You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Charters’ tag.
One thing that is important this election season is to find out who is for charter schools and who is against them… Then vote for someone who is against them….
Recently some regulations were changed deep inside the DOE to allow more money to go to charters and be taken out of public schools… They supposedly were stopped by loud noises from legislators. But such will keep coming again and again as long as Charter School law remains open and charters still remain an option….
Did you ever wonder why they always have to “sneak” charter school changes through? Why do YOU sneak things, like past your wife or husband, like past your boss, like past your children? Is it because you don’t want to get caught? Exactly… So why are we “sneaking” changes to charter law in the dead of night?
Because it is bad legislation for Delaware’s soon to be one million people, and it benefits probably 5 friends of those players pushing it forward…. The only way to pass something that will piss off one million to make 5 people happy, is to keep it hidden from those million people…
When someone says at any forum that they are FOR charter schools…. if you can, ask them in public this question:…. Since only one in five children go to charter schools in Delaware, and since Charter Schools take money away from those other four…. how do you propose re-compensating those Public Schools who get hurt by having a Charter take their money, so the levels of educations for 4 out of 5 Delaware children, can remain the same??
And that’s the rub… When they say we are going to improve education for one fifth of our children by great charter schools, what isn’t said at all, is that 4/5ths of our children now have to suffer educational losses due to funding cuts!
How can that even make education better?
If you have a +1 and then add a -4 to it, Common Core or not, you still get a -3 compared to zero change if you did nothing at all….
So ask them, in public, out loud, how if they promote a charter, what is their plan to fill the gap of funding in the public schools system caused by those very charters they support….
Then, don’t vote for them. Vote for their opponent…
Because in all campaigns leading up to this year…. there has been deep silence on that other side of the issue…..
But that other side, the harm they do to the MAJORITY of students, is exactly why charters in 25 years, have never adequately functioned to improve education across any wide area….
The problem with inner-city education everywhere is too much need for too few resources.
Though rather common-sensical when stated so bluntly, it has taken America 50+ years to reach this point. Our slowness comes from the dichotomy of realism. Science tells us that when born, most for our brains are 99.9% identical. (Occasionally an environmental effect or gene flip can impede one before birth, but missing that, all people if placed in the same environment can perform at very close levels of performance through out their lives). However reality of what enters a school system at age 5, presents an entirely different perspective. We see children of affluence entering at very high levels of recordable intelligence, and children of lower affluence when compared to those of high, look just plain dumb.
That appearance of dumbness comes primarily from their inability to express their thoughts (ELA), as well as their lack of a broadened world perspective.
It is a rare person among us who enjoys seeing this dichotomy. We all wish it would get fixed…
If children were businesses, here is how we’d fix them. We would create an insurance fund. Calamities do befall us all at random moments, often with catastrophic consequences. In order not to ruin companies, an idea evolved that if all parties would pay into a fund as their “insurance” they would not lose everything. That fund would reimburse a business if calamity struck them. The assessment for that fund would be affordable to all, written into the costs of what they sold, and thusly, calamities could be economically handled.
Bussing was a clumsy attempt at emulating this system. We shut down an inner city’s district and made four suburban districts split up the costs incurred by those inner city children. We moved children out to where affluent people lived….
With hindsight, it has become apparent that perhaps moving the money in would create less hassle than moving the children out.
Talk of making New Castle County one single school district has been another ongoing attempt to address this issue. The prime idea being that all revenue collected from Talleyville to N. Smyrna would be such a huge pool, students within that geographical boundary could all get proper funding… The suburban money could be averaged out to something that was more equitable to students in Wilmington.
But politically,… schools are a local community issue and parents in urban Wilmington have little concern over the needs of exceptional students on the Maryland-Delaware boundary, and Greenville doesn’t really care that much about people in Port Penn. So having one district handling all decisions, especially those non-financial ones which would now be decided from far-far away, never took off.
Which brings us to the insurance model…
Just as each business runs itself however way it wishes, each district will continue to do the same. No change from how they are now. But each school system pays funds per student they have that go into an insurance fund which gets used to fix calamities in education..
Those calamities would be priority-type schools in areas in areas where there is no seed to cultivate blooms. In a priority school one must buy the seed, as well as tend to its cultivation…. In more affluent districts that seed money is primarily handled by the parents of each child. They teach the basics like alphabet, numbers to twenty, and colors. But in priority schools, where everyone enters at the bottom level, there is no seed to speak of. Teachers have to start where affluent children have been learning since birth. Teaching the 26 letters. Applying phonetics to each of those symbols, basic numerical philosophy (counting), as well as names of colors.
