There is logic behind it. If you can’t get your kid to school, then you should be at a school that’s either closer or has busses that will drive the kid for you.
And they are kicked out if they get into disciplinary trouble. Also, charters aren’t required to give sped services.
Dear goodness. Where are they not required to give sped services??!
Charter and private schools. They aren’t considered “public education” so they aren’t held to minimum standards of public schools. Some may choose to, but if they decide not to, they’re okay.
No seriously, which state allows charters to opt out of sped? (Hint: none)
Sped laws aren’t state laws, they are federal laws. Schools get money both from the state and feds if they are public. If they don’t get a certain percentage, and I don’t remember the threshold, they are not required to offer sped services. This isn’t new. If your child has severe issues, admin are the first to recommend public schools because public are REQUIRED to pay for services, not private or charter. The easy services, like 504, many choose to offer.
lol Charter schools are public schools. They have to of sped services except for level 4. Not all schools, district or charter, do level 4.
yes and no. It depends on how the charter is associated with the current district. If it is not part of that district then yes, it has to provide SPED services. If it is part of the district, then no it doesn't have to.
It's pretty common for charter schools to exclude SPED students and be very selective about what students they take.
Ah, good point! Charter schools in Mn are considered their own independent school district. Unless the student is level 4, they can enroll. I forget that if a charter is part of a regular district, they sometimes don’t have to take sped students.
Our charters operate under contract with authorizer who can and do shut down charters failing to meet contract goals that must include academic and financial health goals. I forget that each state has their own charter laws. My state was the first to have charter schools (fun story on that and how it squeaked by the legislature!) so might be more balanced now due to that longer history and fixing issues through state legislation. And there were mistakes, ufta.
It’s also charter. The point of charter is to provide segregation to parents who didn’t get access to it before. It’s more finely tuned segregation with more levels of privilege to more to. So instead of 10-8 and 0-7 bands you have 0-1, 2-3, 3-4…
This makes all the people between 3 and 7 happy because now they get to get away from the people below them.
This is the inevitable effect of choice, because some families will fundamentally have more choice than others, always and forever.
So sure you have a couple of low privilege students, but you have less than you would otherwise if they were evenly distributed. And of course you will have schools of intensely concentrated despair.
Well, that's largely nonsense.
But I understand, there are more bad charters out there than anyone would like. However, people tend to make blanket statements that skew people's perceptions.
Still, I think I work for a good one. We draw new students by lottery, so a poor student has as good a chance as a wealthier one. But since the super rich pay for private schools anyway, most of our students come from families of modest means, largely Hispanic and black in population, and they come because of our school's STEM programs, which they can't get as easily in the regular public schools.
Now, I would vastly prefer to see public education better funded across the board and negate the need for charter schools, but the sort of plutocracy you're talking about is coming from diverting funding from public to private education, and those are the culprits we should really be directing our vitriol at.
And a lot of those charters are militant by approach. See: uncommon and success
Just a point of clarification, they don't actually get a ton of labor out of them in the prison system. But what they do get, because of privatized prison systems, is profit.
A criminal in the prison system earns them a lot of money. If you can keep costs low by overcrowding and cutting back on food and recreational services, educational services, health services, etc., then companies turn a tidy profit on those that are incarcerated.
In Louisiana, they also work them for outside contracts, both physical and technical, so they make money both ways.
With the rise of AI & robotic, I don't think they will need low cost labor.
the cost of the ai/robotics has to be less than the cost of the labor. Until a robot can get yelled at by white ladies for under $15/hr starbucks workers arent getting replaced
The replacement has already begun in the last few years. Many places have self order kiosks, and most are pushing their customers to use mobile order.
That is by far the smallest and easiest parts of that job. Cooking food, checking temps, cleaning are the majority of labor hours. Kiosks help customers feel seen immediately. I find them to be a positive because they help people with poor vision, bad hearing or just general social anxiety.
