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Tech Billionaire-Backed Charter School Under Fire In Chicago
theodp writes "'As a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm,' boasts the billionaire-backed NewSchools Venture Fund, 'we raise philanthropic capital from both individual and institutional investors, and then use those funds to support education entrepreneurs who are transforming public education.' One recipient of the NewSchools' largesse is The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which received a $5,300,000 NewSchools 'investment', as well as a $1,425,000 grant from NewSchools donor Bill Gates. One way that Noble Street College Prep has been transforming education, reports the Chicago Tribune, is by making students pay the price — literally — for breaking the smallest of rules (sample infractions). Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel defended Noble after a FOIA filing revealed the charter collected almost $190,000 in discipline 'fees' — not 'fines' — last year from its mostly low-income students, saying the ironically exempt-from-most-district-rules charter school gets 'incredible' results and parents don't have to send their children there. Beyond the Noble case, some are asking a bigger question: Should billionaires rule our schools?"
If paying these fines is a problem, then make sure you don't get hit with them.
If you don't want your kid to be educated with a strict set of rules in the school, then choose a different school.
I dislike the fines, but this is EXACTLY the way things like this should be tried out. Try things at relatively small scale and on a population that volunteers for it. This is exactly the way medical research is carried out. If you want the cancer treatment that looks promising, but might not actually work, you have to volunteer to get it and it's available to a limited number of people.
Contrast this with what we usually do: entire school districts, or worse, entire states, or MUCH worse, the whole country tries some harebrained scheme, or even some halfway decent sounding scheme, which turns out to have real problems. Take No Child Left Behind, for example. Testing to measure performance sounds like a really good idea. Could we perhaps have tried it out on a smaller group than the whole country in order to find out it doesn't work?
*I* don't like the idea, but my kids aren't going there. Leave them alone unless there's sufficient data to prove this performs worse than the default.
Incredibly good, I assume.
In evaluating the school, I think you have to first judge how well it is serving the students and families. Then things like the welfare of the teachers and the quality of the facilities. The billionaire connection is rather far down the list of things that I would be concerned about.
Yeah... and I don't know if I trust "billionaires", but I don't know if I trust City Hall a whole lot more, either. Especially when the existing teachers unions are making campaign contributions.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The best correlation of student success is parental interest in their kids education. I come from immigrant family were this was a factor. I and my brothers all received at least one ivy league degree. I've seen poor immigrants from east Europe and Asia do well even when the family did not have a lot of money. Unfortunately the two largest minority groups in the USA do not have lots of family interest in education. They dont do as well even when their schools are well funded.
So you're fine with private organizations imposing fines on a whim? And that a school teaches its students to submit to such arbitrary authority?
They're not imposing fines on a whim. You sent your kids to their school, their rules were agreed to. I disagree with some of the rules (they get fined for hot chips? really?), but if I chose to send my kids to that school, I chose to make it so that every bag of chips my kid brings is expensive. Any organization can impose fees and fines on member who agree to abide by certain rules. You can avoid those fees and fines by severing your affiliation with the group. In this case by enrolling your kid in a normal public school.
And the rich pay less than their fair share of taxes because they have used the power their riches bring to bring it about. They deserve no more praise than a mugger who calls an ambulance for his victim would.
You're making several assumptions here. The first and most important is that every rich person agrees with what every other rich person does. Let's say you and I are both billionaires. I spend a lot of money lobbying to make sure that the fourth jet purchased by any single person is tax deductible. You buy a fourth jet and your accountant deducts it from this year's taxes. Does that make you culpable? Maybe in some ways, but in all probability you didn't even know the damned thing was deductible when you bought it. You might have been perfectly fine just paying the extra taxes. Warren Buffet has been rather vocal that he feels he should be paying more taxes than he is. Does that make him culpable for a tax rate he didn't have anything to do with setting?
The rich are like politicians or lawyers: there might be a few who are honest or even decent, but as a group, they have earned their reputation.
But again, does that mean we shouldn't reward positive behavior? Maybe if enough rich people receive enough positive feedback, more of them will be more willing to help. Even one billionaire parting with even 5% of his/her fortune is able to make more of a difference than I could if I gave away everything I ever made.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
My SO works in the DC office responsible for training the evaluators who assess teachers in the classroom. I don't know exactly how it worked under Rhee, but I do know the way it works now... about half of teacher evaluations are based on standardized test scores, and the other half is based on in-class observation by professional evaluators.
No one is going to argue that teachers can overcome the strong influences of parental involvement and other exogenous factors. However, of the things that can be dealt with in the school, teacher quality is likely the most important. If year after year you have a teacher whose students show no improvement at all and there are other teachers in the same school (and even same subject) who students do show improvement, what do you do?
There are in fact efforts to identify high quality teachers and disseminate their practices to the rest of the teaching population (this was my SO's last work project), so it's not as if there are no resources going into actually improving the quality of teachers in the classroom. However, the fact remains that in many cases you have teachers who may very well be veterans of the classroom but who frankly aren't all that good at their job. Tenure for primary and secondary teachers in this day and age doesn't make sense - you need to be able to fire poor performers.
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no, wearing a school uniform is not a common feature in countries with a more successful education system. just take a look at the scandinavian countries (which arguably have one of the best school systems in the world).
Or take a look at the South Korean and Japanese systems for a counter example. Uniforms are the norm and kids are well behaved. I grew up in a developed country where uniforms were also the norm, and though the education system was not on par to a developed country one, we certainly knew how to behave (and they certainly knew how to add fractions and read after finishing HS, guarantees that we cannot make in the US.)
Uniforms are one of the many tools to instill discipline, an integral part of education. It is also a good way to identify kids that are skipping school (and more importantly, if they are found/seen performing acts of vandalism, which always occurs. Teens will be teens no matter the country.) Suit yourself if you really and truly believe that is a sign of totalitarianism, treating education as it was meant to be a democratic, free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want institution (it never has been.)
uniforms are a sign of totalitarianism - like rules concerning carrying hot chips or red bull or having a "school police".
Calling them a sign of totalitarianism does not make it so. Having a school police is not a sign of totalitarianism either. In particular in the US where we have a plague of mindless vandalism and violence, you need a police force to ensure kids of school age are in school during school ours. In Japan, they do not have a school police because the social norms in place makes that unnecessary. In Japan, it would be a sign of totalitarianism. In the US, is a sign of necessity (and a sad indictment of our social norms.)
Does asking kids to clean their class room (as done in Japan) is a sign of totalitarianism? Does asking not to wear excessive jewelery or chewing gum like a mindless cow during a lecture is a sign of totalitarianism? You are out of your freaking mind if you really believe so.
Yes, the Scandinavian countries do not have uniforms nor school police either. Neither they have strict rules as in Japan or Korea. But that does not mean that we in the US can do the same. Our conduct and perceptions on education are nothing compared to the ones in the Scandinavia countries, or in Japan or Korea or Brazil. We do not have a pre-university education system. We have instead a 12-year long babysitting system were people can go through and learn nothing.
But don't let that get in the way to your argument. Let's leave education in the US running as usual, and let's keep doing what we are doing and give kids all the freedom they want. It seems to be working wonders for us, right, right?