Obviously this would require more teachers. One can’t say “read this book tonight and we’ll discuss tomorrow”. One needs more personalized attention when one is supposed to teach the book, but instead has to simultaneously teach a child how to read at the same time.
Which is why to achieve success in a priority school (which if correctly titled would be any school that has 50% or more of its students listed as low income), one MUST have an 11:1 student teacher ratio.
If one is currently at a 33:1 student teacher ratio then obviously, one needs to hire 2 more teachers just for that one class… Which at $40,000 a teacher, is not cheap. But necessary.
When one is trying to stretch budgets, having one teacher disappear to save $40,000 is the simplest solution. However, it dooms those far-behind children who would readily learn in an 11:1 environment but not in a 22:1 or 33:1 classroom
The reason today we have such problems with inner city education is that across the careers of most of our students, adequate funding for the 11:1 ratio was not available.
But if we had an insurance fund that was culled from all districts, which could be applied to hire additional personnel in poverty schools, that issue would disappear.
Today there are multiple problems with inner city education. We can only tackle them one by one. This idea would take care of one of those problems.
Perhaps it hasn’t been made clear with all the scandals breaking minute by minute from inside the charter school’s network… One would rightly get the impression that our entire educational system if not government has run amok…
To be clear; that is not so. It is only 4 people in gatekeeper positions who either let legislation go forward or not, which are creating this gigantic mess. just 4 people….
Governor Jack Markell — vetoed HB 50 , the most popular legislation overwhelmingly passed by a bipartisan legislative vote to allow opt-out.
Secretary Murphy — now leaving and whose villainous leadership vacuum here will now be filled by Gov. Markell hand picked appointee Penny Schwinn.
8th Senatorial District Senator Dave Sokola: who bottled up HB 186 (a bill mandating public audits on Charter Schools) from going onto the Senate Floor for a vote. Also Sponsored SB 51.
27th Representative Earl Jacques Was unceremoniously put in John Kowalko’s seat as chair of the House Education Committee and has since held up all responsible financial legislation aimed at holding charter accountable to taxpayers funding… Also sponsored HB 165 which now allows the state to subsidize private owners of charter schools with less accountability than have public schools.
Most of our legislature and public officials are deeply concerned about the horrid policies now crushing schools, students, teachers, and parents. Yet based on our system which allows individuals to decide what pieces of legislation they shall be allowed to vote,…. nothing happens.
4 people… Remember that the next time you go off on generalities… it is not a problem where everything is fvcked up… It is a problem where 4 certain people are making everything fvcked up…
Rankings are a tool of control. You get rewarded if your rankings are high… You don’t get rewards and suffer if they are low… therefore you should do everything in your power to meet “our” goals which “we” set, “we” placed before you, “we” forced you to sign, which “we” will siphon and judge the results, which “we” will then issue you a pass if “we” like you and think you are one of us, or “we” will fail you if “we” don’t like you and don’t want you around us in “our” clique….
Of course this will never sell, …so you coach rankings as having some benefit to society overall… In the past due to lack of data, we really never had to deal with rankings as a society before the onslaught of computers… Before that, favoritism was just blatant favoritism… “I” like you so “I’ll” promote you over this other person…
But now with the manipulation of data being used to back up choices of favoritism… there is an clear and apparantly increased danger. Whereas before “I” may have not picked you because “I” liked Penny better, …. now, “I” still am picking Penny but your data has been manipulated so others who have no knowledge of your history, simply look at a score and dismiss you out of policy….
In the past that didn’t happen… If after losing to Penny, you went somewhere else and interviewed, they looked at your personality and said, wow, what a great candidate… Now… your score stops you before the first gate….
Now here’s the rub… In the contest between you and Penny, you could have been in the top 98 percentile of human beings in all categories, and still lose to Penny who is in the 99th percentile… So you would be a great candidate elsewhere, but… your data bank… has been ruined to justify the selection of Penny… and you can’t get a decent job…
Of course, if you could ever get past the gate, you could use your skills too develop a rapport with the interviewer and if you are truly that good, you should be able to sell them on the concept of over-ruling their corporate gatekeeper’s decision.. Like how many of you have ever been turned down for a credit score and so never get the chance to make your case? You know this, so you go through quite a bit of stress and trouble just to keep that score high, now don’t you? You do whatever they want, so your score is not blemished… You become their puppet… “I know you are suppose to be in a wedding but I need you to stay and finish this project this weekend…” “Ok, I’ll tell my daughter I can’t come.”
Ratings are a tool of control, a tool for subject manipulation….
