Posted on 06/11/2015 9:26:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Barack Obama, for his own education, never set foot in a public school.
When he was 10 years of age, his mother shipped him back from Indonesia to his grandparents in Hawaii so that young Barack could get a first-class American education. He entered Punahou, the expensive and most prestigious prep school in the islands. From there, despite his admittedly indifferent grades, Obama was admitted to Occidental, an elite private college in Los Angeles. He spent two years there, after which he transferred to Columbia University, one of the private Ivy League schools. After Columbia, Obama attended Harvard Law, another private Ivy League school.
What about Michelle, then Michelle Robinson? Doesn't she often brag that she attended public schools? But her public school cheerleading requires an asterisk. True, Michelle attended a public high school. But it was Chicago's first magnet school, and admission was a selective and highly competitive process. Michelle spent close to three hours each day on a bus to escape her subpar local public school. So Michelle, in essence, attended an exclusive high school, an option available to her because of her proactive, pro-education parents and her willingness to sacrifice the time to go to and from this superior school.
What about the Obama's own children? Surely the children of a pro-public school politician would attend public schools as a seal of approval. On the contrary, the children of then-Sen. Obama attended a private school operated by the University of Chicago, where Obama had taught as an instructor in the law school. This job enabled the Obama girls to go at little or no cost to Obama.
After Obama was elected president and preparing to move to Washington, D.C., Michelle Obama engaged in a public search for an appropriate school for their children. Michelle considered public schools in D.C. "There are some terrific individual schools in the D.C. system," her husband said later.
But, come time for enrollment, the Obamas chose Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school whose most famous recent grad is Chelsea Clinton. Annual tuition? Almost $40,000 a year, and this excludes books and other material.
Democrats, of course, argue that we need to "invest" more in education. We already spend more on education, K-12, than any other country with the exception of Switzerland, Norway and Luxembourg.
Back in 1985, a federal judge decided to take a different approach, instead of mandating cross-town busing in Kansas City. Why not make urban schools so attractive that all students, no matter their race, would want to go there? He ordered the school district to build what many called "world-class public schools."
And spend they did.
The district built 15 new schools. Then it equipped dozens of magnet schools with equipment and personnel for state-of-the-art academic, athletic and arts programs. One elementary school offered private Suzuki violin lessons for every student. A middle school hired 10 "resource teachers" to develop projects in specialty subjects. Kansas City added a Montessori kindergarten and a first-grade Spanish immersion program. Some teachers got raises, while others received reduced workloads.
At a time when most Americans didn't have a PC or an Apple Macintosh, one Kansas City high school boasted 900 top-of-the-line computers. Others had an Olympic-sized swimming pool complete with six diving boards, a padded wrestling room, a classical Greek theater, an eight-lane indoor track and a professionally equipped gymnastics center. Some of the renovations included a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium and a wildlife sanctuary. Instead of using buses to bring white kids to the inner-city schools, the district hired 120 taxis.
After 15 years and $2 billion dollars, the Kansas City school district failed all of Missouri's 11 academic performance standards and became the first big-city school district to lose its academic accreditation. All that spending managed to attract several hundred white suburban students in the early 1990s, but many later left.
This brings us to vouchers, where the money follows the student -- rather than the other way around.
Urban parents want the option to remove their kid from an underperforming local government school to a better school. Polls show 80 percent of inner-city parents want vouchers. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of public-school teachers with school-age children send their kids to a private school. In Chicago, it's 39 percent. Nationwide, about 11 percent of all parents enroll their children in private schools; only 6 percent of black parents do so.
A year and a half after the Obama girls had settled into their new school, Obama was asked whether any D.C. public schools offered his daughters the same quality of education as a private school. "I'll be blunt with you," said Obama. "The answer is 'no' right now." But then he added, "Given my position, if I wanted to find a great public school for Malia and Sasha to be in, we could probably maneuver to do it. But the broader problem is for a mom or a dad who are working hard but don't have a bunch of connections." So it's who you know, how much clout you have.
Obama does not realize it, but he made an open-and-shut case for vouchers.
It’s good to be king.
Cleavage much, FLOTUS?
King? I may be an American but I’ll take a leader elevated by divine right over affirmative action any day.
The Lear Jet Leftists expect to form the core of the global Inner Party. They will continue to enjoy the finest foods and most advanced gadgets the world has to offer — while deciding your fate for you.
If you work very hard and show them your unwavering loyalty you may be permitted to join the global Outer Party. You will be allowed occasional servings of meat - and air conditioning on a rationed basis.
The rest of us will eat insects and swelter – ‘for the common good’.
Looks like someone left the door open and the wrong dogs came home.
“Polls show 80 percent of inner-city parents want vouchers.”
Then stop voting for DemocRats!
Then suddenly two years at Columbia in New York: How did Obama pay for it?
Obama's silence on how a middle-class student from Hawaii, who lived in an apartment in Hawaii with his grandparents, paid his way through both Occidental and Columbia---very expensive schools even back then in the 1980s---I find suspicious.
When my daughter transferred to the district where we had purchased our new house her Second grade teacher told us “i have thirty children in my class and only 6 can read and your daughter is one of them, do you understand me?” We immediately placed our daughter in private school. To make a long story short she has now graduated from an IVY League school and is entering a nice career. Monitor any public school your children attend. Stay away from “diverse” schools.
What’s the point of being “elite” if anyone else can enjoy the same things you can?
Use some common sense, man!
We never bothered with private or public school,
though we thought about private school just a little bit.
Homeschooling results are undeniably superior.
Democrat animals are more equal than other animals.
But that would mean that the racist Republicans win.
As long as “homeschooling” is carried out in a systematically competent fashion it is ok.
systematically competent fashion
That’s funny.
If half the homeschoolers were “incompetent”, they’d STILL outperform public school results.
HSers AVERAGE 86th percentile on ACT/SATs.
And there is but 2 percentile differences for parental education level and/or income.
I have personally seen disastrous results. The kids involved were pretty bright and only one out of seven “made it.” It requires intelligent stable parents who know what they are doing and are organized.
This federal judge should have been strung up for that usurpation of power.
And how many “disastrous” results do we get from urban public schools?
Home schooling with a CHRISTIAN curriculum is the way to go. You get to totally avoid the socialist indoctrination and nonsense about crap like the totally discredited theory of “human evolution.” You also can teach REAL American history, including the God’s miraculous protection of George Washington in battle and the Biblical basis for everything in the U.S. Constitution.
Yes... perhaps that’s why I don’t see the failures in the families in our homeschooling circles.
The worldview is pretty constant throughout,
though some have gone off the deep end with their foody aesthetism.
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