The Chartered boat needs to sink

Education, like health care, has become a location where corporations can make millions of dollars. Two of the occupations that respectfully knew everything about the members of the community and permitted the community to function, like 100 years ago (see my most recent post, “A Problem with Socialism“). My experience in education has led me to grave concerns. Like health care, education is doomed for the end of civilization.

Charter schools do great things. Their students show well, especially when compared to other students in the area and when they take standardized tests. Here is how this works: Charter schools dismisses the “bad apples” and public school take these students in. Charter schools do not accept “difficult” Special Education students, public schools work with ALL students. Charter Schools focus on one specific strategy or pedagogy, hence their charter which the students strive toward (ie. Montessori, STEM, Preforming Arts, etc…), public school work with all students and need to spread their focuses to cover the dozens of learning styles enclosed in their environment. Charter schools drain money from public schools.

Having taught in private, charter and public schools I have seen all three types of educational “societies” in action. Although I will not propose that I know all the details about any values included in these three general locations for education I can speak with knowledge about a lot of things. Briefly, I want to expose a trick Charter schools do to make themselves look better. Charter schools push for students who sincerely do not have a disability to “qualify” for Individual Educational Plans. When these students, who really are not receiving any specialized services, or at least not that cost much money, perform well on standardized tests these schools look great and thus qualify for more monies that would otherwise go to other local public schools. Today, I participated in another IEP meeting for a student who originally qualified for an IEP at a local Charter School. This meeting was to re-evaluate the student to see if they still qualified for an IEP. Like many students who left the Carter school, because they realized the education they were getting was not adequate, does not qualify for an individualize instruction and looking back at the testing, the student should not have qualified in the first place. These cases make it difficult on the public schools and allow money to be funneled to the Charter school.

Stay tuned for more quips about education