Milwaukee is leading the way. They let you use public school money to attend a private school of your choice, or more likely, your choice of the terrible schools that result from a race to the bottom. The bad drives out the good.
Despite the dirty carpet and peeling walls, and a first-floor bathroom with no toilet paper, no paper towels, and heavy scribbling in the stalls and over the sink, Pastor Claudio is proud of how much better things look here since school started in September, after a major cleanup. Last fall, he tells us, the lights didn’t work….
“We use the Bob Jones University curriculum,” he says….
“We have two-thirds of our kids who would probably benefit from special ed,” Pastor Claudio tells us. But there is no special education program here. Instead, the pastor makes an effort to connect kids with tutors: “college kids, people who are interested in education. They sit down for individual instruction with them. Plus we have people from all the churches—I’m connected with so many churches.”
“Welcome to Middle School Science,” says a sign on an upstairs classroom door. Eleven eighth-grade boys are sitting in the science class. Another poster at eye level on the door says: “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth—Genesis 1:1″
The teacher, Mr. Mosconi, walks over and closes the door as we look in.
On the same hallway there is another large poster that says: “God can see your heart and he knows that it is wicked.”
Say hello to the future of American science!
private schools and private prisons. sure way to get back to the dark ages in a hurry.
apparently, a lot of people long for the days of feudalism. and, oddly, a lot of those would be happy just being serfs.
Gimme that old-time serfdom,
Gimme that old-time serfdom
I wonder if they do background checks on the “tutors” or do they just “let the spirit guide them”?
last line of the article:
that’s because it is.
The endless droning by venture capitalists of the “evils of socialism” that has been going on since the late 1800s, out of fear of losing their privileged status, is what will lead to the end of the very societies that gave them their privilege to begin with.
If this were just a fictional novel, I’d be thinking “just deserts”.
Too bad it’s reality.
Uhg. I feel ill after reading that. To inflict that upon children is horrific.
what I found interesting was a comment from a supposed “liberal christian” on the article:
so, yeah… so easy to respect liberal xians when they threaten you with extortion, apparently without even realizing it.
nope, if this is what the majority of xians are like any more, NO, WE DON’T NEED YOU. doesn’t matter if you are in the majority or not. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
@ Ichthyic
Neither private prisons or schools are private in the true sense of the word as both exist as extensions of the state, the British term “quango” for a semi-government body that attaches itself limpet-like to the body of the state but without any of that nasty “accountability” stuff and the benefit of commercial confidentiality is more fitting. “Rort” is shorter but not specific enough.
Privatisation is just a great way for governments to wash their hands of responsibility for what they pay for. If the private prison, private welfare provider or the charter/voucher school screws things up horribly the government buying their services can say “hey-it wasn’t us”. See for instance, “private” refugee detention centres in Australia, private prisons in America, private mercenary bands like Blackwater rampaging through whatever country America lets them….
Ichthyic wrote:
They’ve always been like that. “Yeah, what the other guy said was bad, but I think the bigger problem is that you said bad things about my faith that made me feel uncomfortable!” It’s hard to make common cause with someone who’s more interested in tut-tutting you rather than face those who are actually causing harm. There’s always some stupid excuse for inaction by those who pretend to hold the high road.
Also, ? I think the poster may have inadvertently exposed themselves with that term.
^^ Yeah, I thought to mention that they may watch too much bad fiction on TV, but, really, what would be the point?
If I insisted that my students were wicked, I’d probably be in deep shit.
For a good reason. That is emotional child abuse, nothing else.
From the “liberal christian”
Wow, I didn’t even know that atheists are that powerful.
hey, atheists aren’t the most hated single group in the world for nuthin!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdvUR67nZs0
I don’t understand the idea of vouchers. If you need to give people vouchers for private school, then it means the public schools need more help. Of course, that would mean spending more money on education than the military, which would upset those sensitive politicians. And it would man you can’t tell people they need pull themselves up by their bootstraps and then blame them when they fail. Some days I do really hate the US.
The last report I saw, please someone correct me if I’m wrong, is that Charter schools, at their very best, perform on par with Public schools and a majority of them don’t even do that well.
I remember an article in the Houston Press a few years ago when we just started seeing charter schools here. Several of them had no furniture in the classroom and no AC. And this wasn’t some sort of aesthetic choice, the people running the school just took the money and ran.
Any time someone starts talking about a public/private partnership (school lunch,prisons, charter schools) the real motive is for someone to profit from the public trust.
One of my minor complaints about fundies, minor because they do much worse:
Fundies set their kids up to fail. The kids then…fail.
FWIW, the elites aren’t going to send their kids to substandard schools. They send them to good secondary school and then good Ivy League, good state, or good private universities.
They know we can’t run a Hi Tech society with uneducated people. But we can staff it with a lot. Guess which side they are going to be on?