And so it is with rating schools…. All rankings are as subjective as are College Football rankings… A great team not among the usual candidates is not ranked until they knock off a top contender. No matter how awesome; it is subjective. Even then, if an unranked team beats the number one team,…. thumps them…., the number one team drops one or two levels, and the winner barely gets on the board, maybe at 25… Subjectivity.
All schools across our future will be rated according to an agenda, depending on who controls them in the future… If is racial, they will be ranked by growth (if catering to the black community) or by top scores (if catering to the white community)… If Political, they will be ranked by likability, and if catering to the business community, they will be ranked so charters get favored…
What has worked well these last several years though is simply the publishing of all information… In fact, today the information is beginning to be curtailed because it was too successfully used in combating the administration’s switch from public schools to corporate schools’ policy… The lies they told, were all too quickly refuted by the availability of all the data…
With large pools of data one gets a balanced sense of a school. Gee, scores are low… but look at the numbers of low income… Obviously then those low scores do not mean teachers can’t teach….The actual improvement of those low scores over time in fact show the exact opposite. Inner city teachers are doing very well….. But on the opposite side, charters with high scores are lazy, living off the abilities of their students. Unchallenging, unimaginative, and unproductive, their data shows they are under-performing, though they trumpet how highly ranked their scores are…
This is lost in corporate rankings; grades of A, B, C, D, F. For gone is the methodology… There is no accountability behind the determination of the scores other than “it’s because we say so”… If Wilmington Charter is number one… it is number one. If Bayard Middle school is last at 98… It is last at 98 ….
This is not to say rankings should not be part of society. They have their place in corporations… After all, a corporation is based on one single motif, earn money and how and why that money gets earned is not necessary to know. Just who is driving our money is all that is needed for a corporation to continue making money…
But that single mindedness does not apply outside corporate life… Here is a startling example. Should we rank our children? How would we go about it? How would we decide which of all of them is the better? And rightfully … could we? Because as parents we see their differences and we see how each has different strengths and we recognize that their rankings will be determined strictly by “OUR” BIAS on how we choose to develop “our” rubric for that purpose…
Rankings are nothing but a confirmation of “our” own bias….
Which is why rankings continue promoting the status quo whether that status quo should be continued, or not….
How can “you” stop this?
“You” decided not to play… “You” leave your corporation and find another job. “You” file for divorce. “You” strike. “you”go to war.
Bottom line is they need you more than you need them…
They always succumb if “you all” stick together…. So go to Dover and learn how parents can be a force in the Strike against the Smarter Balanced Assessment….
Rankings are only good if you are in the top 1 percent…. Which means that 99% of us should wish as for ourselves, that our own children have their future decided upon their own merit, as judged by human beings who know them for one whole school year at a time… and not by some $11 dollar an hour temp in some test grading warehouse in Nashville Tennessee who grades 25 assessments per every hour.
This is what is wrong with education… This is why, “you” need to stop it.
They were 39 days late… but we got them… The preliminary Smarter Balanced Assessments….
The big takeaway was: is that all there is to it?
We’ve been arguing over this for 4 years. (I’ve been doing it for 3). We’ve spent $119 million dollars of Race To The Top Money to bring this to fruition. And we’ve been promised so much good would come from this test that we had no choice BUT to go forward with it…
But looking at the scores, it is the same as it ever was…. Nothing changed. Kids didn’t learn more. Kids may have learned less. If one takes the word of students and teachers, each student spent 8 hours taking this test spread over an average of 3.25 days…
At 70,000 Delawarean students taking the test, a total of 560,000 learning hours were spent on this actual test… One has to ask if that is worth the cost…
Over half a million hours were spent on this test… just so we can fire teachers. Is that the best use of our students time? Or should every parent be concerned with this, and insist that we return to the DCAS, one which took far less time and unlike this test, gave teachers feedback they could give students immediately afterwards.
Because we all know.
If experts say 8 years olds should be able to jump over a 3 foot high bar and you raise it to 5 feet, you are going to have fewer successful jumps… So anyone who says “see, how terrible education is today?: by looking at these scores, needs to be laughed out, ridiculed, and then ignored…. Because they don’t mean anything… Nothing at all.
The real question that needs to be asked is this… By raising the bar to 5 feet, did more people jump over the 3 foot bar then before… That data would tell us if this program was a success or failure…
But we don’t have that data… All we know is that fewer people “passed” because we made “passing” beyond the capabilities of all but our most developed and well trained….
So.. parents… is this truly worth $119 million dollars? So teachers…. is this truly worth $119 million dollars… So administrators… is this truly worth $119 million dollars?
