The spreading GOP destruction of public education

Happens all the time. So many kids come back to the public schools a year behind after trying out a charter school. Or come back partway through the year because the school went under or just disappeared on them. Disruptive to the learning of those students and the ones who stayed in the public school.

 

You make schools profitable by cutting costs. Hire teachers who aren't as good, make them teach more students, and the profits come rolling in. It also helps to own the building the school meets in and force the corporate school to pay higher than market rents. Lots of ways to make money off of education. Most of them result in worse education.

If you can avoid letting expensive kids (ESE, handicapped, discipline problems) into your school, that makes profits higher. If your state doesn't allow you to cherry pick the easy kids, take them in and then kick them out in a month.

 

I have no doubt that's true.

I don't know. How so?
I'm older than you, but I never heard the term 'government school' growing up, or thru most of my adulthood. They were public schools.
It's not a coincidence that it's become the term that conservatives routinely use to describe them. And it's not as a positive term, is it?

 

1. Preston used to be the secretary of HUD (meaningless side note.)
2. I'm with Habitat for Humanity not Goodwill. (Meaningful side note).
3. My yacht has been in drydock all spring and I have been forced to slum it at my private resort in the Caicos. (Meaningless embellishment of truth)

 

And when they come back to public school in the middle of the school year no funding comes with them.

 

A vital point that seems to get lost. The public schools have to be there, have to be ready, have to be funded.
Jacksonville has had charter schools close suddenly during the school year.

 

In my opinion a government school sounds much like a political term used in the way that you would expect. It would exist to help perpetuate the goal of a specific government. (What people are accusing DeSantis of for instance.)

A government run school is one that is bogged down with politics both internal and external (not the red and blue kind per se)but doesnt really exist for the purpose of propping up the beliefs of government.

I consider our public schools to be the second of the two options.

My concern though is that if you keep a society mostly bound to government RUN schools, you take away a needed road block on the slope to government schools.

(Not sure if that made sense, but just trying to show what I consider the difference.)

 

Since it's not going to be based on what is safe for the child's development, how do you navigate teaching about a topic based on competing parental instructions such "as soon as possible" vs "never!"

 

Actually I didn’t have to dig at all, but you have to be careful with any of these rankings because rarely do they provide the metrics they used. For instance U.S. News has Florida at #14, but they only use three metrics for that ranking which are 8th grade standardized test scores, graduation rates, and college readiness again based test scores of those who took the SAT, ACT, or both.

 

It's all a GOP Indoctrination campaign. We are just a few years before Marshall Law is declared as necessary to keep the 'libbies' down. Turn neighbor against neighbor and let chaos reign. Putin's dream becomes a reality, except it may be China that will be the new Superpower nation.

 

Litter boxes and drag queen story hour for sure. It’s a national crisis.

 

Master plan. No bookstores, no story hour. Libraries next.

 

It’s a tough problem, and I think there’s good reason to come at it from more of a relative perspective as you are doing. I appreciate your philosophical questions. I also take Friedman’s basic point that competition creates superior products and gives parents more say in their children’s education. I don’t know how to satisfactorily solve this tension, but I wouldn’t be opposed to some smaller scale experimentation.

 

So many issues, but I think I take significant issue with the fact that the voucher system will result in some form of competition with measurable determination of superior pedagogy. I guess in our current climate, and this isn't the only issue, I view that judgement of the most effective method like the Russian judge and the old Olympics.

 

And many others benefit from it. It’s called having a choice. Not all choices are the right ones.

 

Parents can educate at home as they choose. The other side cannot undo what’s happened.

One has a choice the other doesn’t if all have to be part of it.

A parent can also check books out of the public library that they want their kid to read even if they are banned from the schools. If it’s important enough to them, they will. This is why some decide to attend a different school. It’s not always about grades.

 

Certainly I agree that we haven’t yet developed a broadly accepted metric for determining quality of pedagogy, but this issue plagues public education as much as it does private/charter schools. If the task is so daunting that we can’t trust parents and students to judge the quality of education - those whose lives are directly affected by the education - I am not sure why we would be able to trust politicians and the public to accomplish it.

 

This too often describes the nature of charter schools. Looks great to the general public, but peel back just one layer and you find a nefarious entity that tends to fail the children it supposedly serves.