Charter schools amendment: Say “no” to ed biz “shamans” and “snake charmers”
In the final stretch of the charter school amendment battle, I am going to run a few more pro and con pieces.
Here is the con from high school educator Ian Altman of Athens. Stay tuned for a pro piece shortly.
By Ian Altman
Georgia voters will decide next week on Amendment 1 and whether to allow a politically appointed commission in Atlanta to override elected boards of education. Hence, they will be deciding whether to let millions of their tax dollars evade the respectability of their provenance by enriching the lives and moral self-regard of the billionaire Koch brothers, professional disparager of teachers Michelle Rhee, and Walmart heiress Alice Walton, among other mega-donors outside of Georgia who are dissatisfied with the vintage of our state constitution.
The mellifluous promises of these white collared carpetbaggers would have us believe that the best interest of our kids is in the fragmenting of the public interest through the proliferation of for-profit charter school choices.
Their motivations are the same as those of the Milton Friedman shamans and Ayn Rand snake charmers and Lehman Brothers flat-earthers whom we assumed to know how to behave like adults, who would burn my salary in half a month’s worth of private jet fuel, and who left us high and baked in a desert economy from which they tell us we’ll never emerge if our students don’t learn the proprietary programming language to fix the pecuniary wings of our bumbling financial Icarus.
The business of learning is to be transmogrified by high-rent holy writ into the learning of business. In 2007, as now, I’d rather have had impoverished kindergarteners, who at least remember our lessons about sharing, handle my money.
Accordingly, I decline to accept that there is no longer such a thing as a common good which finds among its highest expressions a public school system. Under the control of elected boards which are accountable to voters, our public schools have, when we account for variables such as poverty to compare apples to apples instead of to pepperoni, kept achievement standards just as high as Singapore, Shanghai, Finland, and any other place a charter school company stockholder will point to as ostensible proof of a crisis.
You will not hear that from them because without that crisis, their product sits on the shelf like an ineffably gaudy chandelier, spun out of the poor imagination of the Gates Foundation – that Gatsby of educational theory – and discarded because it’s not bright enough.
None of this is to deny that public schools have problems. I live with those problems every day and know them far better than any politician, think-tank analyst, or armchair sociologist. The issue, however, is that the problems the apostles of for-profit charter schools would solve are not those we actually face, which nearly everyone who is both honest and serious in education research knows to be caused by poverty and exacerbated by the other private part of the education industry: the ship-boarding privateer proprietors of our standardized tests like McGraw-Hill and NCS Pearson, the latter of which writes Georgia’s tests. Every year they bring out from their opaque autoclaves these testing instruments which are as monkey wrenches for the performing of brain surgery, and every year we struggle to analyze the results which any competent teacher could have predicted without the extra consultants’ fees and the insult to our students’ dignity.
What do these tests have to do with the charter schools amendment, you ask? The two issues are the two sides of a silver coin proffered to buy away our trust in the very idea of the public as such, complimentary acts of skullduggery that undermine on the one hand the project of public education and on the other the professionalism of its employees.
Students in my literature classes read Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and learn to separate the moral awareness of the narrator from the emotional awareness of the protagonist, understand the celestial rhetoric of Romeo and Juliet in relation to the earthy vulgarity of Mercutio, write analyses of the logic of competing editorialists’ views of Arizona’s ban of ethnic studies courses, and reflect on the theft of history as rendered in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.”
Such learning is difficult, emotionally unsafe, politically unstable, necessary for the mold-breaking lives of free-thinking citizens in a democracy, and utterly unrelatable to the choice of A, B, C, or D on a sterile scantron sheet. Whatever it is those tests measure or purport to measure, it just isn’t that important.
Many for-profit charter school curricula are bought and paid for in accordance with the wishes of the industry that designs their assessments. In other words, they pay and are paid to institutionalize that anesthetizing practice which we in the public schools have tried so hard to resist: teaching to the test.
Students can watch a video of a lecture on a computer and spit answers back at a computerized multiple choice test without having a teacher at all. That is exactly the model some for-profit charter schools use, and those are the charter schools Amendment 1 is designed to attract, as evidenced by the many thousands of dollars those companies have poured into Georgia from outside to influence our vote. It is a high-tech version of a 2,000- year old practice, and it is meant to save money, not kids.