Yes, and there's still cashier if you want to order in person. They can't replace the whole work force overnight, but they can reduce the need for labor. Have you seen those automatic / robot barista machine at airports? Soon, a Starbuck will only need 1 or 2 workers to supervise, while the machines do the rest of the works.
You clearly don't watch employees working. Talking to customers is a very small part of what gets done. There is also a lack of staff partially due to wages, but also because of losses in the workforce due to the pandemic.
That is the F. Mike Miles plan for Houston
Don't get me even started lmao.
Was waiting for a mention of him
You're not wrong. Except now it's like private prisons. Instead of 100% of money being put, even shadily, into the schools, it's a race to see who can cut the most corners because the owner of the charter gets to take any profits home with them.
Imagine if your principal could just make class sizes bigger and pocket the sacked teachers' salaries.
the rich will send their kids to private academies and everyone else will wallow in for profit filth. well functioning public schools were actually letting a few poors succeed and they couldn't have that. this is the solution.
If you think it sucks to be a teacher, it will be worse then. If you get to be a real teacher, you'll have at least a one hour commute because you can't afford the area with a real school. Otherwise, you'll get to be a literal babysitter because the funding and atmosphere doesn't let you teach.
You'll be broke in both, though I'm sure there will be a 1% of teachers that'll make bank at the real wealthy schools. Commute will still suck, of course. They still can't afford their school area.
Meanwhile, all the Betsy DeVoses will be reveling in all that passive income.
take a look at black education in the 1950s. There will just be kids unable to go to school, even if its their right
I recently did a search about this because I was curious, but did you know that in the US, receiving an education is not a constitutional right? Some states might have it in their laws, but still, you'd think by now there'd be an amendment for it.
From what I gather, the 14th amendment is the closest thing which guarantees "equal access" or something like that but it's not explicit.
But guns on the other hand? I can see why we're in the place we're in now.
Doesn't charter then essentially become public then? All kids will have to go to them.
You underestimate the capacity of evil behind the intent to destroy public schools. All schools won't become public...what will happen is they'll change education being mandatory, is all.
Then the USA will become like other countries today where this model exists: the children of the rich will be educated, while the children of the poor will not be educated. This is course leads to a large and permanent underclass of people who will then work for crumbs, and their children will work also. So the rich will just get richer.
Think of countries today where kids dig for the minerals needed for cell phones. Or countries where kids sew clothes and athletic shoes. These are not poor countries, at all. All the money goes to the wealthy people in these countries, and the poor are kept ignorant and uneducated. 'Human rights' is a foreign concept, so IF people can summon energy after working insanely enough to actually rebel, any rebellion is quickly squashed.
Anything good and decent we have in this country sprung out of rebellion against the rich, public schools are just one example
Education will be delivered by technology, e.g., AI and VR.
The radical right gets a lot of flak, rightfully so, for wanting to destroy public education and funnel the money into private hands. Sure.
But everytime some misguided Liberal pushes shit like social promotion, or graduating illiterates because of something called "equity," or responding to classroom violence or other misbehaviour with something called "restorative justice," they are literally making the case for the radical right.
It’s amazing people fail to realize this. It’s not entirely the republicans/right wing that has led public education to become what it is today. I live in California, so there’s no way I can blame the Republican Party for the mutual issues here like low pay (a lot of rural areas don’t pay well and some big cities don’t pay enough for COL), behavioral policy, etc. I know of Charter schools that have waitlists! There’s a growing demand for those schools bc the public schools are plagued with issues that stem from these social justice, equity, compassion policies that the left advocates for. Parents see a poor learning environment and flee. For example, as much as people try to delegitimize charters bc they can kick students out for bad behavior or failing, kicking students out bc they are negatively contributing to the classroom environment isn’t bad policy. Public schools used to do that too. It would be Saturday schools, suspensions, and expulsions for poor behavior and alternative schooling for students severely behind academically. And the classroom used to be a more serious environment bc of it. It’s no good to the student either to not learn of consequences or force them into a class where they are underprepared for the material.
