Slashdot Mirror
Teachers Union Opposes Virtual K-8 Charter School
theodp writes "'You can't sit a child in front of a computer and expect him to learn things he needs to succeed in society,' said unimpressed Chicago Teachers Union president Marilyn Stewart of the Chicago Virtual Charter School, which will open to Chicago elementary school students this fall if approved by the state board of education."
If I were to hire an employee, I would disregard any degrees from online universities. Why should I (and any private high schools/colleges) consider a student who comes from an online middle school?
http://www.asti-usa.com
any different then regular home schooling? The biggest deficiency in both will be a lack of interaction with other students. You know the sort of interaction that helps develop good social and behavioral skills when we are young, and yes, I can attest to many home-schooled individuals that I know who were sadly underdeveloped in these areas. Concerns from teachers on this are not really going to make me concerned; these are people who are worried they may be without jobs if this catches on too quickly or too much.
Yes, there is a lack of PE; however, if you are done with school in half the time and/or can be much more flexible with when you are actually doing school work, children can find plenty of time to take on physical activities, which is really the main reason for having PE in the first place. I am not going to worry too much about the lack of music in the system either. Most of my grade school musical education was a complete waste. I barely remember the musical scale (though that might be better then most my peers), and I certainly wouldn't have felt cheated if I got to hear less Bach, Beethoven, et. al. I actually would be surprised if 1/2 the US population even realized they heard a piece by a famous composer in their lifetime.
I think this is actually a good idea and a bad one at the same time. On one hand, I would be a bit worried about children not gaining certain social skills that develop during these early school years. On the other, I believe it would be a great thing for children who have problems focusing in class or for those who have had behavioral issues, because this is a far better alternative then the "alternative" schools I have heard stories about in most every school district.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
The care of social education is shifted on parental shoulders.
But most of them do not think about it at all.
Hide your files and folders from others!
Which brings up a point - why is this any worse than home schooling? It seems like exactly the same thing, except here the kid is taught by actual teachers and a syllabus with (assumedly) some idea about giving a balanced education, not whatever lunatic fairy tales the homeschooling parent happens to want to impart.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
In Canada, the Teacher's Union uses its powers to hold this country hostage once in a while. Public school teachers are basically government employees, they get summers for vacations, they get benefits, above average salaries, and they often (just about every year) exercise their union powers on the people of this country. When they strike during the school-year, they are putting millions of families into really difficult situations - the kids have to stay home, someone has to be there or someone has to be hired or a parent has to stay home, if it is a single-parent family, then it is even more difficult (I have no kids, but I see this all the time.) The kids' education suffers, they have nothing to do during the strike, many of them can go to the streets and do whatever, join gangs maybe?
In Ontario, the provincial liberal government is gutless, they always cave in to ANY union, and so they just give away our money for no reason, and the unions know this and they take advantage of this even more than in the rest of the country. Teachers get more 'professional development' days (during business days) in Ontario than anywhere else it seems like and they don't really spend those days for any development, and this happens while in private organizations PD days are taken during weekends. Those who bother to show up for those days don't really learn anything new, or if there is anything, it is all about the administrative part. In reality, teachers have entire summers that could be dedicated to 'improvement' in their profession, but what they do, is get summer jobs and make even more money instead. (they earn all of their money in the winter, but those ARE the money for the entire year, but they get to work 2 jobs and make double during the summer, isn't that great for them?)
So whenever I hear that a teacher's union opens their collective mouths to say something, all I can think of is that the parents, the kids, and the rest of the society is about to get a shaft.
(Ontario, you have to wake up and fire this union, fire those teachers who are lazy and useless and get yourself into a better alternative deal.)
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, Chicago Public Schools can be dangerous and frightening. This isn't the right way, however. What many of the comments seem to be presupposing is that the parents of the students will be able to help out the kids with their video lessons, as the system seems to want. The parents of these students are not there as they're working, and often it's a single family home, which in Chicago means that if you make minimum you're not paying your rent on only one job. The kids this is targeted for are going to be doing this largely on their own. Yes, fix the schools. Don't do it by funneling charter money into the hands of people like this, who care more about lowering overhead costs (video lessons require fewer teachers per student, obviously) than actually teaching kids. Am I the only one who has a problem with video screens becoming the font of all received knowledge?