Money that was taken from reading coaches that the Minner administration placed in every school. Money that was taken from math coaches that the Minner administration placed in every school. Money that was taken from having a policeman in every school… Money that was taken from supplying classrooms. Money that was taken from extra curricular activities. Money that was taken from the libraries. Money that was taken away from field trips. Money that was taken away… .. from you… After all, it is your money now being spent on this…
Did you get all the worth over what you paid? Are your kids Smarter? Do they seem more balanced?
If yes, we can’t knock the program … It appears to have worked… But if no, then as many of us have pointed out, this is a boondoggle of epic proportions….
So, when you looked over the preliminaries… did you too say…. “Is that all there is?
Someone is getting rich… somewhere…
First to understand the headline, Go here…
Through minutes buried on the DOE website, Keven shows us their game plan for the future… It is all about coming up with an arbitrary way of rating schools…
If they like your school’s principal… They will give it a good rating… (There, there, you did exactly as we said, Mr. Principal. Thanks for forwarding OUR agenda OVER those of parents… here is your good rating…..)
If they don’t like your school’s principal… They give your school a bad rating… (Sorry, Mr. Principal.. you did not fully support the bogus fake test we rolled out called the Smarter Balanced Assessment and therefore you get a fail……)
And one can’t complain back, because this rating system cherry picks ratings for each school … For example, Charters get let off the hook, their neighborhood public school gets pummeled even though all old data shows the charters failed as did Moyer, REACH, and Pencader, and neighboring public schools improved greatly (from a 45% to 72%).
===============
What this is like,… is ‘New Coke’ being forced upon you (for those old enough to remember it)… One marketing person thinks that ‘New Coke’ is better and convinces everyone in the company to go forward with it, though employees are shaking their head as they take their orders from on high…
What happened was… no one liked it; no one bought it.. It just sat on the shelves… Coke rushed to get the old coke back on shelves calling it Coca-Cola Classic and in their absence literally everyone switched to Pepsi… This became “the classic” example of epic marketing FAIL…
Now for us, one person thinks this Smarter Balanced Assessment is better, and has used their power to convince a majority in politics that we need to go forward. The employees closest to the action are all shaking their heads saying “it is crazy”, but would lose their jobs if they didn’t comply and since they have no other way to make income, they do what they are told, just as would you or I… And just like ‘New Coke’, this gets forced on the public.. Just like ‘New Coke’, the public obligingly takes their first curious sip……
Just like ‘New Coke’: EWWWWWWWWW… they all say.
What is the equivalent of Pepsi (opposite of Coke) to Delaware’s public schools? Yes, charters and private schools… And it is no secret that those in charge of formulating this policy were all former Charter Nazi’s at their former jobs.
So IS this just a misguided attempt to better a product, one that no one except its creators want to buy?… Or is it an attempt to fool the public into thinking their public schools are failing and that only charters can save and help their child get properly trained for adulthood?…
The sad thing is as more and more children go to charters, the public schools implode from lack of funding, and eventually serve only as a collective receptacle of all those unable to meet the high bar of charter entry, and yes, it does indeed becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. So is this deliberate swipe at demeaning public schools (not the first time tried by this administration) indeed a sinister plot to springboard huge corporate interests into the Delaware Market?… KIPP and Great Oaks are just two.
If so, why would Penny Marshal want to destroy public schools and go with charters?
Answer as always, is money.
Here is how it works. In the waning years of the Clinton presidency a tax credit was passed to allow free- enterprise-zones in our blighted inner cities. Made sense to do so.. That offers a 39% tax credit… yes.. 39%.
This allows a charter schools more than any other business, (charter schools incomes are set; other businesses are determinant on fluctuations.) to double their investment in 7 years...
Works like this…
You are Charlie Copeland and you put up $5 million up for your charter schools… the tax credits are designated by percentages for each year and they go like this for seven of them…. 5%, 5%, 5%, 6%, 6%, 6%, 6%…….. You are allowed to take that percentage off your original investment. So add the $5 million times either 5% or 6%…. $250,000, $250,000, $250,000, $300,000, $300,000, $300,000, $300,000….. for a total of $1,950,000 which is often rounded up to $2 million. Which makes your total investment in those schools come down to a net of $3 million… To double your investment (2 X 3) in 7 years, you would need to hit the $6 million mark by that time frame….
Doing math here….. $6,000,000 divided by 7 years gives your yearly target requirement, $857,000… or rounded up to $860,000. To double your money you would need to hit that per annum…..
When a child moves from public school to a charter, roughly $3700 follows him… The best charters (profit wise) skim 33% off the top… therefore to meet this doubling guideline, they would need…[ (x) X .33($3700) = $860,000 ] so x = 704 students…. How can you get 704 students to go to the former Bank of America charter schools? Simple… Close down city schools all around it.