Those are not liberal policies. Those are conservative policies. Social promotion is 100%, and I mean every single fucking scrap, about funding. A kid costs twice as much when they are held back. That cannot happen.
The same is true of discipline. It’s about preserving funding and preserving their jobs, dealing with problems by allowing the privileged students to segregate away.
These are not policies that have anything to do with the left. sacrificing public good cynically to maximize funding is a clear conservative goal. If you buy the rhetoric that it is about equity in even the smallest degree, then you are gullible as hell.
That is just not true. Liberals have pushed these equity policies the most. In my state conservative legislators pushed through a new school discipline bill. Who opposed them? Liberals.
True. Also, there will always be poor people. And poor people’s kids deserve schools, too.
And Special Ed. Charter/ Private schools don’t want to work with certain groups within that population.
Also, there will always be poor people. And poor people’s kids deserve schools, too.
And this is the great shame of our country. In a country as rich as the USA, filled with people descended from the bold and the daring and the adventurous and, more than anything else, the BRAVE from all over the world, it is a shame that poverty still exists. It is a shame that we can't even seem to imagine a future where there are no poor people.
Nobody should be poor in the USA
The children of
the bold and the daring and the adventurous, and more than anything else, the BRAVE
would have gravitated toward the mean.
And yet, none of us should be poor. This country is so rich in resources, poverty should not exist at all. There should be no poor people. Everyone who can work, should be paid at bare minimum a living wage, which would lift them out of poverty, and everyone who can't work should be supported by the surplus with a stipend equal to living wage. This would eradicate economic poverty immediately, and social supports should eradicate the mental/emotional effects of poverty within a few generations.
We could do this if we wanted to. But most Americans can't imagine poverty not existing. We need to break the belief that there is a scarcity of resources.
Yep. Private/charter schools can decide not to take kids that have disabilities.
Tell that to the charter school I worked at this past year. We were starting to joke that next year we might not be able to meet General Education requirements for FAPE because of how many students with disabilities we had and how many more were applying to the school for next year. We were doing nothing to advertise to get that population to apply, but legally we couldn't discriminate against them or tell them "no" if we could meet the least restrictive environment as established in their IEP.
The idea, at least, is that charters can specialize in ways public school can't or won't, and that they can compete with each other along using that specialization. The smart kid at a Title 1 who needs to spend half his time watching his back can go to the charter built around top test scores and academics and be happy there. The kid who doesn't really grasp or see the point in higher-level classes can go to a vocational charter that runs him through whatever's mandatory and then tries to get him on a good career path without the expectation of college.
There are, of course, things that might interfere with the above, but that's what's being hoped for.
What you described is literally just segregating students. The ideal goal of charters that you correctly just described is at best stupid and at worst hateful.
Public schools can't be everything for everybody. We have tried that for decades and it's failing.
We can do that without defunding public education, it would just take policy changes.
Public schools will still exist, it'll just be the kids who can't afford or get kicked out of the charter/private schools because of grades/behavior.
Public business vs private business. Public schools are more of 1 size fit all type. Charter schools are more of selective market. There will be charter school focus on the poor disadvantage students, there will be charter school focus on the gifted, and there will be charter school focus on the average students.
Pure fantasy. You’ve bought the lie that profit is the only thing that drives progress. Look at how private equity is decimating the health care system in the US.
Private equity is decimating the healthcare system because reimbursement for medicine has been slashed for the last 30 years. If reimbursement through medicare/private insurances kept up with inflation, doctors would be getting paid 2x what they're getting paid now.
It's literally the opposite. The LACK of profits is what is decimating the healthcare system. The average doctor made 160k in 1990, they make about 225k now. If adjusted for inflation in 1990, they should be making 380k
Just in the last 4 years, the medicare conversion factor was reduced by 10%. While there has been skyhigh inflation, doctor salaries have been reduced by 10%.