I'm rather confident in my abilities as a teacher. My experiences as a teacher tell me that kids learn from each other, for one. I modify how I teach constantly based upon the reactions of the students I see before me. These things aren't possible in this format.
I was home schooled for 5 years in a foreign country, where I didn't interact with the locals my age. Very much 3rd world, to the extent where kids my age and even older people never before saw white people. When I got back to my own country @ the age of 15 I was not socially adapted to handle a school environment. Socially I was a mess till around the time I turned 21. Children should socialise with their peers otherwise they will have much larger problems when the peer group has moved into adulthood and they havent.
This is my sig.
Then why not correct the underlying problem?
If kids attend classes online for fear of being shot at in the 'real' school, they're gearing themselves up for a life out in the 'real' world where they're just as likely to get shot.
Am I missing the picture here? Spend the money elsewhere correcting the underlying problems, rather than beating around the bush trying to work out a compromise. New York City has proven that it is *very* possible to reduce crime, and go from being one of the most dangerous cities in the world to one of the safest per capita, and do so in an incredibly short amount of time.
Magnet Schools and Charter Schools don't seem like such a great idea anymore either, and put the 'normal' kids at a *severe* disadvantage.
My county disbanded its charter and magnet programs several years back, and redirected the funds to public schools, in addition to making several reforms to improve the schools. People were upset at first, but in a very short amount of time, average test scores in the regular public schools were wildly surpassing those that the charter/magnet programs were seeing when they were in operation. THAT's progress.
On a more observational note, the public school that I attend has many students from charter/magnet schools in it, and the generalized observation shared by most is that they are arrogant, socially-inept, and no smarter than the 'normal' kids. The kids who were smart enough to attend magnet programs, but chose for one reason or another to stay in their local school tend to be the most well-adjusted and intelligent people I come across.
Private schooling is also not the answer, but for very different reasons.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Its important to learn social interactions, which you DO get in current school systems.
The problem is that you also learn negative solical interactions; i.e. getting picked on, bullied, etc. So it is a crap shoot as far as helping kids be social. I learned to be not very social and it was years before I became more outgoing after my experiences in school.
wish I had mod points. of course around here this gets modded flamebait, but you are 110% correct. I am a high school history teacher and am thoroughly disgusted with the treatment history gets in our textbooks. It is sanitized, whitewashed, and outright rewritten. Dianne Ravitch (hardly a right-wing ideologue) wrote a great piece a while ago titled: PC textbooks full of skewed history which details the way California (where I teach) purposefully uses history for every reason other than to teach about the past.
Public schools have failed precisely because they are not doing precisely what it is they are required to do. There are many solutions, not the least of which is to eliminate teacher unions (of which I am a member) completely. I can think of no greater conflict of interest than unions lobbying the state on educational issues. There is no concern for educational quality only what is in the teachers' best interests. In fact, I believe that public employees shouldn't be allowed to strike. This is hardly an anti-labor/anti-union position, as public employees (police, fire, teachers) a) chose their profession b) have job security and c) serve vital roles which the market cannot remedy. Unlike say an auto manufacturer who has competitors, is accountable to shareholders, and has to actually market and sell a product, you have no real choice when you dial 911 or send your child to school.
The unions have been infiltrated with very left-wing ideologues and it has permeated every sector of education. Now, before people get upset, just think about those places where "intelligent design" has been adopted into the cuuriculum. Many want that no more than others want Heather has two mommies but it is exactly the same prinicple. I've always believed that privatization of schools is the ultimate answer. In fact, government should stay out of the schools, marriage, business, the internet, etc.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
For the benefit of us non Americans, what exactly is a charter school?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
According to the US government, which obviously only covers US households, in 2000 1.7% of the K-12 students (1.1 million kids) in America where listed as homeschooled. Of these students, just around 20% also attended public/private school for part of the day. ~65% of the students listed as home-schooled, were homeschooled in multi-student/multi-family environments. As a group they also score above average for their grade level on all three standardized tests (again USGov stats only). They have a statistically higher average of college degrees and lower rate of incarceration (these last two statistics came from a home-school site so expect them to point out the best and ignore the worst).