Quote from Ichthyic at #6:
John Edwards is delusional. There is no atheist campaign to alienate the Left Xians. There is no such thing as the anti-fundie coalition. It’s a great idea, there should be one, but it doesn’t exist!!!
This is a false statement. No Religions run about 22%. Mainline Protestants run about the same.
The group that is growing are the Nones. The group declining the fastest are Mainline Protestants. They are also apathetic and all but invisible. They have crawled into their chuches and unless someone checks, you really don’t know that they even exist any more.
Delusion. We don’t go wilding on our imaginary allies. They aren’t even visible any more and we would have to look hard to even find them.
A lot of Charter type schools are just frauds, scams. It’s easy money.
I’ve seen it with one that I’m aware of.
1. All the teachers are part time. This is so they don’t fall under various employment laws. They don’t get any benefits, no 401(K) plan, no health insurance, no paid vacation, no nothing.
2. I’m not even sure that many of them are accredited teachers. Or trained teachers. This is something that I can’t easily check up on.
3. Ironically, it is probably one of the better ones. They do make an effort to teach the kids something, at least.
There’s big money to be made in education and in running prisons. It’s a Mitt Romneyesque tactic for Republican-dominated state legislatures to strip more and more funding support from public schools, with the next step being to point how how public schools are failing. Then they effectively kill the public school system so that businesses can take over and suck on all the available public dollars.
The conservative answer to public school system reform is vouchers or other “parental choice” schemes that funnel millions of dollars to corporations and religious organizations that run alternative educational systems.
http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/charter-schools-fail-new-reports-call-their-magic-into-question/
http://www.nbc4i.com/story/24778722/nbc4-investigates-taxpayers-left-holding-bill-for-charter-schools
Mississippi has held the record for most ignorant populace for far too long. I’m glad to see Wisconsin finally giving them some serious competition.
I still need to make my donation to the Texas Freedom Network this year…………
Sooooo … the kids are getting pretty much zero science education but “the pastor makes an effort to connect kids with tutors” …
Yea, that will work … sure.
There are private schools that provide services public schools do not. We need to change that. I wish I’d have had vouchers, I honestly do. I had to send one of my kids to a private Christian school for a while because it was the only source of education tailored for dyslexic students in my area. It was still a county over. It went bankrupt. People could not afford to send their kids there. The skills they taught me and my child were invaluable. I’m so sad for families like ours who no longer have that option available. I wish a better option had been available for us. That could be solved by the public schools being better able to serve students with learning disabilities. That would mean more teachers and hiring teachers with specialized training. It would mean a good deal of restructuring of our schools and that would mean cost in money and man hours. It would mean higher salaries for teachers.
I wouldn’t want to be a social justice warrior for more funding for our schools and a clear separation of church and state though. What’s that got to do with atheism?
Yep. If everybody would just use Bob Jones science education.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/graphics/science4text.jpg
Our public schools also employ part time teachers. We pay assistant teachers very little.
It’s no accident that teachers, social workers and nurses are undervalued.
It’s almost like these issues are interconnected somehow.
I think that if we’re going to allow people to use tax dollars to go to the school of their choice then there should be some strict standards as to the kind of school , and the quality of teaching at the school. If the school doesn’t meet those standards, then the parents will just have to find the money to pay for the school themselves,
“Welcome to the Middle-ages Version of School Science,”
Fixed it.
Well, the evidence says that is the situation with vouchers, so dispense with the vouchers and cost of the program to give them out, and just let everybody wanting a private education pay for it. And those who want to help that cause, give scholarship monies.
@Nerd of Redhead,
That’s part of the endgame, but only after all public schools have been eliminated.
This sounds a lot like my Catholic upbringing. Scared the heck out of me. I said years ago it almost ruined my sex life. I always wondered when I was in what we call middle school now how can this all knowing god that loves us let all these bad things happen in the world? Oh right because we are evil! So glad I gave the disease up!
There is a problem with capitalism that undermines the privatizers’ basic premise that private is always better than public. That problem is the cold hard reality that at the very foundation of capitalism, there lies a perverse incentive – one so basic and fundamental that everyone intuitively knows its there, even though no one wants to talk about it:
The fundamental incentive of the profit motive is to charge the customer as much money as can possibly be justified, while providing for that money, as little in money invested as can be gotten away with.
Does that sound like a formula for customer satisfaction to you? Me, neither.
Given that stark reality, why is anyone surprised that for-profit education is a failure? Here in Costa Rica where I live, we long ago privatized our universities (and to a lesser degree, primary education), and now everyone in this country laments that decision – and the consequence it has had for the national economy. The only really educated people in this country are the scions of the rich and the people who were educated before that decision was taken in 1982. So now, we’re looking at ways to revitalize the public school sector in primary education and the university system – while cracking down on the plethora of private, overpriced “universities” which are really just glorified trade schools, and don’t meet accreditation standards for even that.
USAnians, don’t make the same mistake that Latin America has, by privatizing education. You’ll only live to regret it.