There are plenty of good charter schools in Georgia already, and more no doubt will be approved by local boards of education, but we do not need a commission to force communities to have for-profit charter schools designed to siphon Georgia taxpayers’ money through proprietary canned curricula, textbooks, computer programs, and other materials specifically wedded to those curricula, and mind-numbing assessments, to companies outside of Georgia which will sell the package at a premium and call it a revolutionary success when it will in fact be the death of truly critical thinking.
Parents and voters need to realize what they’re really asking for if they vote “yes” to Amendment 1. They will not like many of the results of these new choices, and many of their kids will languish horribly if the amendment passes. The real solution to our public school problems is two-fold. First, make responsible social policies that do more than pay lip service to fighting the vitiating academic consequences of poverty. Second, hire the best teachers with the best academic learning and pedagogical training available, pay us properly and give us the resources we need, and get out of our way.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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107 comments Add your comment
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
9:42 am
Is it a dream to be a capable teacher and want to work somewhere and simply have people leave you alone to do your work, and go home at the end of the day with your head still on your shoulders? This seems reasonable to me. You know, kind of like how most professions operate? Doctor / lawyer / architect / licensed professional engineer?
Woody
November 2nd, 2012
9:45 am
No one has expressed – what is the problem the amendment is trying to fix? Are local boards declining charter schools en masse? Did someone want a charter school and couldn’t get it approved? What? Where are the examples of injustice, and lost court cases, that would require an entire amendment to the state constitution? Without these, the amendment is an empty bit of text that is not related to the real world. Honestly, there needs to be some basic criteria established before any question can be put on the ballot.
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
9:51 am
So this Sabis company http://www.sabis.net/ operates schools in 15 countries but when they set-up a school in Dekalb County they got chopped down?
Seen this a lot with principals. For example, a principal is good at lots of things but not accounting and being a principal in a Georgia government school requires a lot of attention to details of money and accounting. So things get a little sideways. Instead of helping out the principal, the main administration people come after their own employee like that person is the enemy and they chop them down and run them off. Seen a lot of this “oppositional management” style of the people who put in the long hours and work in the school building. Slow to mentor, quick to chop down. And the people who are doing the chopping, cutting people down, it is haphazard who they come after. Local person? Slow to react. From another area or state? Oh yes chop them down thorough and quick. And too it sets up a weird rhythm and appetite for destroying people as though the dragon must be fed. Yes, the dragon must be fed some firewood so that it can breathe fire.
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
9:56 am
Woody Short answer, opinionated and quick. Local school boards hate charter schools, hate their guts, hate them with a vengeance. Local school boards are used to being sole fiefdoms and that dictate and command. They get bat-crazy when someone or something encroaches upon them. Current material result of this is that some local school boards find ways to start trying to micromanage a charter school. Government schools already have really poor boundaries to begin with so it is second nature to them to invade anything and everything and dictate, malign, redirect, or do whatever they want for their own self-interest reasons. (plentiful generalizations included)
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
10:08 am
This is a rhetorical question, but on the case of the Sabis managed school in Dekalb County, would it have not made more sense that upon examining the school and finding a few things out of line, to make a list of things for them to fix? In other words, to build instead of to destroy? Seems to be a management style, evidenced by the recent NAHS event, to just do a seek and destroy mission as a way of addressing a situation. Seems like “too much power” syndrome. It also occurs to me that this type of management is also strategic. By being so incredibly arrogant and destructive it has several potential benefits to the parties who practice this method: 1) bully intimidation so that most people are scared of you. 2) creates a smokescreen and re-direct so that the press and public is occupied with the aggressive action, attention redirected away from operations.
Maureen Downey
November 2nd, 2012
10:15 am
@Private, Keep in mind that Sabis had an issue with its own board of parents and founders. Sabis told me that the founders kept interfering. This was not a clash between the school management company and the county or state; the conflict was between the folks who started the school and the company they hired. When Sabis was ousted, the board could not find another management company to come in quickly and take over the contract to run the school.