Personally I came up through the public education system, but I was lucky enough to have a rural school where at least some of the teachers cared. We also make enough in our current household to move to a good school district; however, given where we lived previously it would have been far better to homeschool our children rather than subject them to the crap that passed as public city schooling.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
Hear the feeble cries of a dying industry. We cannot afford the bricks, gasoline, or other inefficiencies of our victorian educational plan if we truly want to educate all the worlds children, whereever they might live.
There is no way to hold back the future. This, like working remotely from home, makes far too much sense to be shouted down by unions, or corporate directors. Think of all the gas alone we will save.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
"Union opposes saving taxpayer money, more news at 11."
They have a vested interest in keeping the jobs local; nothing wrong with that at all. I wouldn't want to loose my job either. This has nothing to do with quality of education or the kids, it's all about the money.
I couldn't agree more. My parents, both members of the NEA and NJEA (New Jersey) are basically extorted into paying fees to an agency that hardly ever help in any way, and seem to spend more time lobbying on issues that have nothing to do with education (or the views of my parents.)
Please - this is NOT a push to start a flame war, so realize this post is NOT about abortion. However, at least with the NJEA and definatley with the NEA, for some reason, they lobby HEAVILY on pro-choice decisions in local and national arenas. While it not only confuses me (less aborted babies = more kids in school = more teaching jobs) it's totally outside the realm of anything to do with the education of children or what's in the interest of the teachers who are part of the union in the capacity of doing their jobs.
Teachers unions are so misguided and misdirected that they're almost completely useless. I know that they are certainly there for certain things like arbitration, but I feel that they evey shy away from conflict whenever possible, even discouraging teachers from filing grievances.
I'm rambilng. Point is, I agree with ya.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
School is more than learning the three R's. It's learning how to deal with other individuals. Life involves cultivating relationships and learning what works and what doesn't when dealing with another human being. It's not just knowing the right information to get straight A's.
The social aspect of actually GOING to school is too-often downplayed. Your kid needs to learn how to deal with other people... both good people and bad people. Those people-skills are something you can't get in a home school setting, no matter how you try. And those skills are a better indicator of success later in life than any report card with straight A's.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
It doesn't help that every Christian-themed store in the country has a sign in the front window advertising "homeschooling supplies and materials" or some such. Or that a huge chunk of the online homeschooling-assistance communities are infested with religious loonies.
Erm, how do teachers have more job security than anyone else? And the legal inability to strike in several states has resulted in teacher's wages going to crap, and incidentally, schools having to hire incompetant people because the wages are so low. (No, schools can't just decide to pay their teachers more, that comes down from the top.) Teachers should at least be allowed to strike instead of signing contracts for the next year, i.e, start the strike between the school years. Right now the 'teacher's union', like any union that can't legally strike, is a complete joke.
And your problem isn't with schools, or teachers unions, or anyone like that. It's with California. Don't go acting like California's gibberish is some sort of 'educational' problem. Did you not even read the article? 'The state's social-content guidelines should be abolished. They put the state Board of Education into the absurd position...' It's not even the Board of Education's fault, much less any teacher's.
There is no fucking way that 'teachers unions' have a damn thing to do with any of that. You're anti-union, so have decided to conflate teacher lobbying and teacher unions with the government of California deciding to do stupid things.
And, incidentally:
So it's not surprising that in recent months gays and lesbians have stepped forward to demand a place at the state's capacious table. They too want their roles to be portrayed positively in textbooks purchased by the state. And frankly, they've got a point. In view of the state's broad inclusion of every other group in its list of those deserving such treatment, the state has no principled reason to exclude any new claimant.
shows exactly where that author is coming from and where, I suspect, you are too. Damn, it sucks we don't seem to have a good excuse under the law to portray gay people as evil.
Yes, there is such thing as 'Too much tolerance' or whatever, where no one can can ever be portrayed in a negative light, or just no one except straight WASPs (SWASPs?) can be portrayed in a negative light, and the California school system has managed to reach that point, about 20 years after Hollywood and everyone else did and then passed it. That's a bad point to be at, history needs to tell facts, and even fiction needs realistic villians.(1) OTOH, there are people like your writer, who was involved in writing the textbooks at one time, and who are annoyed that there's no 'principled reason' to exclude the mere existence of gay people from all the textbooks in school system, so maybe there's a fucking point to those rules.