Now don’t forget “the” rents. The Longwood Trust got this for free but don’t think they won’t charge rent… Since a charter can do what it wants (it is in their charter) they can pay rent.. The National Charter School Network recommends that rent stay under 20% of all earnings. But that is unenforceable and there are Charter Schools in Rick Scott’s Florida paying 43% rent… but they are non profits being run by real estate companies who hold the properties they are on…. So a large part of the cost of that child’s education goes to the rent… (normally one fifth, but sometimes two fifths)…
I bring this up so you understand why this is happening… I’ve been just as guilty as others of using speech tactics to amp up the audience and for the most part, almost everyone else has likewise chimed in and has said… WTF are they doing… all this is crazy!
No, it is not crazy.. It is pretty smart actually. It is a way to go around existing law and privatize public education which is perfectly legal. We set these rules up for good reasons and they are being used to make people wealthy which was their intention… So these guys are not crazy in the least….
What is crazy, is that this is being sold as being good for children.. And it all ties together.. Common Core, Charter Schools, Race To The Top, Data Mining, Privatization of Education, Smarter Balanced Assessments.
Charter Schools would be dying out now based on their overall performance, but for the Smarter Balanced Assessment which as you see from Kevin’s revelation above, …. will be used to rate them higher and public schools lower. The Smarter Balanced would not exist if not for the Common Core initiatives. And no one would have paid Common Core any mind, if not for the free money attached to the Race To The Top initiatives. Data mining fits in. Your child will be refused entry if there is any previous problem and we track those now and no child is ever forgiven.
It all ties together and it works its way out whether you do anything or not…
For you see, we’ve really come down to a war for your child… Is your child a commodity to be used at investor’s discretion, and thanks for your property tax dollars btw, but no, sorry, you have no accountability over them……
Or is your child a human being, one you are charged with making the best choice for and for which you hold the responsibility over how he turns out?
Bottom line…. either way it is always going to be your responsibility… If charter schools fail… they blame it on you. If test scores are low, they blame it on you. How many times have you read… “it’s these dumb parents’ fault? Too many I suspect.
The question you need to face now, is… a), whether you want to turn over your child to someone who cares nothing for them and is not accountable ( never forget the closings of 3 Delaware schools)….
Or b), do you want to be able to go to a school board and make your points directly. have them discussed and enacted, and then vote those people out who want to ruin your child’s future so their friend can double his investment in 7 years……
You see… this is war… for your child. It is as if someone marched into Delaware and imposed martial law, It is as if an invading army used all your resources for their benefit.. As history will tell, you have only two options… The first is to bribe them… and that is always temporal… They raise the demands until eventually you can’t pay the ransom and by then, you are too broke to fight their invading armies….
Or you can fight them from the get-go.. War is a term which means you fight to the death because there is no other way to resolve the fact that you both want possession of something, and the winner is the one who has the fewest causalities and all who survive accept him as the winner.
We are in one now and most of Delaware is asleep. When they wake up and the invaders are here, that’s when they first realize what the night-watchmen on the parapets were yelling about in the dark…
Occasionally in life, you really have to call things as they are… make your choice and then take the consequences… Our forefathers did so when they called out the king of Great Britain; they won, but primarily because they won over the French…. Likewise our Southern section did so when they fired on Fort Sumter… but they wound up losing because of Lincoln’s overwhelming will to keep the union together, and greater numbers of men and supplies which the North had over its Southern counterparts. In both cases, war settled the issue in the US’s favor.
What we see here instead, is very similar to the conquest of the Old West by speculative money and investment. We, The People, are the Indians… If we wait until we see their full cavalries arrayed against us… we’ve lost. just look at Indian reservation children today to see what’s coming… But if we wipe them out first… as they struggle to get their toeholds, we end the onslaught. No longer for them, is the business deal worth pursuing.
But there is a difference between the Indians and us, though our plights are now similar. The Indians didn’t have a Constitution. The Indians didn’t have elected officials. The Indians didn’t have voting power…. and they couldn’t just stop the advancement, by opting out.
That is why,…. what Kevin shows us in their own words, is deeply troubling. A wake up call really. In closed door sessions, they are trying to take away those rights and turn us into Indians…..
What you need to ponder is:……. Are you just going to do nothing and let them?….
.
After Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans, being that Bush was flying overhead in a helicopter, many entrepreneurs thought the time had come to make the inner city into an all-charter district and show the world what free enterprise, competition, business morals (or lack thereof) could accomplish… Surely at worst, they’d be better than the public system which existed beforehand and they could all become wealthy while going public good by giving poor children a step up.
