frankj1 wrote:Massachusetts overall has good public schools, despite unfunded mandates like Bush's No Child Left Behind and requirements that have forced "teaching to the test".
Competing for educational dollars makes no sense when discussing publicly funded schools. But if schools outside of that definition want to compete for private money/tuition...more power to them, as long as they are subject to the same standards as the public schools. Currently they are not, even when it comes to requiring some standard that decides what constitutes a "qualified" teacher. No public money then as far as I am concerned.
If a family decides that private education suits them, go for it. Might mean get a second job though. Unfortunately, Al is correct about "cherry picking". Your kid may not get into a charter school if he/she might ruin their "stats", even though those schools are considered public. Oh, poor kids can attend, as long as they raise the averages.
The trick is to educate the rest of them.
And most folks forget that many of the tax dollars go to heating the schools, maintaining the buildings, etc. Simply transferring a dollar amount to a school with different regulations based on students lost does not cover the costs of maintaining buildings that does not go down due to less students!
No Child Left Behind is ridiculous. As most here know, on my off duty days I worked as an SRO. It was truly sickening to watch ass
hole kids disrupt children who wanted to learn. There were no consequences. Schools couldn't expel them, instead they would get shuffled from one school to another leaving behind a trail of havoc.
One time I booked a 13 year old kid for robbery. This kid was completely out of control. He disrupted his class and many others because all he did was wonder from one class to another causing chaos. Anyway, one day he took a set of $5 earbuds out of another student's hands. Physically taking something from another person's possession is considered robbery. All robberies in LA are considered felony offenses regardless of the value of the item taken. Since he was a juvenile, I had the option of booking him into juvenile detention on the felony charge or releasing him to a custodian. His state appointed guardian told me that if I released him to her custody she was going to check him right back into school. Since I had an option, I booked him so the school could at least get what I thought would be a 3 day sabbatical. Instead of being released after a few days, he was sent back to north Louisiana to serve juvenile time since the robbery violated his probation in an earlier case.
Anyway, I'm not in favor of replacing public schools with private schools using vouchers. Nor am I in favor of allowing private schools to select which vouchers they accept. Create a list. Make the private schools select each student based on who is next on the list.
I highly favor public schools being forced to compete for those dollars because they will have to quit catering to the teacher unions. Instead I would like to see them start educating children again and being good custodians of public funds.
Its about accountability. Right now there is very little.