Maureen
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
10:27 am
Woody In Georgia, there are plenty of government agencies that as far as they are concerned, they own anything that moves within the square footage and boundary lines of their county. Seen this with local police pulling over a car of youth because a tail light or license plate light is out, completely hijacking them, having all four of the youth out of the beat up car, going through the girl’s purse, the whole bit, the whole routine. I saw this because it required five police cars to achieve this manuever, parked hari-kari all over the place and blocking in my vehicle. After waiting a good thirty minutes and after one of the officers had set his convenience store drink on the hood of my vehicle that they had blocked in, I appeared and they sort of snapped out of it and backed up one of their police cars so I could go on my way. Without the soda drink cup on my hood, thank you. Welcome to Georgia. Have a nice day.
G&G
November 2nd, 2012
10:29 am
What we have here are trigger words like “school” and “charter” to cover up the bigger deception: more big business profit.
In addition, money wields power. We don’t need the likes of NCS Pearson or Alice Walton designing curriculum. It’s a slippery slope, folks. Yes, our current education system is not working, but this is not the fix. I predict the same fall-out as NCLB: the rich will prosper and the poor will suffer. Vote NO.
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
10:34 am
@Maureen, Thank you for providing detail/ explanation. Apparently there is a structure method to governance / how these charter schools are put together. You seem to have a clear understanding of this, as well as Dr. Henson. If the charter amendment succeeds, this information with be the more poignant (?). (making effort to keep up with the use of language in the featured essay
)
DeKalb Inside Out
November 2nd, 2012
10:36 am
Woody,
There are 2 issues
1. The Ga Supreme Court said, in a split decision, the state could not create state chartered K-12 schools.
2. The local boards of many counties refuse to approve or even consider charters.
85% of the state chartered schools operate in counties where the local boards won’t approve charters. The Charter Amendment clears up the constitution allowing for the state to create chartered schools again.
d
November 2nd, 2012
10:39 am
@DeKalb Inside Out – since the state can already authorize charters under existing law – as you correctly stated there are state-authorized charters – then the amendment is not needed to clear up anything. As I stated before, Amendment 1 is not about charters, children, or improving education.
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
10:46 am
Actually, G&G, conditions for teachers were better under NCLB than under Obama’s RTTT. Believe me, I am no fan of these acronym-jive control themes, but at least under NCLB the attention was on performance of schools. Under RTTT, they have zeroed in on teachers and this jive-routine to harass individuals. Allow me to call upon the brothers Gibb to commemorate in song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVjITlgqlHo
Guess which song the teachers get to sing in response? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKdVq_vNAAI
bootney farnsworth
November 2nd, 2012
10:48 am
considering there are rules and regulations out the tail which the state universally ignores as they wish
all the rules in the world about charter management mean little
yuzeyurbrane
November 2nd, 2012
10:50 am
My advice to author: too many $10 words to maximize persuasion of your target audience. But I agree with most of what you say.
Dr. Monica Henson
November 2nd, 2012
10:55 am
The Sabis situation clearly illustrates how important good governance is for any school, just as we see it in districts like DeKalb and Clayton. If you have folks on the board who try to micromanage and/or are not competent to govern well, whether it’s an elected board of education or a nonprofit board of directors, it creates problems for the organization.
The sad thing is, short of voter recall en masse, governor removal of a dysfunctional board, or loss of accreditation, there’s really not much families trapped in failing district schools can do. If you campaign to remove board members, you get that opportunity once every four years. That’s three chances during the time your child is in K-12 public education. It’s highly unlikely that substantive change can be engineered with the haste needed to benefit children in the existing system.
Private citizen and parent
November 2nd, 2012
11:01 am
By choice, I have a child in a very socio-economically diverse public school system (with incredibly good teachers) that neighbors a white, affluent suburban county. Everyone touts the success of the neighboring county’s schools. Is it a surprise that kids who have college-educated parents, eat three square meals a day and have involved parents do well?? No.
Is it a surprise when diverse schools have more mixed results? No. Generalizing here, but by and large it is true in my experience. The children coming from difficult circumstances tend to struggle more (but many succeed), and the kids raised in homes with college-educated, involved parents succeed just as they would in the neighboring county. Bravo to the teachers who can teach all kids! That is exactly what is happening at our school! Couldn’t be happier!