It has been 10 years… and by all indications… if this is what an all Charter District looks like, DELAWARE WANTS NOTHING TO DO WITH CHARTERS WHATSOEVER…
A) Finding a charter school for a child with disabilities is impossible.
B) Schools advertising special programs, do not provide them.
C) Administrators lie to regulating bodies which then, must pull a Pencader, Moyer, or REACH upon the school.
D) All the schools violate special education laws. No school complies because it is cheaper to close a school and open a new one, than go through the process of complying.
E) New schools open. They get handed off to new charter operators. They close down.
F) One chooses a school out of 50+ elementary campuses. One is not guaranteed a spot near one’s home. Families submit a list in order of preferences and a computer makes a match, often sending ones child across the city.
G) In a city where 80% are low income, the time to research and visit new school choices before enrolling is not there. This is a huge stumbling block in the Charter mantra that parents are not limited to a failing school in their zip code. That may be true if you earn over $567,000 and have two partners as head of a family and several nannies only a phone call away.. It is not true for a single mom juggling 2 jobs to make $200 a week.
H) The Computer (called One-App) matches students and schools based on demand and number of seats available. Not on which match is the best for the student.
I) The highest performing charters still hold onto their selective policies, as in our local Charter Schools of Wilmington and Newark, and remain just as closed to the disadvantaged city students as they were when it was an all public district.
J) Charters use these tactics to not accept disadvantaged students by encouraging transfers, not reporting open spots, or marketing schools through invitation-only events.
K) A lawsuit filed in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that the New Orleans’ charter schools served fewer students with disabilities than did district-run schools.
L) Several schools either flat-out turned away students with special needs or didn’t have the right teachers and staff to provide them necessary services.
M) To fix this problem, New Schools for New Orleans has been aggressively seeking foundation money and awarding grants to charter schools to expand their special education services. Ultimately costing taxpayer FAR, FAR, FAR more than public schools ever could.
N) Those changes were only driven by the 2010 lawsuit,
O) Overall. A system where the ultimate accountability rests on school closure is not sustainable for a family. They need stability: familiar classmates, teachers who know their students, schools that stays open, year in and year out.
=====
Charters do not provide that. “We’d be better under the direction of a chimpanzee,” said one parent. “That’s how I feel as a parent seeing this whole system.”
We need now to eliminate charters. Not grow them... If the grand test-case to promote charters has been a complete failure, how can anyone expect a Delaware district with less national attention or desire to do right, to perform any better?
Rid ourselves of charters. We have seen their damage, and we don’t want it… You cannot have private enterprise whose sole purpose is to make profit, perform in a field where the sole purpose should be to give your child the best education that all the money available can provide… These two are pulling in opposite ways…
You cannot get good results when you have two diametrically opposite forces pulling you apart….
There is a problem in Christina. It is a lack of money… Last spring, twice, voters said they do not want to fund money to a district only to have it spun off to charter schools.. After all millionaires already have money. Why should struggling property owners in Christina have to shell out even more to enrich their pockets?
It is quite clear everywhere in the USA where Charters are allowed to be .. THEY HURT SCHOOLS. And Delaware has a district that is taking over 900 students out of Christina .. We used to have to look elsewhere for evidence that Charterization destroys children’s futures. Now we can look to ourselves. It is here…. It takes $21 million away from Christina……
Ideally we could be like Red Clay and pass a new referendum.. But voters in Christina do not have money to burn like they do in Pike Creek (lol) so they want their hard earned money going to their own kids, not kids of some wealthy parents….. Wealthy parents who can easily afford a $25,000 year private school but would rather the welfare state educate their children in a semi-private school on the taxpayers dole…
In Christina, one third of every dollar paid in taxes winds up in some rich man’s pocket… Which simply is not right by any person’s account, (unless they are the recipient of that 33.3%)….
And it is not the worst students leaving the district.. It is the best ones… Which means, that of course the scores will be lower… That is how averages work.. It’s basic math and has no bearing on teachers, students, funding, or school districts.
The large problem is our General Assembly. They are on LSD. La, la, la, la, everything is fine.. everything is good… Wow, look at that giant chicken eating cars…. La, la, la, la.. Oh wow.. That cloud looks just like Mark Murphy… oops, my bad, now it’s the devil; look he’s eating children… Cool… La, la, la, la…
Charters caused the problem and eliminating charters will fix the problem.. Fixing the Charter problem is very easy. There are two options. One, the Christina School board, (as well as every other school board) becomes sole authorizer for every charter in its district… That way it gets the money and can balance accordingly so that money is spent where it is needed and not wasted on rich people’s children whose parents could drop $25,000 without blinking an eye…
The second option is to divorce Charters from public property tax money. We are stuck in this system of using property tax to pay for schools for at least a number of years. The numbers are just not there for the state to take full financial ownerships and keep schools solvent. But Charters are a perk, like Tatnall or Tower. We really don’t need them, and their children could get a better education by staying in a fully funded public school… Just compare the top students of public schools verses all the students at those two famously private schools.
