More School Reality
Last month it was the report on private versus public schools showing no noticeable difference and this month we discover Report: Public Beats Charter In Scores.
Giving out vouchers is a waste of money, because public schools are as good as private schools, and better than charter schools, if the tests that the Department of Education insists everyone take are to be believed.
In Florida there is no accountability for charter schools. Just handing out tax dollars to private groups without requiring accountability is criminally stupid.
4 comments
Hmmmm, seems like handing our tax dollars to government groups without accountability should also be considered criminally stupid.
Case in point: well, let’s start with the Iraq debacle and then we can go forward or backward from there ad infinitum.
OK, I know your were talking about education….
So even if they are better are public schools good enough to support in their current form?
I think a pretty good case can be made that they are pretty much a failure at providing an education* and not very good at babysitting which seems to be their dominant activity…
*unfortunately for the public schools a majority of their students either aren’t very interested in education or have achieved their educational goals by junior high or earlier.
I think a pretty good case can be made that they are pretty much a failure at providing an education* and not very good at babysitting which seems to be their dominant activity… – Steve
Steve, I do not believe that is a sustainable assertion in the general case. And to the extent public schools have declined in quality, it is in part because they have been willfully deprived of money by well-intended but wrongheaded people on school boards and in antitax activist groups across the country. Defund the public schools, and you may be sure they will not be satisfactory.
For what it’s worth, I am a product of HISD in Houston. I do not believe the education I received there was compromised in any significant way. Does HISD have problems these days? No doubt. Please show me how diverting taxpayers’ money to failing private schools will help the public schools, which are, after all, the government’s obligation to the taxpaying public.
Locally we’ve had some charter schools that turned out to be nothing more than scams. Don’t get me started! They are shining examples of what happens when your government says, “Here’s some money; we’re not going to monitor what you do with it or what kind of educational results you produce with it.”
Steve [Modulator], I received a public school education and with it the obligation to pay for the next generation, just as the previous generation paid for me. There aren’t any free lunches, and public education isn’t free. You get what you pay for, and skimping on education means that the next generation won’t have the skills for the jobs needed to keep the country afloat.
When the US began its shift from industrial jobs to information jobs, no one wanted to spend the money to shift public education to deal with this new reality. When a kid sees that what s/he is learning in school has no relationship to the jobs available, the kid loses interest. There was a time when the public school system prepared people for the work place, now it prepares them to go on to another school where they might learn what they need for a job.
We need to stop with all the worthless testing and start bringing public schools in line with the workplace. We are ending up with a group of kids who don’t know how to do anything but take tests, which is not a marketable skill.
This isn’t about being a liberal or conservative, this is about saving the nation which is on its way to third world status.
Most of the school administrative costs that everyone complains about are directly related to fulfilling all of the requirements of “accountability” that people keep passing. The people who complain about the cost of education are usually the source of the additional paperwork that bogs down the system.
Vouchers are nothing more than kick-backs to the relgious right for their endorsements.