It isn’t a broken school system in most cases (it is a difficult home life). But, if it is the system…. fix it. Don’t create yet another public school in the hopes that that will be the magic bullet! It won’t!
Charter schools can be ok, but the results are a mixed bag. Kind of like what we already have. Why create yet another public school system controlled at the state level? Makes no sense.
I’ll be voting NO on Amendment 1.
Ron F.
November 2nd, 2012
11:08 am
“considering there are rules and regulations out the tail which the state universally ignores as they wish
all the rules in the world about charter management mean little”
EXACTLY, and one more reason I gladly voted NO to the amendment. The state seems to make up the rules as they go and confuse the legal language so that if anyone has the guts to sue them, they win either way. But too many, I fear, will trust them on this issue.
friendlyflyer
November 2nd, 2012
11:12 am
I’ve always been a fan of public school…still want to be. My eighth grade daughter was having panic episodes over a period of eighteen months. She was enrolled in public school and was struggling….the school had to call me a couple times a week from the nurse’s office. Finally after two months of agony for us all, we had to take her out of our local school and enroll in state public virtual school (charter school) because our local school said we were non-compliant parents if we didn’t medicate our daughter. She hasn’t been medicated and is thriving in online school. She’s much better and hopes to return to her friends and our local high school next year. But I thank God for this choice we were allowed to make. It’s all about choices, folks. We shouldn’t box ourselves in.
DeKalb Inside Out
November 2nd, 2012
11:14 am
Pardon My Blog
This is another common misconception. If you look at the History of Funding Education in Georgia you’ll see that school districts have received more and more money ever year over the last 26 years. Adjusted for inflation, they are getting more now than they ever have.
Note: All local money stays with the local school district. Therefore, for every child that goes to a charter school the local school district has more money per child in their system.
What about the kids who by virtue of the “lottery or selection process” do not get into the Charter School? Are they expendable? State chartered schools is not a cure all for Georgia Education, but another tool in the belt. I hope you wouldn’t deny the kids that do get in a superior education just because everyone couldn’t get in. That being said, “market theory” says the state chartered school will encourage the traditional school down the street to innovate and become a better school … in theory anyway.
Boot Camp – Heck Yeah!! I think we should have reform schools with dormitories. Count me in big time.
Pardon my blog, Why the “Instead”? Can we please implement as many tools as possible to improve education in Georgia?
Mountain Man
November 2nd, 2012
11:16 am
“But, if it is the system…. fix it.”
That is what I have been saying for years. They have been working on “fixing it” for forty years and have gone backward.
So charters seems like at least a good choice to offer parents instead of trapping them in the schools that “need fixing”.
I love my charter school.
November 2nd, 2012
11:20 am
Out-of-state corporations are profiting every day from our educational tax $$, as is every overpaid, corrupt superintendent and useless BOE. Every day, our tax $$ are being handed to out-of-state, FOR-PROFIT corporations that provide gasoline to buses, food to students, books, school supplies, and computers. More money is being sent to for-profit educational companies for testing materials than is being spent on programs to enrich our children.
If the many useless, overpaid for-profit admins & superintendents (the “NO” crowd) had any interest in fixing our embarrassing educational system, they’d have done so long ago.
Do you realize how much money state tax money is spent on sending children to post-secondary schools per year? Really people?? Go look at the debate that is posted on the GPB.org in reference to the charter school.
Heck, we all have spent years paying for our public schools to educate “our children” while I also paid for private school tuition for my children. According to the test scores that our county and surrounding counties have reported, we all are getting ripped off. We can’t fix our corrupt system here so we did something about it. At least now I feel like the state money is going some where useful.
catlady
November 2nd, 2012
11:28 am
Gary Lopez and others: there is no such thing as “state tax money.” ALL money, state or local, comes from the citizens (and visitors passing through, as well as companies doing business.)
DeKalb Inside Out
November 2nd, 2012
11:39 am
d
state can already authorize charters under existing law
Short Answer
OCGA says the state can, but the GA Supreme Court says they cannot.