And taxpayers can willingly pay for perks when the basic needs are met… But under the misdirection of Dave Sokola (see Exceptional Delaware) our General Assembly was misinformed, misdirected, and misguided into allowing these privateers to STEAL public money which otherwise was used as the basic bread of the public school system…
In Early American history we used to send ships of solders to hunt down pirate ships to kill their crews. Today voters in the 27th Representative District (Earl Jacques’) and the 4th Senatorial district (Dave Sokola’s) return these pirates to public office to allow them to continue to rob, steal, and pillage our children’s future….
Therefore, our General Assembly needs to focus on removing Charters from Delaware… and the best way of doing that is to treat them as line items in the State Budget…
Every charter school should get the same scrutiny as every other publics’ expenditure… Not washed under the blanket of …. “‘oh, it’s someone else’s problem, … look under the umbrella of property tax expenditure per child…”
If every Charter School was looked at… honestly… as in “why do we need to pay $13 million to Newark Charter School ” when there is plenty of room at 16 Newark schools within a 5 mile radius, only then are we wisely spending everyone’s tax dollars…
For seriously… WHY DO WE NEED A NEWARK CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL ? Perhaps the answer is in both’s school’s and district’s student make-up…. Christina School District 2014/2015: 31.7 White and 41% below the Federal Poverty Level…. And NEWARK CHARTER SCHOOL? 71% White (and Asian) and 7.2% below poverty…. OH, SO THAT’S WHY…………………
Obviously state supported Charter Schools is state supported RACISM ….. which is illegal by the way… The only reason it can exist in Delaware is because of both Sokola’s and Jacques’ legislation, and the fact that no one has yet filed suit demanding the eradication of Charters from Delaware’s soil based on the discrimination it causes to low income and minority students… If you are like me, all regular readers should immediately be reminded of the “for real” Charter School Student Application question asking if your momma raised watermelons……
Lotteries. Radius maps, increased public school financing are all diversions… Either a) the existing districts become sole authorizer of Charters, or b) Charters get line-itemed into the state budget with all property taxes returning back to the district encompassing that property, or c) we outlaw and close down all charters and let the financiers absorb their financial risk as is supposed to happen in a capitalistic society.
Because anything otherwise is plain for everyone to see… state supported discrimination… You cannot have charter schools in Delaware without discriminating… Members of the General Assembly. You need to fix this now…. Seperate but equal is not equal… We’ve been down that road before….
And voters, unless your are indeed a die-hard racist who hates blacks, who hates Mexicans, who hates women, who hates people making less than $41 million every single year…. you need to tell these two… Earl Jacques and Dave Sokola just how much you appreciate them (being ironic) doing their part to put “darky” back in his place…..
Why those two don’t get punched in the face every single minute of their existence is beyond me… Fortunately for all of us, our average Delaware citizen is more tolerant of ugly human behavior than is probably good for them……
This is unprecedented. $21 million… Remember the casinos who were $12 million in the hole? Oh, its a tragedy they whined; we’ll lose jobs, we have no choice but to reimburse the profits being lost by the casino owners…. Remember when they asked for $37 million the next year? Again…. We have to do it…
Well, guess what… Jobs are being lost at Christina too. And it is solely because of Charters…. Minus $21 million!
We pay tax money to fund our public schools. Privateers bribed our legislature (piloted by Sokola (see Exceptional Delaware) into allowing charter schools steal money from public schools…
If we paid taxes to New Castle County and as an example, one fifth of then were being sent to Sussex County because Sam Wilson was a friend of Charlie Copeland and needed a welfare hand-out… we would have a legal case on hand. Our money is collected for our district. If we paid the state that same money then such would be legal; it would be in their jurisdiction.. But we don’t pay the state… We pay our district….
From the 2015 Budget conveniently provided by Those In Favor, we see that Current Expense Tax Receipts for the Christina District is pegged at $76,856,000 out of which is immediately stolen by Charters: $20,146,672…. So the Charters take (20,146,672/76,856,000) or 26.21% of every tax dollar you give.…
For every $500 you are assessed in Christina……. $131 IS NOT GOING TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS… It is going to Charters…..
