ATTN Suu and Nigel: this is why your fellow students derp so hard

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

A couple of things I'd like to point out: Teachers are required to have a degree in the subject they're hired to teach. Not the one they end up actually teaching. This is how a PE coach taught (failed to teach, actually) my daughter math for a year.

Schools have significantly increased the amount of homework children are supposed to do, starting at a very very young age, and their grades are increasingly tied to this homework. This creates an even greater burden for families where there is only one parent, or where both parents have to work, which is the majority of families. The excuse for this is that they are "preparing children for college" (really? You're preparing my ten-year-old for college?) but of course, as both a parent and a college student I am very aware that what children experience in college is absolutely nothing at all like what they are trained for in high school. In fact, yesterday I heard yet another college educator say that she consistently prefers teaching kids who dropped out of high school or weren't schooled at all, because, assuming they can read fluently, no education at all is a better preparation for college than most schooling.

This is the third one I've heard say something along those lines. And bam, there's another research idea.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

And, truth be told, I'm not entirely sad about this. If it's possible to privatize education and have an industry of for-profit companies making money off of education, while providing education superior to what public schools can provide (for whatever reason), keeping the price at or near zero, and retaining genuine educators who really are willing to do a good job, then what's the problem? It isn't like the State has an inherent monopoly on effective education. Public schools were never about getting the BEST education possible, they were about expanding access to education. If the "market" has a solution to this that works, there's no reason to hate it just because it's the "market."

Not really getting this, to be honest. In my admittedly limited experience with the charter school system I'm not seeing a major problem. What I've seen of the curriculum so far (what's being taught so far and the plans for this year) pretty much blows public school curriculum out of the water, there's no charge for tuition (there are uniforms, but there isn't a "fundraiser" event every week that they set the kids' hearts on while they're at school to shame you into going and contributing, like public schools have), and the teachers we met with are excited about the job and seem to know what they're doing (again - so far, at least).

So... are you posting the "ha ha look at the slow kid" gif because you know something that should change my calculus here, or just because I said something that hilariously fails to meet with your own opinions?

My understanding is that charter schools have much laxer rules about, for instance, the quality of school lunches compared to public schools. You aren't allowed to take special ed students if you don't have the resources to cover them properly... but in a lot of places charter schools aren't required to have special ed resources in the first place, so they can leave all of the difficult kids in public schools.

The quality of school lunches at this particular school (not all charter schools are the same...) makes public school lunches look like a McDonald's happy meal. There is an entrance exam, which I suppose is their way of eliminating the need to deal with "special ed" kids, a luxury public schools don't have. It used to be that public schools dealt with that by allowing for different "tracks" based on a student's individual ability and current level of proficiency in a given subject, which I understand was basically dismantled by NCLB. A real tragedy, that, but again I'm not going to make my kids dawdle uselessly in a class that's been slowed down to the lowest common denominator just because I hate the people who keep pushing for privatization of stuff.

Public schools - as govt institutions - have to maintain a minimal standard of students civil rights. Private schools can kick you out for whatever they feel like. The school I'm helping to build an administrative backend for has something like 6400 days of suspension served in the last five school years out of 6900 students, and only 400 of those suspended were only suspended for one day. About 500 were suspended for 2-3 days. Their suspension curve is crazy, they have a ton of students who've been suspended for 20+ days.

They make everyone wear expensive uniforms, and if something happens to it you gotta buy a new one, or else they'll write up your kindergartener in class every day for even the wrong color socks or whatever. God help you if you got paint on the tie. The catch is that they operate in the poorer neighborhoods of NYC. And as Nigel pointed out, the best predictor of student success is their family income. So you design policies specifically to discriminate against your own poorer students, repeatedly punishing them over trivial matters (I think their #1 "culture infraction" is some variation on "wore white socks with black shoes") until those poorer students parents get fed up and take their underperforming kid to go bring down the average of the public school test scores. Or not, and you just keep suspending the kid. They've got at least a dozen kids who've spent 40+ days in suspension. That's two months of school days. If they were actually dangerous, you'd expel them... so the only explanation is that they're playing chicken with kids lives to try to get the parents to voluntarily withdraw them.

No experience with this personally, but I'm sure it's a problem. Public schools, of course, have their own problems. For my family it was a choice between two sets of problems. On one hand, there was a school that systematically slowed learning to a barely perceptible crawl because classes were too large to control, the only thing being downsized faster than faculty was curriculum, large volumes of obnoxious kids whose parents refused to take an active role in their education (or their lives in general, for that matter), and the constant pleading for donations in the form of "hey kids let's all go home and tell our parents about this super awesome fun zany thing we're going to do! yay!" AND on the other hand, a school that doesn't bus the kids from and back to home, has a strict dress code including uniforms you have to buy (there are price breaks for low-income families), and a lack of accessible governing bodies.

