College students get federal need grants to attend religious institutions. How is that different?
Speaking for myself, I don’t think pell should go to private unis either- religious or not. A wrong at one level doesn’t mean that wrong should be expanded to other levels IMO.
I am always curious as to who school of choice is supposed to help. Say you’re in a failing school in Detroit and you are given a voucher to go elsewhere. Do you go to another failing school in Detroit? Or do you go to one a few cities away? If the latter, who is that really helping? The relatively well-off families who can afford to drive that distance (we don’t have public transportation here) and who can afford the time off work to transport back and forth. Who is left behind? The poorest of the poor with even LESS resources since those other students’ money is now gone.
And on the other end? My old high school is one of those that would likely take in school of choice students from Detroit and other surrounding districts. My high school already has somewhere around 6500 students. How much more do we want to push that? (Don’t get me wrong. I am happy that we accepted school of choice students and we did have students come from Detroit and elsewhere. I just don’t think it’s a sustainable model.)
A Freep article about this very thing. School of choice, around here, has created a modern wave of white flight. http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/09/20/schools-choice-creating-white-flight-metro-detroit/90509180/
Re: #41
Based on that article, it seems like school choice in the Detroit metro area makes the tendency toward self segregation (white flight) more obvious than it already is. Detroit is already a more segregated city at the neighborhood level than expected, according to http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/
Yes… it’s given another generation of whites an opportunity to “fly.” But I don’t know why that wouldn’t happen elsewhere- but sub out “white” for whatever is the slightly-better-off-on-average population.
I agree with you romanig on the Pell grants applicable only to public unis. It’s not uncommon in my area for parents to use schools of choice for elementary and middle school. We did. It made sense for our kids to go to the school from their babysitter’s home and her driveway was a bus stop for the neighborhood. I don’t know how we could have done it any different other than to hire someone to drive the kids back from the sitter after we dropped them off in the early morning to the elementary school closest to our home and then pick them up and drive them back to the babysitter. I don’t think the issue is schools of choice per se when discussing going to one public school vs. a neighboring public school, I think it sticks in people’s craws that they pay taxes to support public K-12 education and “someone” might use a share of that to attend a private school…the voucher concept. I think I support schools of choice and I think I support charter schools on surface, but I think I don’t support taking taxpayer dollars to attend a private school with possibly some exceptions , like disabilities. I am still formulating my thoughts on this because I am in an area where the charter schools and public schools supplement each other especially for kids with special interests in STEM or the arts. But here’s an interesting chart I found when I was starting to read up on this issue of vouchers.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparison.aspx
It’s hard for me to compare Detroit to very many places, even in Michigan. Perhaps Muskegon. One of Muskegon’s inner city high schools failed. It was taken over, as a charter school so time will tell. Perhaps closing failing schools and using taxpayer dollars to bus kids to successful school districts might be the answer for Detroit until the city can get on it’s feet…which could be decades. The issue of no public transportation is a huge one in Michigan but understandable given the history so shuttering poorly performing schools and consolidating kids at stronger schools would absolutely entail transportation which costs money. I suspect that since education is a state and local issue, the concept of charter schools and the reputation of the local religious and other privates is all over the place in implementation.
The charter schools don’t seem to be places to get extraordinary education.
But rather many times for kids who were doing poorly in public schools to be pulled out and try a charter.
Why would top kids want to be with the trouble / bottom kids?
Rich kids shouldn’t get a coupon to go to a private school. (Not charter) If that is what she wants to push, people should push back hard. That’s not right.
What says it would be troubled kids or those doing poorly?
I don’t see how any of us has enough knowledge to declare charters crappy, across the board. Nor assume there wouldn’t be some matching of kids to private schools.
Ironically, so many parents do want more say in their kids’ educations. Bussing is problematic, yes. But what about more quality alternatives nearer to their homes?
How exactly did “her policies” fail in Michigan when “her policies” were “rejected” in Michigan? If the performance of Michigan students is declining, how can one blame “her policies” if they were never enacted?
My family has had 8 educators (some of whom went on to become administrators) and every single one is adamant that Common Core is an absolute disaster and that teachers need to be held to some form of minimum performance standards evaluation. For several decades they had to tolerate sub-standard performance by some of their fellow educators, while the MEA fought tooth and nail to avoid any meaningful legislation holding educators to task.
There are good and bad public schools, just as there are good and bad charter schools. As momofthreeboys stated upthread, a school district is only as good as it’s teachers, administrators, and parents. If the MEA and the NEA are opposed to her, that’s more than enough reason for me to want to see how her policies might actually work. Common Core and the status quo sure as heck aren’t helping.