Which means that for every $12,000 required to teach each child in your school…. there is only $8854 dollars going to your child’s education….
This is Dave Sokola’s fault (again, see Exceptional Delaware)……
Now, compounded to this dilemma is the fact that with the absence of any Race To The Top money those programs pushing Common Core are still costing the district close to $14 million per year… (which incidentally is close to its shortfall… Getting rid of both Common Core and the Smarter Balanced Assessment could make the Christina District financially solvent as is…
But adding the Common Core costs upon to the Charter School costs compounds the problem yielding a loss of $35,000,000 dollars or 45.45% of your local tax dollars…
So those who complain that they aren’t getting the bang for their buck are correct… they are getting exactly 55% of the bang for their buck…
If we simply cut charters off of district funding… and if we simply dropped the Smarter Balanced Assessment, this District would instantly have back $35,000,000 of its lost money to plump down into making its school system one of the best in the state….
The problem is not teachers. The problem is not schools. The problem is not poverty. …. .The problem is not the district…. The problem with education in Delaware all comes from the Corporate Reform movement which is trying hard to bankrupt public schools so they can put in charters and be paid royally for doing so….
The even bigger problem with that, is that only 17% of charters are better off than the schools they replace. 37% are actually worse!!!!! And the balance sort of muddle as the same…. Building charters only gives you a one in six shot at improving the education of those children, while guaranteeing the demise of every one of the 79% remaining in public schools because of the local lack of funding which you can plainly see here in Delaware
We need a class action lawsuit that seeks an injunction of continuing any charter school in 2017… Next it needs to be up to the individual legislators to throw out the lobbyists and listen to real people for a change, and remove all charters from district funding… All the tax base goes to the feeder school’s district And we need to remove the Smarter Balanced Assessment as our state albatross…. (Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner reference)
We can fix Christina’s problems without more taxes….. if we unite to rid ourselves of all charter schools and the Smarter Balanced Assessments…
But you see… the problem of the shortfall is plainly not that of Christina’s District… it is all Dave Sokola’s (see Exceptional Delaware)
Attention Parents.
The easiest time to opt out is at the beginning of school. Your kids have taken the test. They have told you it is a waste of time. Out of 45 states once part of Common Core, Delaware is one of 9 left taking this horrible test. You have not gotten the scores back because they are afraid you will opt out once you see them… They have set a deadline to opt out that will be crossed before you get your scores….
Point is: you don’t need those scores to know you want to opt out… You want to opt out… Here is the short list of reasons including the one above.
- Legislatures in almost every state have dropped the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Delaware is one of the few that didn’t. The test is that bad.
- The Delaware General Assembly House voted 36 to 3 to allow you, the parent to opt out… That is a 12 to 1 ratio in favor…
- The Delaware General Assembly Senate voted 14 to 7 to allow you, the parent to opt out… That is a 2 to 1 ratio of people who despite getting the hard sell from the governor to stand firm against parents and allow corporations to masticate your children, chose to allow you, the parent to opt out….
- The General Assembly will meet this fall in a special session to override the Governor’s veto if you, the parent become active in your state government and call all the representatives to demand it.
- 100% of child psychologists across the country have said the Smarter Balanced Assessment unlike any other test out there, is very harmful to your child’s development. They strongly urge all children to opt out.
- The test is a joke. Every grown up who has taken the test (which you can do as well) has said “what the fvck are these questions even asking?”
- The scores are graded on a curve… and it doesn’t matter how well your child does on the test, he is still going to be given the score the DOE wants him to have… It is not like tests you remember in school where if everyone gets all the answers right, they all get an “A”… Being graded on the curve means that even if all the kid’s answer correctly, the bottom 70% of those answering perfectly, will still fail. It will be decided on the psychological profiling questions every child must answer….
- The answers are so immature, professional adults don’t know which is right. Therefore they can be changed at will and no one ever sees the scores or the tests to collaborate that the score received came from the test that was taken… They get their appointed score based on their race and income level.. Pure and simple…
Opting out has never been easier… Copy and paste the form below and send it with your child on August 31st….
———————————————————————————————————–
Delaware’s Official Opt Out Form.
Dear Principal at ____________________________________ School.
I, the parent of _______________________________________ am choosing to opt my child out of the most ridiculous test ever known to man: the Smarter Balanced Assessment. He is not to take that test when it is administered to his class.
Please put him in study hall or a classroom where he can read something he finds worthwhile when those in his class who did not opt out, are scheduled to take the test…
Thank you in advance for your prompt response…..
Signed______________________________________________
Parent and legal guardian of ______________________________________________
Copyright held by the Delaware Department of Education/2015
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
kavips 