The 2011 ruling leaves no room for any state agency to create charter schools, a power the justices held to be the “exclusive” constitutional domain of local boards. The state’s role in commissioning charters cannot be clarified without a constitutional amendment.
Georgia PTA Lobbyist Sally Fitzgerald made it perfectly clear that a lawsuit challenging the State Board’s authority to create schools is forthcoming should this amendment fail.
In his dissent of the 2011 judgement, Judge Nahmias warns us of the inability of the State Board to commission charters under the 2011 ruling should it be contested.
sneak peak into education
November 2nd, 2012
11:43 am
@Gerry Lopez-no,you are wrong; charter schools regularly do NOT perform better than their traditional counterparts and study after study shows this. However, this amendment is not about voting down charter schools but is against changing our constitution to allow an unelected board to decide where to spend OUR tax dollars.
Vote NO in NOvember
I love my charter school.
November 2nd, 2012
11:45 am
The three biggest arguments we’ve heard against Amendment 1 are:
1) There is already an appeal process.
The best that a charter school organizer can hope for is to be approved as a “special” school receiving just a fraction of the funding that conventional public schools receive. So, of course, school like those are doomed to fail. Especially in our area where over 50% receive free or reduced lunches.
2) The approving of this amendment would mean less funding for traditional public schools:
The only way that additional charter schools meaningfully divert funds from other schools is if they attract back to public education children who are not currently attending public schools. In a state where tens of thousands of children- more than 100,000 in Atlanta alone – have abandoned public schools, the idea of convincing a new generation of students and their families to return to public education is a GOOD thing. To argue otherwise is to accept all of the worst trends in public education of the past 50 years.
3) This fives the state “too much power” over public education and takes away the local control of local school boards.
How can anyone argue that the system of local school boards has been a good thing?? Over the last 20 years. Suburban school boards have openly encouraged white flight from the city and resisted reform ferociously. The city school system continues- despite the valiant efforts of some who have tried to turn things around- to post abysmal academic performance and graduation rates, and is today most famous for Atlanta’s ignominious cheating scandal.. What could possibly be the argument for continuing to give that system of governance total control of all public schools???
I copied and pasted from Doug and Michelle Blackmon article but it is all so true.
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/blog/why-we-will-vote-for-the-georgia-charter-school-amendment-on-nov-6/
I love my charter school.
November 2nd, 2012
11:49 am
At least these non-paid commissioned officers (non-paid mean NOT PAID – Volunteering) are not trying to line their own pockets and their family members that are working for the local public school systems pockets.
DeKalb Inside Out
November 2nd, 2012
12:03 pm
Jaynie
You say [the charter amendment] takes control away from local parents and boards of education
How is that? Local parents don’t have any control (neither do local boards, but that is another thread). Superintendents have all the control. Amendment 1 is about ripping control away from Superintendents and their administrations and giving it back to the local community.
Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. – I don’t see how Amendment 1 throws the baby or the bathwater out. All local money stays with the local school district. For every child that goes to a state chartered school, the local school district has more money per child to spend on education in their district.
Amendment 1 isn’t going to be the end of traditional schools and it isn’t going to cure all that ails education in Georgia. It’s just another tool.
chartered schools should not be overseen by an appointed board – Chartered schools are not overseen by an appointed board. Traditional and chartered schools are both overseen by their respective local boards. Traditional and chartered schools are then overseen by the state.
DeKalb Inside Out
November 2nd, 2012
12:14 pm
Sneak Peak
Note: When you say charter schools, I’m going to assume in this context you mean state chartered schools. Otherwise, dependent charters take on a whole new meaning.
Charter schools regularly do NOT perform better than their traditional counterparts
So What? Parents know what is best for their children. If a state chartered school isn’t better, then parents will not choose to go there. If a state chartered school doesn’t have enough students, it will fail and close.
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
12:21 pm
friendlyflyer our local school said we were non-compliant parents if we didn’t medicate our daughter.