Not true. A good friend of mine down state drove her kids a long way back and forth to have them go to Black River Schools in Holland. It is one of the top twenty high schools in Michigan…and it’s a charter school. Excel Charter Academy in Grand Rapids is very good, Concord in Petosky is very good and there are others… I would suspect…just like public schools there are excellent charter schools and not so excellent charter schools and I suspect that holds true across the country…but I cannot agree with a blanket statement that charter schools don’t seem to be places to get extraordinary education.
Well she now disavows her support for common core but that was not always the case. When you dig deeper she was a strong supporter of national standards. More telling people whatever they want to hear. I would certainly want someone who is in charge of national education policy to have training and experience in education.
The most important aspect of her job is the part that is federal…Pell grants, federal loans etc. I’m not sure we need someone at the classroom level. In the past decade federal spending increased at least 30% with programs for low-income and disabled but by far, the greatest dollars under her new department are Pell, federal loans etc. Taking a close look at existing spending, managing the budget and looking at something with fresh eyes are far, far more important to me than the fact that she never stood in front of a classroom. Perhaps it might have had minimal value had she been a administrator or business manager for a school district at a local level but not having held that job at some point isn’t a strike against her for me.
What qualifies DeVos for this position other than lack of experience with public education? I ask that seriously.
She is the chairman of the American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group. She is also a member of the board for the Foundation of Excellence in Education and the Great Lakes Education Project both of which, however ,are supportive of Common Core as well as school choice. She served as the National Republican Party rep for Michigan and chaired the Michigan Republican Party four time. She is a chair of Windquest Group which is loosely an incubator and venture capital company for growing ideas and bringing them to market and she serves many boards and organizations including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Philanthropy Roundtable (she and her husband and family are in the top 50 philanthropists in the country) and Kids Hope USA which loosely is a mentoring group for at-risk kids. I have no idea why he chose her but perhaps she had the right balance of business acumen, political acumen and passion. That is usually what gets you a any job so I assume figuring out who you want in the business of your presidency is no different.
In highly segregated areas, “racial flight” is relatively easy to do for those who want to do it. In less segregated areas, it may be less doable for those who want to live in an area populated with only their own race / ethnicity, although it may be easier for those who want to avoid a specific race / ethnicity but do not care about the others.
Even in the absence or impracticality of “racial flight”, it is often the case that SES segregation is high. So “SES flight” could happen.
You seem to be confusing the idea of national standards with sameness of process. DeVos is for vigorous, minimum standards, but not sameness of how to get there, and is all for going beyond that standard when a school can do that and the students can as well.
I was probably in a similar place as she was. I was in favor of Common Core when it was first outlined, It was a good set of critical thinking and objective guidelines that laid out a set of minimums standards that students, in public school, should be able to achieve at particular grade levels. The key word here should have been “minimum.”
However, I quickly changed my mind when I saw that Common Core morphed into a top-down, heavy-handed, “teach this this way and only this way” approach. It took away the flexibility of local control of the process, and it often did not adjust for different level of ability. It was no longer a minimum set of standards because all the materials were set up with it as the only standard - that is not good.
For example, in the interest of normalizing slower kids, smart and very smart kids were intentionally held back from moving on lest the slower kids felt left out. At least, in our town we rejected that nonsense and top students are allowed to excel to the best of their ability and the less stellar students go at their own pace as well. This means getting the top students different textbooks with more advanced information etc., something Common Core did not allow for.
Schools need more than good people. They also need funding.
@momofthreeboys – The American Federation for Children, the Foundation of Excellence in Education and the Great Lakes Education Project are great sounding names. In fact, they are nothing more than lobbying groups for privatizing our educational system.
DeVos is a billionaire lobbyist supporting public dollars for for-profit private schools.
Her husband is Dick Devos, who ran for Governor of Michigan and whose father was listed in Forbes as the 67th richest person in the US.
Her brother is Erik Prince, ex- intelligence now active in selling mercenary military forces to foreign governments, under investigation for money laundering, gave an interview to Breitbart claiming the Weiner computer contained all manner of damaging evidence against Hillary, and a major donor to Mike Pence.
Thus is not draining the swamp. Do some research and get behind the fake PR.
^Good thing we’re keeping it non-political :-q
Funding sometimes helps, but there are plenty of underfunded school districts around the country that perform well due to the quality of people they have. There are also plenty of school districts that have been a sinkhole for funding and have never improved. Detroit Public Schools is a classic example. Decades of corruption, fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement are the hallmark of DPS, yet some want to keep throwing more money at it thinking it will somehow improve. Here’s the 2016 DPS Inspector General’s report…happy reading.
http://detroitk12.org/admin/inspector_general/docs/2016_Annual_Report.pdf