Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

I think Mordy's not denying that. My nieces attend an excellent charter school but I recognize the system is a shuck designed to dismantle public education.

there are a ton of terrible charter schools, too; esp. the for-profit ones.

imo if you send kids to a charter school and there are public schools available you are a scab

are public schools unavailable in some areas?

xxxp plus those specifically geared to produce compliant workers for a hungry industry, e.g., the J.W. Marriott High School for Future Hotel Maids.

Or the Steve Jobs Academy for Immigrant Children with Tiny Hands Who Don't Mind Inhaling Toxic Dust.

Go SJAfICwTHWDMITD, the Fightin' Dusties!

I will give a pass to montessori-style institutions for alternative class structuring but our local public school district has one of those, too

78% of New Orleans students are in charter schools, and all but five of the schools in that district are charter schools

It's one of those things where reform is painted as an impossibility (because reform involves work and administrative costs and is therefore Too Hard) and the solution is proposed to circumvent all existing structures and start schools over from scratch using charters. Areas with economic blight or natural disasters are targets for full shifts.

the other driver has been the bottom-up dismantling of social institutions by republican governors coinciding with national/regional efforts like No Child Left Behind -- demands being put on institutions to change their ways or conform to metrics (shifting metrics, since NCLB had a lot of flaws) without enough time, training, or funding to make those changes. prime opportunity for a charter school that was built from the ground up to conform to current regulations to step in

also conservatives are right that liberals who send their kids to private schools and then oppose charter schools on the grounds that they're bad for the public schools are hypocrites.

if I had kids and lived in an area with a mixture of schools, I'd probably be the parent who makes token arguments to my spouse about how we should be sending our kids to public school but gives up when my partner argues for a local private one

the only private schools available when I was a kid were parochial ones and the magnet high school I went to easily smoked them on course selection and quality of education

i'm sending my kids to private schools. nb that they are orthodox jewish schools so maybe i could cite that as a pass for why i'm not a hypocrite - and the public school districts in my neighborhood are routinely considered among the best in the country - but still, if you aren't sending your kids to the local public schools it takes some chutzpah to complain about vouchers.

the catholic high school kind of notoriously had some non-catholic athletes who were given scholarships to attend catholic high school. hmm.

also conservatives are right that liberals who send their kids to private schools and then oppose charter schools on the grounds that they're bad for the public schools are hypocrites.

Sorry, wrong.

Private schools are privately funded, paid for via tuition, alumni gifts, and so forth.

Charter schools are publicly funded, paid for via various grifts that all basically amount to the government contracting for a service.

I would never send my kid to a charter school, but I'm okay with private schools, the same way I believe rich people can pay for premium home security and premium firefighting services if they want. But charter schools are bullshit.

i think you misunderstand the critique. it's that if you buy your way out of the schools when it comes to your kids but don't allow ppl with less money than you get their kids out of the [presumably] inferior publicly run schooling, maybe it's not hypocrisy exactly but it's something gross. it's even worse maybe bc you're saying that only ppl w/ money deserve privately run education.

Charter schools could be fine and maybe good if they were regulated to within an inch of their lives, but the actual reality is that even the good ones are there to skim off taxpayer funds to enrich their operators, and this becomes nakedly apparent from time to time, usually with no consideration for, you know, the well-being of the children enrolled in them (hey look cheap real estate opened up across town! dear moms and dads, prepare to drive!)

I'm only aghast at private schools when it's clear the area has a really harsh private/public divide that mirrors a really stark income disparity and the public schools are underfunded

my friend who lived in Baton Rouge for a few years noted this was the case in part of Louisiana -- voters who went to bad public schools would get all ramped up for candidates who vowed to cut spending and lower taxes, public schools would get even less funding, and the politicians and moneyed class all sent their kids to private school anyway

the charter school mess is similar -- in some areas, the school board's influence is limited to the public schools and charter schools report to a city administrator. theoretically you could boot the charter company or have financial links to performance and oversight, but it doesn't really flush out that way. you just end up with a line item for education.

