Jay wrote:
Why?
I'm glad that you axed.
For any of you that don’t know what a charter school in the U.S. is: a charter school is a privately run school that uses government money in the form of price per student. Each kid gets a certain amount of money for the school to use in any way it sees fit. Basically school privatization.
A school voucher is a government given voucher worth several thousand dollars to be used for paying the tuition of a private school.
My main gripe with both of these is economic segregation. America is an incredibly classist place: QED your Biblical struggle to move up in class. Everyone shits on the people in the class just under them in order to make themselves feel better. You know how they say racism is mostly due to lack of experience with other races in the early years of development? I think the same applies with class. Middle and upper middle class people seem to share a different world with the working class and the poor. Being born into the former and having friends and working with and around people in the latter I can tell you how how this exist.
Now I'm sure everyone just rolled their eyes and said "Macbeth went off the rails and became a communist". No. I'm perfectly fine with private schools existing and enforcing their own standards of admission whether it is along class or racial or whatever other lines that exist. But when it comes to charter schools and vouchers the issue suddenly moves into the area of 'what the government is doing'. I do not believe the government should be pursing policy that splits the country in different existences based on money. It is bad for the country and society.
Now you are also thinking "Macbeth wants to use the schools for social engineering". Well, yes. The entire point of schools was social engineering. They were meant to build upstanding and educated citizens who could contribute to society. Building a nation. Why not enforce policy that gets back to the root of the school's purpose?
And now you are digging through wikipedia and reason.com to hit me with some info about teacher unions and charter school performance. Well if you want to discuss charter schools, we can discuss charter schools. As you acknowledged earlier education is my planned course in life and education and reform is an interest. Several points Re: charter schools
A. Charter schools do not perform any better than normal schools.
83% of charter schools perform the same or worse than comparable local public schools. According to Stanford university.
B. They have a high teacher turnover.
Charter school teachers are one and a half times more likely to leave teaching than a public school teacher. According to the U.S. department of education,
charter schools are more likely to hire teachers that do not meet state teaching requirements.C. The reason for hiring unqualified people and losing qualified ones is due to charter schools being non unionized.
95% of charter schools are non-union Remember charter schools are for profit entities and how an incentive to hire people for the least amount of money.
D. Being a for profit entity they end up squandering and mismanaging money that could be used on education.
My second gripe with charter schools are that they are or profit businesses. Not everything works better when there is a profit motive behind it for someone. Privatizing our prison system has unleashed maybe the worst human rights disaster in the Western world since the end of segregation in the south. Prison corps, and unions have inventive to make sure people get put into the prison system and stay there. God knows what will happen if we let private corporations run wild with the single biggest budgetary item for any U.S. state. For profit education at the university level has already led to a large amount of degree inflation and ballooning student debt.
I look forward to your well reasoned and not at all predicable and boring response.
Last edited by Macbeth (2013-03-08 18:57:59)