1) I remember on Angel where there was an inner-city gang in LA, and someone said 'Damn, that's the most multi-racial inner-city gang in LA I've ever seen.', which was interesting because it was a mostly positive portrayal (They were fighting vampires who were preying on them, which mistakenly put them at odds with the protaganist who of course was one, but it was more a classic 'superheroes not trusting each other when they met' instead of 'these are the bad guys'.) and thus it would be hard to see how anyone would be offended with accuracy. In latter episodes when the gang returned, they were more realisticly almost entirely black and hispanic, and at the end got even more interesting when they started killing off completely harmless demons, although they did raise an interesting point about these 'harmless demons' working with horrible ones, and that beings who laugh and joke with murderers are probably 'evil' even if they aren't actually committing evil acts. (Which is an analogy about race and racism in more ways than one.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I am one. What's your point?
People need to realize that locking kids up in a basement and throwing away the key is not prerequisite for home education.
I was home schooled K-12, using a curriculum so religious and conservative it would likely make the majority of Slashdot readers barf, and yet, I like to think that I turned out relatively OK. I'm a college graduate, I have a good job as a programmer, and I'm happily married. I even have friends!
The only negative effect that homeschooling had on me socially is this damn inferiority complex I have from people like Mr. Underbirdge never missing an opportunity to tell me and my parents how screwed up I was going to end up for being home schooled.
Seriously, I grew up thinking I was stupid because my friends would constantly whine and gripe about how much homework they had to do and how long they had to be in school each day. They'd tell me that I had it so easy, not having to wake up until 10 and only doing school work for 2-3 hours a day. It wasn't until I took the ACT and scored about 8 or 9 points higher than most of them that I finally started to realize that I probably wasn't so stupid.
That said, I'm sure there are some pretty screwed up home schooled kids out there, just like I'm sure there are some pretty screwed up public schooled kids out there. There is no one solution that fits everyone. I really don't mind if people don't like homeschooling. But what irritates the hell out of me is the assumption that homeschooling = guaranteed social retardation.
That's not what is going on in the article, though. The online school is basically there to help parents who are home schooling their children.
Frankly, there are a lot of things that children "learn" in school that I think are counter productive. We just moved to New York (Long Island) this year (from the west coast), and the school here is terrible. All the kids are "dating" in 5th grade (which I think is the parent's fault). The school has dances for 5th grade. They are two years behind where her old school was in pretty much every academic subject. The kids are allowed and even encouraged to use profanity in school.
So, next year she will be attending a private school. One semester at the crappy New York school is too much.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
They are against new testing.
Students take too many progression tests as it is. Excessive progresssion testing means you teach for the test, instead of the student.
They are against charter schools.
Their efficacy is questionable, along with every other magic pill in the last 25 years (alternative schools, magnet schools, etc.)
They are against charter schools even if it means no schools. (Charters were willing to set up in New Orleans long before the public schools would have been able to operate. The unions fought against them, in favor of no schools at all.)
Liar. The union was scattered and powerless after the storm. The state took over immediately and the N.O. teachers union currently has no power. 20 charter schools have been set up since the storm.
The unions are against anything proposed by or endorsed by the conservatives.
Mayhap you should be looking at that one from a different angle. Magic-pill placebos are a little hard to swallow.
The unions are against Wal-Mart. The unions are against the high cost of living.
What?
They are against home schooling.
Rightly so.
They are against school funding cuts.
No shit.
They are against property tax increases.
Strange, since that generally means more money for schools.
And they support teachers retiring at 55 with 25 years of service. They expect to work 25 years, only about 1/3 of their lives, and have the rest of us taxpayers who work from 16 to 65+, including summers, to support them. (Earlier retirement means hiring more teachers, which means more union members and more dues paid.)
If it's such a bargain, then why aren't you a teacher as well? Is there some sort of downside to this profession? Ask the wife if you can sub for a day or two, just to see if you like it.
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.