<p>^ well, yeah, but our schools are not our medical centers. And having had two kids go thru sex education in public schools I can tell you they don’t do a particularly job of it. If parents are relying on them for that . . . well good luck!</p>
<p>I’d just expand Planned Parenthood - have more public outreach and neighborhood penetration. I have no problem with tax dollars going there. :)</p>
<p>I will admit my ignorance, I had no idea tax dollars were being used to fund religious schools. How is that okay? Why should the public pay for religious training? Especially when it comes at the expense of actual science education.
I am not a public school teacher, nor do I think public schools are perfect, but this whole movement strikes me as political. The vast majority of teachers I have met, in not even close to a blue ribbon type district, really care about the kids and the job they are doing.</p>
<p>Oh so you support cutting health and gym? Shame given our teen pregnancy and obesity rate. Ah well.</p>
<p>Gym and health aren’t regular parts of the curriculum in all areas.</p>
<p>Well, health is a joke. I mean a complete and total waste of time such as it is “taught” in public schools. Trust me. I’ve had kids go thru it.</p>
<p>Gym? I’m for gym.</p>
<p>I know, zoose and it’s a shame.</p>
<p>Our public high school had a very good health curriculum, I was very impressed.
In middle school, Ds curriculum was taught by the core LA/SS team. They read books that dealt with health issues and had classroom discussion. It prompted my Ds friends to contact the counselor in the building to hold an intervention for her and may have saved her life.</p>
<p>The health teacher at my DD’s middle school stalked a classmate and got away with it for several years. I just heard years later that he was finally fired. It was beyond awful for girls at that school to take “health” from the guy, but of course he had tenure.</p>
<p>Again, yes there are better and worse charter schools, just like better or worse public schools.</p>
<p>The difference is that even at the supposed lottery schools, students are cherry-picked. So comparing schools which kick out pregnant girls (or ELL students or special ed students etc etc) to those truly public schools that must and do accept everyone, is dishonest and repugnant.</p>
<p>If parents want schools which exclude either overtly or covertly, then that’s their choice. But to take money from the truly public schools to do that is simply a way to create a more class-ed society than the one we already had–on everybody’s dime.</p>
<p>^ garland, when I was on a school board during the early days of Charters (started out opposed, btw) the only way to get into a charter was by lottery. And this of course does require a minimally engaged and literate parent when the kids are little just to fill out the application. So yes, there is a selection effect, and that did trouble all of us as we looked at bringing charters into our district.</p>
<p>ESL requires a lot of resources so I would be surprised by a parent choosing a charter if their kid is not fluent in English. OTOH, I can imagine some highly ambitious immigrant families pursuing charters and perhaps not requesting ESL resources for their kids. </p>
<p>But the underlying and fundamental question here is why are these kids and their families seeking charters in the first place. It is not about finding fault with charters. It is looking for why our society has lost confidence in our public k12 system.</p>
<p>If a student who needs to be in ESL classes isn’t in ESL classes, their parents are doing them a grave disservice.</p>
<p>SH-- You ask why do some families choose them? Well, for some, it will be to escape the school with the behavior problems and students with learning difficulties and students with apathetic parents, etc. In fact, I’d say that’s the major difference between charter and noncharter schools.</p>
<p>So then the question becomes, do we want a two-tier system: tier one–students with no learning barriers but with involved parents, and tier two–students with learning/behavior/emotional/social challenges, and/or students whose parents aren’t savvy enough to remove them? And then, do we want to then compare the test scores of the two groups and say–look at how much worse the students in the second group are doing–it must be the fault of public teachers?</p>
<p>Because that’s what you (we) are doing these days–picking out the more prepared students, leaving behind the ones with issues, and then blaming the school and teachers.</p>
<p>Do we have more students with social/emotional/cognitive/SES challenges than before? That would be a good question, but it does seem so. OTOH, we ask more of students than we used to, and we bombard them with standardized testing, and the students who fell between the cracks were unrecognized in the past, though they still certainly existed.</p>
<p>The fact is, when controlling for poverty (the biggest “issue”) American students do as well as most other first-world countries’ students. So our public school system ain’t broke; but our social system has huge gaps and broken areas.</p>
<p>THOSE are what needs fixing–that is not an easy task. But scooping out the higher-functioning students and leaving behind the rest, while doling out “blame” for those who can’t single-handedly heal the left-behind students, is a bandaid approach. Nice for those who get chosen; more misery (and less support) for the rest.</p>
<p>Sew, the last time you were spewing public school hate you mentioned your disgust for a degree in education. I asked you why it was so terrible. You never replied. Also, what % of public school teachers have such a degree?</p>
<p>We have a straight-up totally public, K-12 school on a breathtaking campus here for which admission is only by lottery. People are absolutely desperate to get their kids in there.</p>
<p>
So it’s ok to drag down the high-functioning kids?</p>
<p>As I said upthread, our public high schools are amazing. Unfortunately, the admissions process is monstrous, favors the kids with families who are savvy about working the system, and leaves behind the kids who are most needy. They may not be charter schools, but when you split public schools into selective admission parts, it has the same impact of cherry-picking and segregating. The only difference is that the numbers look better than they actually are.</p>
<p>In our area, teachers above the elementary level can’t have a degree in education. They must have an academic degree in their field.</p>
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<p>Speak for yourself, please. You and your ideological pals are not “our society.”</p>
<p>My son’s second grade teacher had a weather satellite on the roof of the school with a terminal in her classroom. (Paid for by a grant.) The kids viewed from-space photos of our area, and made maps assigning colors to different ground formations/covers and features. (This was over a decade before Google Maps.) Each of them made a t-shirt showing all of this and the location of their own house. She taught the kids some Gaelic. They made and launched rockets and airplanes. They studied a rotten log and its insect life to learn about biomes and ecology and life cycles. They learned how to take scientific measurements, and participated in a longitudinal study by monitoring the growth and health of a stand of white pines. They made Pascal’s triangles, carried out as far as they wished. (8th grade math, according to some…) There was more, but I forget all of it. She had been a Maine Teacher of the Year. Later she spent a year as a NASA fellow and won a Milliken Foundation award.</p>
<p>Her degree? Physics? Biology? Math? No: education, and from what was formerly the state teacher’s college, at that.</p>
<p>
My son’s middle school has a state of the art weather center. Gorgeous, amazing.</p>
<p>When the test results were released in July, 0 boys in either 6th or 8th scored at the advanced level on the ELA exam. Zero.</p>
<p>
Statements like this burn my butt and come from people who generally don’t have kids with learning differences. Certainly not parents of multiple children who fall into high achieving as well as exceptionally gifted/learning disabled and see needs from both sides.</p>
<p>Most charter schools shun IEPs that allow for accommodations for students who are both gifted and learning disabled. Accommodations may be as simple as using a keyboard due to a written language disability (different neurological pathways), or an extra set of text books at home. Please, please, tell me how this is dragging another student down in any possible way? When the high achieving students all flee to avoid being drug down by the icky low-functing kids, the demand for advanced classes is gone. Where does that leave the student that is both gifted and learning disabled?</p>
<p>I’m not talking about learning differences Blueiguana, and please don’t make assumptions about my family because you have no idea. In the context, I was talking about kids from families who make the effort to seek out another option, which I think makes a huge difference. Learning differences are a whole other issue and one I will not speak to.</p>
<p>
In some areas, public schools don’t do a particularly good job with accommodations, either. That’s why in my area it is so incredibly common for kids in those situations to be sent to private schools.</p>
<p>So back to the OP… It looks like the policy is under review.</p>