I was there. I’ve been to several of those meetings and seen the authority change to where the school admin. wants to play doctor and basically require medicating kids who are acting out. At the time I thought to myself “are we exceeding authority here?” I’ve also had a student who was so zonked out on high-tech pharmaceuticals that for half a year this student came to school every day and said “MY HEAD HURTS” and I could tell, looking at the student, the they had pharmaco ping pong balls bouncing around in their head. For me, this is getting into really serious violation of ethics, but basically I am here to affirm your report and say that I have seen in person the “so much authority” syndrome progress to the point of non-medically trained building administration putting over pressure on parent / student during meeting that the student’s behavior should be subdued or otherwise taken responsibility for using pharmacological drugs. i should note that this approach occurred after the state put pressure on the school to not suspend or otherwise discipline students who were chronic attention-seeking misbehavior artists. If kids sense there is no real authority over them, some will exploit this and just keep acting out. That’s a whole other matter, that from the state level, many schools have been stripped of the ability to govern student behavior. Disciplinary actions are recorded and data sent to the state. Schools that have a lot of discipline issues are formally told to lessen the number of disciplinary actions used to govern student behavior. It is a complex thing, but I have seen over pressure to use drugs to control behavior as a back up plan from administrators trying to rightly govern student behavior. It now seems impossible to just throw a kid out of school on their head if they insist on disrupting class each and every day. The truth of the matter is that there is likely a complete lack of alternative programs for repeat disruptors and the terrible truth is that without this stop-gap, there are kids who will continue disrupting. Back when you had alternative schools and such, there were kids who would take to the very edge with their bravado and then suddenly break down and cry buckets of tears when they figured out they were not going to be with their friends for a while, but now that stop gap is gone. Seen this many times, bravado kids taking misbehavior as far as they can possible take it – seeking a meaningful response from authority. Now, that meaningful response is “here’s a bottle of pills and you will take them. It’ll be uncomfortable at first until your body adjusts, but this is what you must do.”
Anotther comment
November 2nd, 2012
12:30 pm
The real amendment we need is to get rid of is the cap on the number of school district. Those of Us recruited to the south for employment, shake our heads. We know the real problem is these mega school district. We all went to high performing small school districts that were one high school and it’s feeders large. The wealthy and poor of the community went to the same school. Everyone worked to make it a great school. It wasn’t a race for the most free lunch applications and more title one money. On the contrary, everyone got to see what life was like on the other side of the tracks. Everyone wanted to perform at a higher standard. The local community put their children in the school. We were mortified moving to Georgia and seeing the racist attitudes that still exist. The reverse racism in some school district is the worst. Many of us would love to live in-town, but our Midwestern or Northern values don’t justify or give us the connections to send our kids to Westminster, Lovett, or Marist even if we wanted to plunk down $22k per kid. We grew up in Parts of the country where everyone goes to their local public High School.
Private Citizen
November 2nd, 2012
12:32 pm
Being stripped of resources, some schools are in the position of telling parents, “medicate student or face expulsion / here’s your file, get out of here, expelled, no longer in this school system.” In a time of few resources, this is what school discipline has become.
Michael
November 2nd, 2012
12:45 pm
The government bureaucrats and public school administrators who misuse millions of taxpayers dollars are scared to death to have to run accountable institutions. The math doesn’t lie, both my children go to private schools and it hurts so much to have to pay that money. But sending them to public schools is absolutely out of the question. Charter schools will follow the same strategy as our private schools – hold administrators, teachers, parents and children accountable for their education. The fact that we spend more on each student than any industrialized country – and the results we get from that investment – PROVE that a change is needed. It will come soon. The charter amendment will pass next week.
Maureen Downey
November 2nd, 2012
1:32 pm
@To all, The AJC has a page of charter school related stories and info. If you want to read a lot about the issue, go here.
Beverly Fraud
November 2nd, 2012
1:32 pm
Vote NO for snake oil salesmen; leave education to the true professionals like Beverly Hall and Crawford Lewis.
Ron F.
November 2nd, 2012
1:41 pm
Beverly: Bev Hall is LONG gone and good riddance to her. There are plenty of current supers for you to research and criticize. Please use your obvious energy better and get after the fools currently in office.
bootney farnsworth
November 2nd, 2012
2:38 pm
@ catlady
stop stating the obvious.
but it is a pity you have to.
NotYou
November 2nd, 2012
3:34 pm
Those that are claiming “public school has issues”, “they’ve had forty years to fix their problems”, clearly did not read the article. Yes they have issues but this amendment will not address those issues! Do you even know what this is about?