Mordy, that critique is mistaking the personal for the political, which is a logical fallacy beloved by conservatives, and I am surprised you fell for it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_personal_is_political

only ppl w/ money deserve privately run education

if you really hate the people who go to private school, you can say this with a sneer

because yeah buddy, you and the school where the nuns hit your kids with yardsticks, sure whatever

Have you noticed the thread title, TOMBOT

yeah the phrase "the personal is political" and the concept Tom is going for here are definitely different, but conflating the two is actually exactly what he is going for

also, lol Alfred

as a little kid I lived down the street from a family who sent their sons to private high school. they were the parents who had their kids host parties at their home, because at least then, *their* kids wouldn't be the teens driving home drunk

I swear I could use words better to win arguments had I gone to a fake private school paid for with public funds

How many of you attended public schools?

I went to public school for first grade and my parents disliked it so much that they pulled me out and sent me to private for the rest of my education.

well of course! they weren't supposed to attend it with you, no wonder they disliked it

I went to public school K-12, in probably two of the best public school systems in the country. The idea of "bad public schools" is utterly foreign to me

i don't have any friends who went to private school

#classwar

I'm starting to think that people with really good public school experiences are way too few

mine wasn't uniformly good -- we had a couple useless teachers in my elementary that a new principal cleared out, and my middle school had some serious discipline problems until we got a new principal. some sort of common thread, there.

where i grew up my elementary school was i think excellent. the middle school was ok, pretty fun times iirc. high school sucked. i think a lot of it had to do with the football team having like 17 coaches, all of them teachers or staff, all of them being more devoted to the football team than teaching. football is probably, out of all the official activities of high school, the worst thing about high school.

football is a disease and a fascist vanguard and children shouldn't be exposed to it

My only experience with public school was university.

Afaict you're paying for it one way or the other either thru private school or thru your expensive mortgage and high school taxes I don't see a huge difference class between private and public school students when we are talking about well funded public schools of the wealthy.

after high school I realized I hadn't met any gay individuals in 4 years there, and a ton of my ex-classmates came out in the years after. realized when thinking back how toxic the environment was to the gay community back then, it was no accident.

I am guessing it's probably not as bad anymore since the country's acceptance has improved, but I feel like kids that went to other schools than mine had an easier time coming out in high school.

local-tax-base-driven school funding is also unconscionable, in WA it's actually unconstitutional and the state legislature is in contempt of court for taking a million years to deal with it xp

xxp yeah, see, that's actually more of a flaw of public schools in practice -- the ones in more affluent areas will have kids that have had the benefits of living in affluent families and parents in that part of the district might spend more time at the school or donate in fundraisers, etc

in theory, funds are allocated by number of students and the needs of students in that area. in a larger city, that's more flat. affluent suburbs, not so much

silby otm, depending on the state/area how school funds are allocated varies and the different factors taken into account are political

there are a number of rural/sparse areas where schools are becoming consolidated and, while larger high schools are somewhat of a norm, the distance and amount of time kids are in transit to go to school becomes yet another factor. so you have student needs, economic disparity, distance to school, facility age and condition, and so many other things vying for priority in funding

I tend to agree that funding schools by locality leads inevitably to educational disparities that mirror economic ones. The antidotes to that involve decoupling education from the local/state level and basically federalizing it.

Which is a topic for "Reveal Your Probably Unachievable Liberal Dreams Here," not "Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here."

my belief is that no matter how much school funding you give northern florida, it's not going to do any good

I tend to agree that funding schools by locality leads inevitably to educational disparities that mirror economic ones. The antidotes to that involve decoupling education from the local/state level and basically federalizing it.

Thanks to one of the most devastating SCOTUS decisions of my lifetime yet no one discusses it: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1332

were you... a baby in 1973? still blame you for not protesting this

I was a zygote, an elegant one.

I was public schooled from pre- through college. Is this really a rare thing?

I was too, all that proves is that a dude who goes to class enough to get Cs can get a college degree

(tbf I went to more like 75% of my classes my last year as opposed to like, 40% the other years)

I went through public schools from preschool through grade 12 and then attended a land grant public university

And I post to ilx

my mom put me in a catholic school in second grade, i'm not entirely sure why other than she was catholic, but i think it was because i got bullied a lot. spoiler alert - it didn't help. high school i went back to public school.

anyway where i grew up got gentrified like five minutes after i was born so i had the option of world-class public schools, which most people don't.

Public/private/charter teacher here. Informed opinion says choice is good, etc., but most charters are profiteering wastelands. And among the charters that are good, many are good /because/ they skim high/low income, ethnic majority/minority students from/to neighborhood publics. IOW some charters good. But many good charters are good because they are re/segregating along the prejudices of the charter's beneficiary population.