The medicare conversion factor ($ per RVU) was $31 in 1992. Wanna know what it is today in 2024? 32 years later? $33.29.
Over the last 32 years, doctors have gotten a 7% raise. Over this time period there has been 120% inflation. What this means is doctors payment per procedure/patient has been reduced by more than 50%.
The problem is medicare. Medicare is absolutely decimating healthcare, not private equity.
huh? where did I say that profit is the only thing that drives progress?
Charter schools will continue to open and close like the small businesses that they are, forcing historically oppressed communities to have to re-enroll their children in the next new venture year after year. The lack of consistency and quality teaching will become another adverse experience in the lives of our most vulnerable youth. Conservative state legislatures will continue to roll back child labor laws and then eventually make school no longer mandatory. The impact of all the compounded toxic stress (generational poverty, historical & structural racism, increasingly draconian laws, collapsed public education with other public services soon to follow) will cause some families to give up the struggle of getting their kids an education. If the schools are terrible and lack oversight, why not just let kids go to work, right? Oh yeah, forced births will also be a thing if the trajectory of GOP policies are allowed to come to fruition.
So a late stage capitalist hellscape basically.
Nah. The oligarchs are just gonna throw all the kids born now at the incoming waters wars or other causes related to securing the fortunes of the wealthy.
I would assume we would be looking at the Dollar General model of education for the majority of folks who live in anything but wealthy areas. A charter is owned by the corporation and they will want to maximize profits for their shareholders. Why pay for teachers when you can provide “fully customized AI learning solutions” or whatever canned curriculum they can use. A good education with things like field trips and maker spaces and robotics programs will be available to those who can afford to pay for it. Those schools answer parents because the parents have a choice of where to put their money. What incentive does the lean running corporate school chain have to answer to parents? About the same incentive Dollar General has to answer to its customers about the quality of its products . I see “teachers”at these schools being more like a proctor. This way anybody can do it. You can get $18 an hour to sit in a room with 30 kids on computers.
I know this is a little dystopian and I have never worked at a charter school, but my completely anecdotal evidence from this sub, seems to point to the same split- high quality great schools where teachers are respected and paid well And schools where the teachers are making $35k a year and being run into the ground.
I guess I just don’t see an America where a corporation decides to bleed money to do what is needed to provide a good education for all children. Educating poor children is not a good moneymaking proposition. I’m a band teacher. In what world does my job exist as part of a profitable corporate model.
Public education does kind of suck for tons of reasons, and it costs people a lot of money, but at least to a degree you are in control of the education provided where you live. A corporation does not have to care at all what you think of the school in your neighborhood any more than the Dollar General has to care what you think of the way their parking lots are painted.
Honestly I don't see charters taking over public schools, I see public schools ser8vng the poor AND those who can't meet the requirements of charters, while charters take all else. The charters are taking kids who are doing fine in school, and public is really left with those who ca t get the support needed from charter.
Charter schools in California are already public schools. They just have their own board and are not constrained by district politics.
Vouchers, non-certified teachers, and lower pay. Oh yeah, no unions and a revolving door of "babysitters." This could be avoided by increasing pay and working conditions, but the right-wing wacko will never allow that to happen.
These charters are essentially private institutions that are funded by public coffers. So what happens is that the owners will find ways to pocket as much as humanly possible. Though these organizations are technically not for profit, it’s trivial to get around this.
For example, the owner of my small 6 classroom plaza charter made a salary of 200k as the executive and owned the land the school leased. His duties included and were limited to working on the paperwork to get the district to forgive the loan they gave him to start the school.
A long time ago, someone said education is the great equalizer. Today it’s seen as some sort of mind altering drug with a political agenda.