Ultimately the charter school won out because the positives outweigh the negatives, for my family at least. We'll see how it looks a year from now. Maybe our opinions will change, but either way the alternative is a known losing proposition.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't really know where to start, so what I'll go with is the inevitable and highly-visible degradation of services which occur as soon as any for-profit sector hits market saturation.

I am not necessarily opposed to charter schools. I (unsuccessfully) attended one of the nation's first charter schools, my children attended/attend a charter school for the highly gifted.

HOWEVER

Charter schools are able to limit attendance to those who make their statistics look good. Since they are also subject to NCLB, they often simply play the numbers by refusing to enroll or kicking out those who drag their statistics down. So, "superior education" is highly questionable. But the most suspect aspect of the for-profit charter school (for what its worth, both the schools I and my children attended are not-for-profit) is the history of for-profit organizations in the US.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I don't really know where to start, so what I'll go with is the inevitable and highly-visible degradation of services which occur as soon as any for-profit sector hits market saturation.

I am not necessarily opposed to charter schools. I (unsuccessfully) attended one of the nation's first charter schools, my children attended/attend a charter school for the highly gifted.

HOWEVER

Charter schools are able to limit attendance to those who make their statistics look good. Since they are also subject to NCLB, they often simply play the numbers by refusing to enroll or kicking out those who drag their statistics down. So, "superior education" is highly questionable. But the most suspect aspect of the for-profit charter school (for what its worth, both the schools I and my children attended are not-for-profit) is the history of for-profit organizations in the US.

Yeah, I'm not really trying to argue any of this. I can totally see how it's likely that a for-profit (and non-profit) school trying to get a high score on standardized tests and therefore expose themselves to as few funding cuts as possible, is likely to play the numbers however they can. It's definitely suspect. My only point is that my kids happen to be their target audience, and for admittedly privileged kids like my own, charter schools do have a better track record than public schools do. So I'm torn between political distrust of the way the system is set up, and my obligation to give my kids every conceivable advantage I can give them. We do strive -- with a lot of success -- not to pass the "privilege" on with the "advantage," though.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't really know where to start, so what I'll go with is the inevitable and highly-visible degradation of services which occur as soon as any for-profit sector hits market saturation.

I am not necessarily opposed to charter schools. I (unsuccessfully) attended one of the nation's first charter schools, my children attended/attend a charter school for the highly gifted.

HOWEVER

Charter schools are able to limit attendance to those who make their statistics look good. Since they are also subject to NCLB, they often simply play the numbers by refusing to enroll or kicking out those who drag their statistics down. So, "superior education" is highly questionable. But the most suspect aspect of the for-profit charter school (for what its worth, both the schools I and my children attended are not-for-profit) is the history of for-profit organizations in the US.

Yeah, I'm not really trying to argue any of this. I can totally see how it's likely that a for-profit (and non-profit) school trying to get a high score on standardized tests and therefore expose themselves to as few funding cuts as possible, is likely to play the numbers however they can. It's definitely suspect. My only point is that my kids happen to be their target audience, and for admittedly privileged kids like my own, charter schools do have a better track record than public schools do. So I'm torn between political distrust of the way the system is set up, and my obligation to give my kids every conceivable advantage I can give them. We do strive -- with a lot of success -- not to pass the "privilege" on with the "advantage," though.

ok

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ohhh I probably forgot to tell you about something.

Fuck it I don't care anymore.

[Golden Applesauce]

And, truth be told, I'm not entirely sad about this. If it's possible to privatize education and have an industry of for-profit companies making money off of education, while providing education superior to what public schools can provide (for whatever reason), keeping the price at or near zero, and retaining genuine educators who really are willing to do a good job, then what's the problem? It isn't like the State has an inherent monopoly on effective education. Public schools were never about getting the BEST education possible, they were about expanding access to education. If the "market" has a solution to this that works, there's no reason to hate it just because it's the "market."

Not really getting this, to be honest. In my admittedly limited experience with the charter school system I'm not seeing a major problem. What I've seen of the curriculum so far (what's being taught so far and the plans for this year) pretty much blows public school curriculum out of the water, there's no charge for tuition (there are uniforms, but there isn't a "fundraiser" event every week that they set the kids' hearts on while they're at school to shame you into going and contributing, like public schools have), and the teachers we met with are excited about the job and seem to know what they're doing (again - so far, at least).

So... are you posting the "ha ha look at the slow kid" gif because you know something that should change my calculus here, or just because I said something that hilariously fails to meet with your own opinions?

