RAVITCH: Vouchers for unaccountable special education charter schools?

[yurbud]

This was especially disturbing to me given that my wife, a special ed teacher in a traditional public school, spends 90% of her non-classroom time on accountability paperwork rather than grading or lessons plans.

You know the game is rigged when politicians are doing everything possible to micromanage the curriculum, test real public schools to death, then use the results as an excuse for mass firings of teachers and to starve schools of funds, but do the exact opposite for for-profit charters.

I noticed this about the right a while ago, but unfortunately it applies to a lot of Democratic politicians too:

What they love they deregulate and shower with money. What they hate, they regulate to death and starve of money.

Politicians only love our kids when a big campaign donor is using them to make money.

While the state played the role of the blind sugar daddy, here is what went on at South Florida Prep, according to parents, students, teachers, and public records: Two hundred students were crammed into ever-changing school locations, including a dingy strip-mall space above a liquor store and down the hall from an Asian massage parlor. Eventually, fire marshals and sheriffs condemned the "campus" as unfit for habitation, pushing the student body into transience in church foyers and public parks.

The teachers were mostly in their early 20s. An afternoon for the high school students might consist of watching a VHS tape of a 1976Laurence Fishburne blaxploitation flick —Cornbread, Earl and Me — and then summarizing the plot. In one class session, a middle school teacher recommended putting "mother nature" — a woman's period — into spaghetti sauce to keep a husband under thumb. "We had no materials," says Nicolas Norris, who taught music despite the lack of a single instrument. "There were no teacher edition books. There was no curriculum."

***

Meanwhile, Brown openly used a form of corporal punishment that has been banned in Miami-Dade and Broward schools for three decades. Four former students and the music teacher Norris recall that the principal frequently paddled students for misbehaving. In a complaint filed with the DOE in April 2009, one parent rushed to the school to stop Brown from taking a paddle to her son's behind.

The reporter described the McKay Scholarship program as: "...a perverse science experiment, using disabled school kids as lab rats and funded by nine figures in taxpayer cash: Dole out millions to anybody calling himself an educator. Don't regulate curriculum or even visit campuses to see where the money is going. For optimal results, do this in Florida, America's fraud capital."

http://wp.me/p2odLa-XZ

[freshwest]

1. So true, when you wrote this:

What they love they deregulate and shower with money.

What they hate, they regulate to death and starve of money.

Politicians only love our kids when a big campaign donor is using them to make money.

[yurbud]

2. I wish someone could prove me wrong on that

and the same principle applies to foreign policy: if they act like this toward the people they supposedly represent, what are the chances that altruism has anything to do with what we do to other countries? Or that it has anything to do with the best interest of average Americans.