Posted on 03/31/2012 4:49:48 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
...The mayors want a raft of changes. They want to replace the uniform pay scale with merit pay. They seek to expand public charter schools, which are largely non-union. Some want to lengthen school days, requiring teachers to work more hours.
And nearly all of these mayors have set their sights on the one workplace protection that teachers have held central for more than 100 years: tenure.
The unions say many of the “fixes” embraced by the mayors are trendy ideas without evidence that they help children learn. Instead, they allow politicians to appear as if they are making improvements without having to confront the profound problems of urban schools, labor leaders say.
“We don’t want to have honest conversations about poverty and segregation and race and class, all those other sorts of ills,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “Those are really tough issues. So this gives them an excuse to focus on something else.”
Her union fought Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s effort to add 90 minutes to the school day in Chicago, which has the shortest school day of any major city. Emanuel, the former chief of staff to President Obama, got the Illinois legislature to pass a law that will allow him to impose a longer school day starting in September. It also makes it harder for the union to strike, among other things.
On the national level, teachers unions have started to recalibrate, looking for ways to work in partnership with politicians.....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This “good schools” idea should really be closely examined. Why? Because the afterschooling done by good parents, such as you and your wife, is never considered. How do we know that these schools are “good” or not, if the contributions of the parent's afterschooling is **never** studied? Perhaps the so-called “good” school is merely ordinary but it is the parents, and their hard work in the home, that is the real reason these students have high standardized test scores.
Afterschooling has **never** been studied by education professionals. A Stanford professor of education e-mailed me and told me exactly that.
We in the U.S. are literally crushed by school taxes. Really, we are! In some of our states, the amount spent on schooling is more than a quarter of million dollars per child for 13 years of schooling. It is not unusual to have property tax bills of $10,000 or more a year in some states on very ordinary homes. And....Business property taxes passed on to the customer raises the price of everything that we buy and use.
Yet... No one really knows if our schools are teaching anything. It could be that they are merely sending home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow in the home, serving as testing centers, and providing grading on projects.
It is good that you have others sharing your point of view, since you can cooperate.
State education, though it predates Marx, is still communist in nature, since it is collectivist statist, and it typically defaults to the lowest common denominator.
What you will be doing is forming a school cooperative. This is vastly different from the school collective that the state imposes on everyone, here in the States and everywhere else that it is practiced.
A cooperative is voluntary. A collective is compulsory, or at least coercive. There are many other differences between a cooperative and a collective, but the aforementioned is probably the most important one.
It is a great shame and a testimony against our governments that both husband and wife must work to live decently.
My uncle says, “They are getting the women for free.”
What does he mean by this? Consider. Here in the States, in 1953, the average tax burden, Federal, State, and Municipal, was about 5%. Today it’s 40% or more. The women typically earn about 40% of what the men earn, for whatever reasons (or grievances) you want to cite, that is a fact.
The overwhelming preponderance of the modern tax burden goes to pay for a lot of government programs that became “necessary” at least in part from taking the women out of the home and the many deleterious social effects precipitating from that.
Ergo, my uncle’s reasoning that “they are getting the women for free.”
I don’t know what it will take to unwind from this bondage, but here we are.
My definition of good schools is where they learn the most they can, have opportunities a single family simply cannot provide and get the least amount of indoctrination.
I agree that afterschooling plays a significant role in the rep of the school, and it is unquantifiable. We have, when our kids were in school, run formal classes in our dining room for 15 kids (their friends got interested) on evenings and weekends. Purely voluntary, but fun. That number would be a bit much now though.
One thing I did learn as a teacher is that eager students, wanting to learn and well ahead of their age group, attract the best teachers to a school while the “less good” teachers look for an easier gig. The ones who teach because they love it, not because it is a job are the ones you want!
You and me both, FRiend. It seems such a mess that we can never unwind from it.
Still, you have given me heart. Been looking at the education rules here and we can do it, by my understanding. Maybe not for teens, but certainly for pre-teens.
Using the local Methodist church as a venue will be no problem, and my priest (Catholic) is asking advice now from the Bishop as to if he and the diocese can get involved.
Bless you and thank you for the information!
God bless you, my brother, and your efforts!
You certainly are a many of action!
Praise the LORD!
No sense in hanging about! The paperwork alone is probably going to be a stack about a mile high.
It is something that we have been vaguely talking about for a while. Everyone I talked to today about it is keen to do it, indeed excited!
Our priest is fully on board with the idea and knows how to handle legal paperwork, so is the pastor of the Methodist church (he has two young children and will let us have the use of the Hall for basically the cost of utilities if we can swing permission from the borough council).
Our local Rabbi phoned me this afternoon offering help in getting it going too - he was involved in setting up a Jewish Free School a few years back.
Thank you! You have given hope to us. The Lord works in mysterious ways indeed, but I firmly believe He inspired your posts. Small miracles happen all the time.
Praise the Lord!
Kill the welfare state so a family can make it on one income.
Imagine if,say, half your taxes went away.
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