I have extremely limited knowledge of charter schools - most of what I know about them is from an aunt who is Very Much active in her local politics, specifically against charter schools. I probably swallowed some woppers along with her legitimate gripes about charter schools. I vaguely recall a source that seemed more balanced to have found is that there is more variation within charter and public than between the two groups, and that the average charter school is about as good as the average public school. The top 10% of charter schools and of public schools are both better than a random school in the other category, but adopting a charter school program doesn't necessarily give you a better or worse school; it comes down to the individual schools. Given that there's no clear statistical benefit, though, there's a fair argument to be had about how whether you want government funds to be diverted into teacher union benefits or individual CEOs.

The only other bit I know is from working with a single specific chart school chain and some googling I did to figure out what all their acronyms meant. (they hired some incompetent 3rd party people to build them software, and it's now August and it's not ready, so they're paying my company to do it right better) This specific chain - I think they might be the largest charter school network in the state of NY, certainly in the city - pretty much only hires teachers straight out of college and few last longer than about 4 years. Is that a good thing? It certainly saves money, but I don't know how that affects the quality of education. I suspect that the high teacher turnover (according to them, this isn't specific to their chain; they claim all charter schools have high turnover rates) is symptomatic of really awful management and teachers getting fed up with educational policy. Or maybe the place is so awesome that a teacher with four years experience can walk into any other school in the country and get a job, I dunno.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

unrelated to topic:

HEY I THINK MY COMPANY IS THE "INCOMPETENT 3RD PARTY" TO WHICH YOU REFER

You keep your grubby mitts off my client, you interloper.


somewhat related to topic:

To be honest I shouldn't be making large-scale statements about the validity of charter schools "in general" as compared to public schools "in general," as I have no real in-depth experience with either "in general." I have only the one district local to me, and the 3 weeks we've spent in a charter school so far, which hardly qualifies me as an authority on the matter. Really it's only anecdotal, and thin at that. My point is only that I am not convinced that either system is superior to the other, only that they have weaknesses in differing categories, and that for my kids specifically (can't say anything about anyone else's kids), charter school seems to be the lesser of two evils.

[Suu]

I'm not that familiar with how charter schools work, nor am I a parent, but, as someone who may potentially educate your child either in college or high school, I find a lot of this pretty disturbing. Granted, teaching is my fall-back plan, though I may still make more money bartending. Either way, thanks for this thread.

[Cain]

PS, Carlos Danger; your new handle makes me LOL and LOL and LOL.

You'll LOL even harder when Carlos Danger's Penis becomes the Mayor of New York.

Holy shit, is it running? I'd vote for that!

Well, the posters I've been making up and putting online certainly work on the basis that it is.

I also think Carlos Danger's penis, despite it's few notable, controversy-laden public appearances, is less liable to break under the pressure of one of the most stressful political positions in the world than Mr Carlos Danger himself.  Probably.

[Cain]

I'm not that familiar with how charter schools work, nor am I a parent, but, as someone who may potentially educate your child either in college or high school, I find a lot of this pretty disturbing. Granted, teaching is my fall-back plan, though I may still make more money bartending. Either way, thanks for this thread.

Based on what I've heard from my friends teaching in the US, I would use this as my very last fallblack plan.

Unless you are willing to teach somewhere they don't treat teachers as the cheap alternative to hiring a babysitter/anger management therapist/parole officer.  Private schools aren't that hard to get work with, and the classrooms are smaller, better equipped and you're usually paid better....but they have their own special brands of bullshit which can be hard to swallow, and when you factor in the extra hours private schools expect from their staff, you're probably not getting paid that much more than a public school.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm not that familiar with how charter schools work, nor am I a parent, but, as someone who may potentially educate your child either in college or high school, I find a lot of this pretty disturbing. Granted, teaching is my fall-back plan, though I may still make more money bartending. Either way, thanks for this thread.

Based on what I've heard from my friends teaching in the US, I would use this as my very last fallblack plan.

Unless you are willing to teach somewhere they don't treat teachers as the cheap alternative to hiring a babysitter/anger management therapist/parole officer.  Private schools aren't that hard to get work with, and the classrooms are smaller, better equipped and you're usually paid better....but they have their own special brands of bullshit which can be hard to swallow, and when you factor in the extra hours private schools expect from their staff, you're probably not getting paid that much more than a public school.

I second this. Also, I have friends who teach or have taught at private schools in the US, and the pay is quite typically really shitty, because private schools can hire whoever they feel like regardless of educational level. My friend was teaching high-school math at a quite expensive private school here and she has no degree at all. She's taken basic math including calculus in college but dropped out.

If you end up teaching, you're better off teaching in a community college or university.

[Suu]

Like I said, total fall-back plan. I want to go into museum work, which pays better to start, at least.