We
November 2nd, 2012
3:38 pm
If you are republican and voting for this, I am confused. This is the complete opposite of accountability and fiscal conservatism. Vote NO
Warrior Woman
November 2nd, 2012
3:42 pm
Ian Altman apparently opposes Amendment 1 because it might cause him to be accountable for his performance or see a diminishment of his turf. Further, based on his comments about Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, he wouldn’t know economic truth if it bit him on the nose.
DeKalb Inside Out
November 2nd, 2012
3:55 pm
NotYou
What’s the plan for fixing traditional schools given that the people in place to make changes at traditional schools are the people who profit the most from the status quo.
What is this amendment about you ask? According to the amendment it is about amending the Constitution of Georgia so as to clarify the authority of the state to establish state-wide education policy;
If not that, what is ‘this’ all about?
Mountain Man
November 2nd, 2012
4:01 pm
“Those that are claiming “public school has issues”, “they’ve had forty years to fix their problems”, clearly did not read the article. Yes they have issues but this amendment will not address those issues! ”
This amendment will give the parents who CARE an OPTION, a CHOICE, to address those issues! Choice they do not have under the current system.
parentoftwo
November 2nd, 2012
4:57 pm
My young son was doing poorly in public school with his over crowded classroom and “educator” who cared nothing about actually teaching. I am fortunate enough to have found, and been able to afford, a local private school that my children now attend.
Instead of being treated like the enemy by a public school system too worried about politics and teaching to the lowest common denominator, my family are now treated like paying customers, which we are. The APS cheating scandal is a prime example of what public schools have become. The children cant pass on their own so the teachers cheat to keep those tax dollars coming to the trough.
I am of the opinion that the money should follow the child to school, not the other way around. Now if I could only get my tax dollars the state diverts to the public school system (that my kids don’t attend) redirected to their private school all would be well.
I voted early, and even though my kids go to private school I voted for the charter schools amendment hoping it will help some other family that needs it.
Both of my kids are making A’s and are learning Spanish and Mandarin Chinese for their language classes at ages 4 and 8.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Pride and Joy
November 2nd, 2012
5:26 pm
VERY WELL SAID Dr. Monica and Mountain man!
Pride and Joy
November 2nd, 2012
5:27 pm
Vote next week the blog says?
Heck no. I voted YES TODAY!
Charter schools amendment: Say ?no? to ed biz ?shamans? and … | Channel 7 Local News
November 3rd, 2012
4:02 am
[...] Source: http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/11/02/charter-schools-amendment-say-no-to-ed-biz-shamans... [...]
anthonydavis
November 3rd, 2012
8:22 am
We are crazy for considering business school because we’re isolated, but what a great crazy it is! Business school AND our careers will be better off, of that I’m convinced.
Pardon My Blog
November 3rd, 2012
8:27 am
Perhaps the only answer is to privatize all the schools and run them like a business. The tax dollars would “follow the child”as parentoftwo suggested and competition for the best students and best teachers would raise the bar. However, this would only work for those kids who want to be there and the parents or guardians who actually are interested in their child receiving an education.
Pardon My Blog
November 3rd, 2012
8:35 am
@DeKalb Inside Out – I would never deny a child a good education which is why it should not be only for those selected for the Charter School. If the Charter School model is so successful, then utilize it system wide. There are many students (and we all pay taxes for the schools, some more than others) that would benefit from a stringent curriculum that are not in the Charter Schools.
Pardon My Blog
November 3rd, 2012
8:37 am
I do know one thing, I will vote YES for the State to run the Charter Schools because until real changes are made in DeKalb (starting with the BoE and Superintendent on down) I don’t think I can trust them to do the right thing.
Angela Dean
November 3rd, 2012
9:44 am
Voting no on this doesn’t mean you are voting against charters. Charter schools existed prior to this vote and voting no won’t prohibit them from existing after the vote. Those that believe voting no is a vote against charters haven’t done the research on what this vote is really about. The difference this vote will make is how charters are created in the state, how they will be funded (when you say the state pays for them, where exactly does that money come from?), and who really controls them.