What has happened, people were made to believe something that is untrue to be true. Most parents think mostly positively of the public schools their own children attend, but have a generally negative view of the whole system- jeee I wonder why?! I had someone tell me some crazy idea about the ‘Chinese’ coming to the us to learn how ‘we’ educated people in the 1950s, because back then it was some awesome thing. The racial / classist undertones were pretty clear. Post wwii education was segregated and not just racially. So much so that we are literally still recovering from the effects of this segregation. Once we enacted laws to ensure everyone regardless of race, gender, religion, disability, or social economic status had equal access somehow education turned into this horrid monster that ill prepared children for life and indoctrinated them with ‘wild ideas.’
But that’s besides the point, what will happen is the same thing the happened to healthcare. Eventually a handful of companies will have a monopoly on the system and boards of individuals with one goal: profit for shareholders, will dictate what your child can and cannot learn, how they will learn it, when they will learn it, where they will learn it, and have the power to deny service for arbitrary reasons. This will inevitably result in tiered levels of education that further segregate society into groups of those who have too much, have just enough, and have nothing. Communities will try to regain control but the charters will be too powerful to eliminate.
Charters are public. They just make an individual agreement with the state to get approved that outlines their focus. I do t know the process new ISD get made but I'm sure it is similar.
Remember the elected do not want an educated electorate. An informed educated populace threatens their power and control. Education will always lack funds, support, and importance because the elected prioritize maintaining control over an uninformed constituency. This perpetuates a cycle where critical thinking and informed decision-making are undervalued, ensuring their authority remains unchallenged.
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Great take. All too often the voucher discussion presumes that vouchers have to be one way or the other.
In reality, a legislature could legislate any restraints or policies it wants.
The disability activist groups will try to get public education back. I promise you most charter schools don't want IEPs. Parents will get sick of private companies kicking out their children and push lawsuit after lawsuit until there is a public option. Public education isn't going anyway where but funding might be reduced to nothing.
Charter schools have students with IEPS.
Yes because many local government dictate they need to have a lottery system to ensure equal access, however, I have notice that many (but not all) drop students with special needs prior to mandatory state testing from their roster. They always cite some obscure finding and the parents cannot submit a FOIA request since they are.... private.
The disability activists have no juice. They might be given vouchers to try to get serviced or it might just go back to what it used to be. Neglected and overlooked. 😕
I hadn't considered that. Vouchers may be an appeasement for them if they can utilized those programs to go to specialty schools.
That's why I think the future of public schools are those with IEPs or too poor to go anywhere, sadly.
Lots of states also have a right to education in their constitutions. Not easy to change those either.
Well the difference between charter and public is that it’s easier to say “we don’t like the data. We’re cutting funding until it’s better”. With public schools, it ultimately becomes the state’s problem the fix.
That would be the dream!
No, because charter schools are often unionized, which leaves a lot of blue state unions out.
11% of public charters are unionized
“While unions represent nearly 70 percent of traditional public school teachers, they represent only 11 percent of teachers at charter schools. These numbers reflect many charter schools’ strident resistance to teacher unionization. One example of this resistance played out in D.C. There, in June 2017, teachers at a charter school voted overwhelmingly to form a union, making theirs the first unionized charter school in the city. But negotiations between the union and the administration dragged on for years. And then, in January 2019, the school’s leadership abruptly announced that the school was closing at the end of the schoolyear. The teachers suspect that the school closing was no coincidence: they allege that it had everything to do with the union.”
Ugh, in my haste I skipped writing non-unionized, which as you show is generally the case.
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Hi, I taught in New Orleans which is all charter. What happens is that there are some schools that are great and all the parents apply there and keep the quality high based on that repudiation.
Then there are grifters at plenty of the other schools. 3A.P. Making 130k each and they stay at the school for three years and then keep rotating with crazy high salaries.
Eventually school board comes in to revoke the charter, and all the people who work there shuffle to another charter. And all the kids get dumped into other schools